Contributor Profiles

Henry McRandall is a multilingual throwback to another era: a political and social activist who went into journalism hoping to expose the failings of political and social elites in order to bring about positive changes for disempowered members of society.

While still in high school, he began his journalism career at age of 16, working full-time evenings and weekends as a disc jockey and newscaster at Quebec City's now-defunct English-language radio station, CFOM.

His 20-year media career included key senior editing, writing, and/or reporting positions with some of the largest and most respected newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, including The New York Times, New York Post, The Boston Herald, The Philadelphia Journal, The Las Vegas Sun, The Toronto Star, The (Toronto) Globe & Mail, The (Montreal) Gazette, Winnipeg Sun, The Edmonton Journal and both the National Enquirer and its primary competition, Globe.

Henry, who speaks English, French and Spanish, redesigned three major dailies, assisted in the redesign of two others, and participated in the launch or re-launch of 11 newspapers and magazines across the continent. When asked what he liked best about being a journalist, he replies: “Being able to address tough, issue-oriented questions to self-important bureaucrats and, in the process, offering alternatives to government policies I viewed as harmful.”

Contrarian and outspoken

With such an impressive CV, one would think he would have been on a meteoric career trajectory after 20 years in media. It may have been his blunt nature or his libertarian-leftist political outlook or both, but before he had hit age 40, Henry found himself blacklisted at major North American newspapers and homeless on the streets of Toronto for 14 months in 1986-87.

He picked himself up, moved to London, Ontario, where he has family and enrolled at age 40 at Western University, majoring in sociology, history and economics. In 2009, he founded www.WriseUp.com, a hard-hitting online newsmagazine that examines world affairs from a non-partisan, no-holds-barred perspective.

“Through WriseUp.com, I speak truth to power, offering readers an alternative to the status quo drivel that now passes for news in the mainstream media.”

To this day he remains the proverbial lone-wolf journalist who enjoys spending leisure hours reading non-fiction and performing statistical analyses in support of his columns. Sometimes he can be found in his living room listening to a favorite rock group of a bygone era or laughing sardonically at some of the non-sequiturs emanating from the talking heads on television news broadcasts.

Henry welcomes the opportunity to communicate with individuals who, like him, believe in striving to change the system for the benefit of the many, rather than for the few. He can be reached at: henrymcrandall@gmail.com