Discovery Channel Head Started at the Bottom
Rosalin Krieger, Special to The CJN
“I always had the need to tell stories,” Paul Lewis confides. The British-born, married, father of two girls and self-confessed “total nerd” is the president and general manager of Discovery Channel Canada. He is an affable but unassuming risk-taker with a distinguished Canadian media career that stretches back to 1979 with the CBC, where he spent 14 years as a journalist on Sunday Report. In 1994, he jumped over to cable’s fledgling Discovery Channel to launch television’s first science magazine show, now called Daily Planet. “My parents knew I was a creative person” who needed an outlet, he explained. But he rejected a “painful and solitary writer’s life.” He enrolled in Ryerson University’s journalism program and paid his dues “right at the bottom” as a copy clerk, an entry level position in Saskatoon, which he made the most of. “I realized,” Lewis said, “that you could just take the job at face value, do what you’re supposed to do and do it probably for the rest of your life or you could seize the opportunity, make connections, offer to do more… be proactive, and that was a great strategy. I always gave them more than what they expected. ‘Can I give you two more than that?’ I would ask. ‘Can I interview this person? Can I write this news story?’” Lewis made a point of cultivating relationships, anywhere and everywhere.
“You’d bump into somebody in a bathroom and you start up a conversation and all of a sudden you’re friends. It’s like, ‘Hey, can I help you out in some way?’ You had to grab opportunities and I think that’s even more so now, because broadcasting is shrinking.” So much work is contract based, he said, that you need to position yourself as a content provider. Being the only Jew in a Saskatoon newsroom in 1979 was interesting. “People didn’t even know what a bagel was,” Lewis joked. “I’d get them shipped to me and people were looking at them.” And they would tell him, “I’ve never met a Jewish person before.” It was a great opportunity to educate, Lewis recalled with a smile. Being Jewish is “part of my thinking, the way I approach things, my sense of humour, the way you relate to people, it’s different. I’ve tried to take the values that I’ve learned at home and apply them in the work environment, the way I relate to people, the way I approach everything…things have changed now. At the beginning it was constantly explaining what I was doing, who I am,” and that being Jewish is “such a broad definition, there’s many different types of Jews.”
Lewis said aspiring media content producers should have a sense of humour. “It is so important, absolutely critical,” he said Also understand that nobody’s going to get it right all the time, so keep trying.
You’re “constantly reacting…its 24/7 on shpilkes.” It’s not for the “faint of heart or people who don’t like change.”
Discovery channel is producing The History of the Jewish Canadians to air in September 2014. Based on
the PBS series Jews in America, the two-hour program will cover the first arrival of Jews to Canada, and Lewis promises “lots of untold stories.”
Grandson Shares Musical Legacy with Deli Mogul
Rosalin Krieger, Special to The CJN, Friday, April 26, 2013
Stacey Shopsowitz, 21, an upright and electric bass player who is the grandson of the late Sam Shopsowitz of Jewish delicatessen fame, is quietly carving out an interesting musical path.
One might say he’s entered the “unofficial” family business: music. Turns out, his grandfather had unfulfilled musical ambitions of his own.
A 1984 obituary on Sam referred to him as a “frustrated musician,” which Shopsowitz said is a fair assessment. Sam, an accordion player as far back as high school, was a regular performer, said Shopsowitz, and had a number of unsuccessful Hollywood auditions.
Shopsowitz said one of Sam’s closest friends was former jingle writer and Tony Award-winning Jewish American composer Mitch Leigh, who told Shopsowitz that his grandfather was “the best guy I ever met.”
Shopsowitz got hooked on jazz at age five, when his mother, Ellen Drevnig, took him to a Joshua Redmond modern jazz concert with a gospel jazz group as an opening act. But Shopsowitz considers himself a blues musician in the manner of Buddy Guy, who, Shopsowitz said, plays a lot of “happy” blues.
For Shopsowitz, blues is not solely about the pain of African-Americans; it’s about “the smallest common denominator,” he said. “If you listen to a B.B. King solo, he can say just as much with four notes as Charlie Parker can with 400. It’s about communicating feeling through sound.”
Shopsowitz cites three years of storytelling at the Toronto Heschel School as one of his influences. Two of his favourite storyteller musicians are African-American alternative singer-songwriter India Arie and Ravid Kahalani, of the critically acclaimed North and West African Israeli infused group Yemen Blues, whom Shopsowitz studied with.
Shopsowitz has played bass for the popular sibling Toronto and Los Angeles-based rock band Ménage and participates in Scarborough’s East Collective youth music hip-hop program.
Shopsowitz said he was “really inspired” by his two summer terms with the Berklee Middle Eastern All-Star Ensemble program at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he shared a room with Turkish and Persian students.
Shopsowitz’s parents would like him to pursue a law degree with music “on the side” because of the instability of a business, in which he can wait five to six months to get paid an amount sometimes lower than what was negotiated. But Shopsowitz is returning to Humber College to complete a contemporary music degree that encompasses mostly jazz, because in his third year he will learn music production and business, which will serve him well.
Shopsowitz’s budding musical career connects him to his late grandfather – whom he only knows anecdotally and through photos – because he had serious musical aspirations that never came to fruition. In a sense, Shopsowitz is carrying on his grandfather’s musical dream.
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