Words

Any number of graduates could say they owe their careers to the lessons they learned, but how many are able to pinpoint a single assignment that changed their lives?

Well, prominent Ottawa CTV news anchor Michael O’Byrne for one.

O’Byrne was in the first year of Algonquin College’s print journalism program in 1979 when his instructor announced an overnight assignment: the class was to monitor police radio communication one evening and write as many stories as they could muster from the leads they picked up.

Most of his classmates contemplated writing five or six stories, O’Byrne recalls:

“I said I’m going to get 20 stories. I went out to every little cat call… and I wrote 20 stories the next day.”

One of the stories described firefighters rescuing a cat from a burning building. O’Byrne’s instructor was impressed and suggested he might be able to sell it to one of the city’s two daily newspapers. O’Byrne took it to the Ottawa Journal, whose editors snapped it up.

“They paid me one hundred dollars,” says O’Byrne, but that wasn’t the best part. “They knew who I was, and they hired me a month later. Because of an assignment at Algonquin College. That’s how it started.”

When the Journal folded in the late summer of 1980, happenstance and O’Byrne’s College training again served him well. His program had included one course in television journalism and he had taken to it – quickly learning the different rhythms and conventions of writing for TV and presenting on air. On the strength of that experience, he landed a position with the CJOH (CTV Ottawa) newsroom; nearly 37 years later, O’Byrne looks back proudly on the career he built there.

A long time anchor of CTV News at Noon, O’Byrne has also helped created some award-winning television, including an internationally-acclaimed documentary about Noella Leclair’s experience as Canada’s first recipient of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart.

He has travelled the world on assignment for his station, and recalls covering the launch of the space shuttle Challenger when it carried Ottawa astronaut Steve MacLean into orbit.

“Algonquin College changed my life,” says O’Byrne. “Algonquin College gave me an opportunity that turned into a career.”

As it turned out, the College gave him that career long before he was able to graduate. His work at the Journal and CJOH made attendance at his journalism courses sporadic, and O’Byrne was a couple of courses short of diploma requirements when his classmates graduated in 1982. Years later, the College’s administration offered to give him an honorary diploma, based on his experience and his community involvement (O’Byrne lends his celebrity to more than 200 charity events a year). O’Byrne demurred.

“I said, ‘No, I don’t want an honorary diploma, thank you. I want to go back to school and earn the credits that I was short,’” he recalls. “They arranged for me to go back to school that summer.” He accepted his diploma with that fall’s graduating class.

“It meant the world to me to go back to school and get that diploma and go to my graduation with my kids in the audience,” he says. Today, O’Byrne gives back to his alma matter by serving on the Algonquin College Foundation’s Board of Directors.

Given the dramatic changes O’Byrne has seen in his industry, particularly since the ascendance of the Internet, he has some advice for new graduates of the College’s journalism program: be open and inquisitive.

“Algonquin College gives you the groundwork to convince someone to hire you,” he says. “From there, you’re going to learn so much more.”