Reporter Rob Munro is officially retiring. His last day was Thursday, March 28.

(JONESIE / iNFOnews.ca)

Six years ago, I got a letter from some guy who said he had just retired and wanted to help us cover the City of Kelowna.

These kinds of letters are not entirely unusual. There’s always people, usually seniors, usually men, who want to push their personal agendas through a parade of letters to the editor or columns.

But this one was a bit different.

Rob Munro had been a reporter for many years, including covering City Hall in Kelowna, albeit almost 30 years earlier. He had considered running for council then changed his mind after watching how councillors behaved.

He’s not a glad-hander, a suck-up or an ass-kisser, so he didn’t like his chances of getting elected.

Marshall Jones, managing editor

But he was still interested in what goes on in the city. Far better to be a reporter then, and that’s what he did for us for the last six years.

While he is always happy to counsel young reporters if they ask for it, he freely admits he’s not a particularly nice guy.

He’s gruff, dare I say even grumpy. He doesn’t start conversations with chit chat, rarely says hello, never says good-bye after meetings or phone calls and never tells anyone to have a nice day.

He’s off to work.

We argue constantly but always productively. At story meetings, he will raise an idea or development in a story and we’ll fight over the meaning, the implications, what might happen next, all so we can understand why this thing is happening.

When I’m wrong in my supposition, he simply responds with ‘no’ and explains why because he has the facts. We’ll correct, think about it some more, and arrive at a unique angle on where the story is going.

Over my objections, he starts his day at 6 a.m., notorious for filing two or three stories before other reporters even wake up.

I worried about the technology at first. How will he ever learn to use social media?

But Rob wasn’t bothered. He’s old school. He thinks social media is stupid, so he never uses it. While other reporters based most of their work on things they found on Facebook or Twitter, he follows his own path, finding stories his own way. He rarely uses texts, doesn’t use Messenger, he picks up the phone and, you know… talks to people. Just as reporters have always done.

And when he finds a subject, whether assigned or by following his own nose, he drives straight to the heart of it. No games, no purple prose or flowery language. It all gets in the way of trying to explain complicated subjects.

I tried for months to get him to meet with city councillors privately, make some friends, make life easier on himself if he could get tips directly from them about what’s coming up.

“No. Why the hell would I sit there and have a councillor tell me what they think is news,” he told me, or something to that effect.

It was wasted time, as far as he’s concerned.

While other reporters struggle to get information, Rob rarely has that problem. Despite his no-nonsense, no punches-pulled style, his regular sources had no issues talking to him.
Because he is always fair, a far better goal than balance.

During the pandemic, he often found unique angles and headlines, though his tough questions to health officials meant he rarely got called to query them again. He started covering the mess happening in long-term care facilities and developed a network of sources across the province to break provincial news.

He did a couple stories on gas prices going up but quickly grew frustrated with the lack of information. So he build a spreadsheet and collected gas prices almost daily for years so he could provide context.

He did the same thing with real estate prices. As the housing crisis deepened, he covered all angles, including pointing to ridiculous sale prices on multi-million-dollar properties. All realtors spoke to him. Except Jane Hoffman. That darned Jane Hoffman.

He became a favourite among meteorologists at Environment Canada because they appreciated that he asked interesting and curious questions, not just milking them for an average weather forecast.

Same with forest fires or overdoses or a hundred other subjects he sunk his teeth into.

His job as a reporter, he says, isn’t to bombard people with the opinions of under-informed people, it’s to find context for why you are reading about this particular bit of news. 

Like me, he never cared much for fragile ‘feelings’ that only get in the way of stories. If it needs to be said, say it.

It took a year or two before I realized Rob was living my dream. I never want to stop.

Sadly for me, however, that time has come for Rob. He’s in his early 70s now. He’s been working 10- to 11-hour days for the past six years covering the length and breadth of Kelowna and the Okanagan and he’s earned a rest.

He officially retired yesterday. Here's how he signed off: "It is time for me to move on to the next chapter in my life. What that will be, I do not know but I’m sure it will include participating and contributing and trying to do some good and education to this (messed)-up world in some way and it will likely have something to do with writing."

Vintage Rob.

He’s not even gone as I write this, and it feels like I — we — have lost a limb. A right hand, perhaps.

We’ll be poorer for his loss, but his passion for the job, his methods, tricks, his even-hand, his work ethic continue to inspire me and the rest of my newsroom.

You’ve done good, Rob. We’re going to miss you.

— Marshall Jones is the Managing Editor of iNFOnews.ca

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