Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Areas of Interest
- The Business of Journalism
- The CBC/Radio-Canada
- Artificial Intelligence
- Narrative Forms
Biography
An award-winning writer and editor, Jessica has worked with or contributed to approximately 75 different media outlets, including the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, the Walrus, the Toronto Star, and the New Republic. She is a former books editor of Saturday Night and a former fashion editor at the Globe & Mail. In 2025, with the data journalist Emma Wilkie, she released “What Should the CBC Be?”, the results of a two-year research project on public service media conducted as a senior fellow at the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University. From 2017 to 2023, she was editor-in-chief of The Walrus, the acclaimed Canadian general interest magazine.
A frequent public speaker and media commentator, Jessica Johnson has contributed perspectives on a wide range of cultural issues, from fiction to artificial intelligence. In 2019, with Maclean’s journalist Anne Kingston, she developed and taught “#MeToo and the Media,” a new class in the Book and Media Studies program at St. Michael’s College, which received international media attention. She is the proprietor of the Substack newsletter “Writing for People Who Hate Writing.” She has a B.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.
Select Publications:
“Canada Needs a Rewrite” in Abdelmahmoud, Elamin (Ed.), Elbows Up! Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance (McClelland & Stewart), October 2025.
Jessica Johnson and Emma Wilkie, “What Should the CBC Be?” [Report], The Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, July 2025.
“Journalism’s Wicked Problem: Save What’s Lost or Invest in What’s New?” 2021 O’Hagan Essay on Public Affairs, The Walrus (Dec. 13, 2021).