About

My name is Mathew Ingram and I work for The Globe and Mail, a daily national newspaper based in Toronto. I’m the “communities editor,” which is a new position aimed at helping make it easier for readers to interact with the paper and its writers and content. I’m a former technology writer and columnist, and I started this blog as a way of pursuing my interest in new media and how the Web is changing my industry — in some ways for the better, in others not. For the record, what I write here is my opinion only (unless otherwise stated), and doesn’t necessarily represent the views of my employer. There’s a brief FAQ about me here.

The long version is this: I was born in Zweibrucken, Germany in 1962, while my father — a fighter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force — was stationed there. We came back to Canada when I was little and lived on Air Force bases in a number of different places, including Winnipeg, Manitoba; Cold Lake, Alberta; Downsview, Toronto and Chatham, New Brunswick. I went to the University of Waterloo and got a degree in English, then went to Ryerson University in Toronto and got my journalism degree.

I worked at the Globe and Mail and the London Free Press, then moved to Edmonton to work at a weekly magazine called Alberta Report (now defunct). I moved back to Toronto and worked at the Financial Times of Canada (now also defunct), then moved to the Globe to write about the stock market. After several years of doing that, I moved to Calgary and wrote a column about Western Canadian business, then in 2000 I moved back to Toronto to become the online business columnist for the Globe’s relaunched website — possibly the first online-only columnist in Canadian journalism.

Since then, I have moved from business into technology writing and blogging, and more recently have become involved in helping to design and deliver a better Web experience at the Globe, using (among other things) “Web 2.0″-type tools such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, wikis and pretty much any other tool we can think of that might help us connect with readers better. I’m also one of the co-founders of an annual Toronto-based Web conference called mesh. I live in Toronto with my wife Rebecca and our three daughters Caitlin, Meaghan and Zoe, and two cats.

You can find me on Twitter, as well as on Facebook, and on LinkedIn. But I spend most of my time here on my blog. Post a comment, or email me at mathew (at) mathewingram.com.