John Sawatsky
Canadian journalist and academic
Ferdinand John Sawatsky (born 1948) is a Canadian author, journalist and interviewer.
Early career
Born in Winkler, Manitoba in 1948, he graduated from Mennonite Educational Institute in Abbotsford and attended Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s. Graduating in political science, he started his career as an investigative reporter. In the 1970s, while working as the Ottawa correspondent for the Vancouver Sun, he published a series of articles on misdeeds of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
He quit daily journalism in 1979 and wrote a number of books, including a biography of Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney published 1991.
He received the 1976 Michener Award for his articles about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and he later wrote a number of books on the RCMP and Canadian espionage.
Academic career
In 1982, Sawatsky began teaching classes in investigative journalism at various Canadian universities and was appointed adjunct professor of journalism at Carleton University's School of Journalism in 1991. Sawatsky also works as a consultant in the practice of interviewing and has been involved in interview training for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation since 1991. He has taught interviewing techniques to television anchors, reporters and print journalists in many parts of the world, including Singapore, The United States, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
He currently teaches an interview-technique seminar for sports reporters for ESPN. The seminar focuses on remedying the sloppy and ineffective interviewing techniques often employed by many of today's major television and cable news interviewers.
The public source identifies “John Sawatsky” as canadian journalist and academic. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around John, Sawatsky and Canadian.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15488616. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1979, 1991 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Sawatsky” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.