Article

Norman Eric Webster

Published Online December 17, 2007

Last Edited December 16, 2013

Norman Eric Webster, journalist (b at Summerside, PEI 4 June 1941). Educated at Bishops College School and then at Bishops U, Webster won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. Returning to Canada, he joined The Globe and Mail and served successfully in the newspaper's bureaus in Québec C and Ottawa.

Webster, Norman Eric

Norman Eric Webster, journalist (b at Summerside, PEI 4 June 1941). Educated at Bishops College School and then at Bishops U, Webster won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. Returning to Canada, he joined The Globe and Mail and served successfully in the newspaper's bureaus in Québec C and Ottawa. He then worked as editor of the Saturday supplement, The Globe Magazine (now defunct), before leaving for a stint as Beijing [Peking] correspondent.

It was in the unlikely role as the paper's commentator on Ontario provincial affairs that he won a faithful following during the 1970s before undertaking a stint as European correspondent. He then joined the editorial staff and was editor-in-chief from 1983 to 1989. Webster also served as a financial angel to the magazine Saturday Night, enabling it to survive one of its periodic spasms of fiscal trouble. In 1987 he sold his interest in the magazine to Conrad Black.

Webster left the Globe to become editor-in-chief of the Montréal Gazette in 1989. He resigned in 1993 to run the R. Howard Webster Foundation.