Matthew Halliday

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Matthew was born in Oshawa, a decaying industrial town on the edge of Toronto’s exurban fringes. Sadly, his shot at a rustic, Springsteen-esque upbringing in the blue-collar heartland was thwarted when his parents moved him to suburban Ottawa, and a few years later on to Montreal and then Calgary, where life took a more John Hughes-y turn.

From May 2006 to May 2008, he worked as an editor and writer at Edmonton’s SEE Magazine, where he learned how to be an editor—first a bad one, then a good one. As an editor at an alt-weekly with a slightly counter-cultural perspective, he also learned to be wary of writers who promise to write the “gonzo” account of any story. (Note to said freelancers: Put down the Wild Turkey for a minute and ask yourself, “Am I brilliant, or am I just drunk?”.)

Matthew likes arts journalism, especially the theatre and music journalism where most of his professional work has been focused, but he'd really like to move in a newsier direction, especially since he’s profiled enough middling pop-rock bands to keep MuchMusic programmed until the end of time.

Matthew has also been an intern reporter at the Calgary Sun, and last summer, he split his time between freelancing news and features for various city magazines/dailies/weeklies. He spent his down-time wandering Edmonton, lamenting its lack of good coffee joints (except for that one pretentious place on 109th Street where the owner pretends not to understand you if you don’t pronounce “gelato” properly), and trying to decide whether to stay in Alberta or get out before the inevitable implosion of its single-resource economy.

A newcomer to Toronto, he’s already fallen hard for the city’s oft-homely, oft-beautiful jumbled-up urbanism, and hopes to watch it mature in years to come. And he plans on being a part of that process. You know, journalistically speaking.