Amélie St-Pierre’s Early Career in Print Media

Veteran journalist and filmmaker Pierre Saint-Yves interviews Amélie St-Pierre, who spent a decade working as a community newspaper editor for Icimédias in the Mauricie and Nicolet-Bécancour areas.

Pierre: Still, you worked as an editor for a long time.

Amélie: Ten years.

Pierre: Let’s talk about how you started out. How does… What leads a 30-year-old woman…

Amélie: Thirty. Yeah, I was 30 at the time.

Pierre: … to take on a challenge like that?

Amélie: Well, at that point I had already been with the organization for almost a decade. So, I had already done a lot of different jobs. I had been… At the start, I worked as an account manager. Then, I was named Sales Director. Eventually, I got the chance to serve as General Manager. That’s what the position was called at the time, but later it was changed to Editor. Anyway, that’s the story. I was already with the organization, I was already included in the succession plan, and I was hoping to rise through the ranks. To move beyond the job I was doing at the time. And then, the opportunity presented itself when the team was restructured. Some positions were cut. There had been several waves of cuts in recent years. And that’s when I was given the opportunity to become General Manager. My title was later changed to Editor. Anyway, my boss was gone because of the restructuring. It was a strange day in terms of emotions, because I had to accept a position that had been my mentor’s. My boss, who had taken a chance on me back in 2006. Well, that’s that. Basically, it was Transcontinental. At the time, they were looking for general managers, editors, people with sales experience. Because they were starting to see a rather big decline in advertising sales, and it was going to take a somewhat different kind of person to manage a newspaper.