Val Sears (December 5, 1927 – January 21, 2016) was a Canadian journalist. He was a reporter, editor,

Ottawa Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core ...

Bureau Chief and foreign correspondent in London, England and Washington, D.C. for the

Toronto Star The ''Toronto Star'' is a Canadian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper. The newspaper is the country's largest daily newspaper by circulation. It is owned by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary of Torstar Corporation and part ...

. Sears won numerous awards for his reporting including a National Newspaper Award for feature writing and for news as well as a science writing Award. He is author of the book ''Hello Sweetheart: Get Me Rewrite'', which is a lively account of the 1950s newspaper wars between the Toronto Telegram and the Toronto Star, both of which employed him. After retiring from the Toronto Star, Sears became a columnist for the Ottawa Sun from 1998 to 2005. Sears always had an intense interest in the career of the Prairie populist conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. He was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to write a trilogy of television plays detailing the life of John Diefenbaker, which were ultimately not produced due to budget cuts at the CBC. In 1991, Sears accepted the Bell Chair as Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Regina. In 1999 he was made a lifetime member of the Ottawa Press Gallery, until his death. Sears was the father of

Robin Sears Robin V. Sears is a communications, marketing, and public affairs adviser with experience on three continents for public- and private-sector clients. Sears joined the Earnscliffe Strategy Group in 2012 and was an NDP strategist for 20 years. Bi ...

, a communications, marketing and public affairs advisor, and of Kit Melamed, a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigative journalism program, the Fifth Estate. He was married to Edith Cody-Rice, senior legal counsel for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He died in Almonte, Ontario on January 21, 2016, aged 88.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sears, Val Canadian newspaper reporters and correspondents 2016 deaths 1927 births Toronto Star people