Fred’s Career

1968: CBC Radio in Montreal – News writer

1969-1975: CBC Television – The Business Desk

1975: CBC Investigative team: Wage & Price Control board

1976: CBC National Business Reporter (Toronto)

1981: CBC Current Affairs – Production of 1-hour documentaries

1982 – 1987: CBC – The Journal

1980’s & 1990’s: Journalist – writing over 250 articles for The Economist, BusinessWeek, The Christian Science Monitor, and other major publications

1997: CBC Newsworld Business Team

1998-2010: CBC Business News – host

2000: Publication of first novel title The Stringer

2010: Publication of Fred’s second novel The Obit Man

2011- current: Freelance Writer, Author, Broadcaster, Speaker & Consultant

I’ve known and worked with Fred for more than forty years. He’s never disappointed as a journalist and he’s never disappointed as a friend. He’s always had a great sense of what’s important in a story and when it comes to the world of business journalism, he has few equals. Peter Mansbridge, Anchor, The National, CBC

Journalist – Print Media

While working in broadcasting Langan was always active as a contributor and regular stringer. His first regular string was for Time Canada, and his work there is part of the background for his novel, The Stringer. While at Time Canada he broke a story on airline pilots resisting the use of French in air traffic control.

His regular strings included: Time Canada, BusinessWeek, and The Economist. Over a period of 8 years he filed 250 stories to The Economist. His other major string at that time was The Christian Science Monitor. He contributed to the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, including a cover story on Canada abolishing the Foreign Investment Review Agency in the mid 1980s.

From the late 80s until 2006 he was the Canadian correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.

Obituaries. Fred Langan has written around 2,000 obituaries. He first started writing obituaries for the Daily Telegraph, which when it was owned by Conrad Black took an interest in Canadian news. When the National Post started he offered them a version of a Telegraph obit on Major Guy d’Artois, a Canadian war hero with the French Resistance. A photo of d’Artois and Charles de Gaulle ran on page one.

That obit is the basis for his novel, The Obit Man.

He then wrote as many as three obits a week for the Post for several years, switching to Globe and Mail late where for a while he wrote under the pen name James MacCready, an in-joke since that is a name on his family tombstone in Mount Royal cemetery.

He continues to write obits for the Globe and Mail.

Journalist – Television

Fred Langan started as a news writer on the radio desk at CBC Montreal in March of 1968. He had just turned 22. His first broadcast was soon afterwards, reporting on a strike at the St. Lawrence Seaway. By September of 1968 he was working television and reported occasionally, including the police strike in Montreal and the bed in of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1969.

Langan was soon a regular reporter for both local and national news. This period is covered in his novel, The Stringer. He worked in Ottawa in 1975 on a special team covering wage and price controls. After covering the Olympics in 1976 he moved to Toronto as the first National Business reporter. He worked as a correspondent in London in 1977.
In 1980 he shifted to Current Affairs making hour-long documentaries on a variety of economic subjects. In 1982 he moved to The Journal and was a producer and presenter of short documentaries. He left the CBC to go freelance full time in December of 1987.

Christian Science Monitor Television. Langan did several documentaries for this short-lived TV network. The most important was a profile of Costa Rica, including an interview with Oscar Arias, the country’s president who won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Venture. Langan was a regular contributor to this new business program. Many of his items were off beat stories shot in England on subjects such as where to buy shirts on London’s Jermyn Street or the high cost of keeping up a stately home.

Business News. Langan went back on staff at the CBC in 1997 after 10 years of pure freelancing. Within a year and half he was host of CBC Business News, a nightly look at markets and business trends. It was a live half hour program and had the top ratings on CBC Newsworld, the Canadian equivalent of CNN. The program was cancelled in 2010 and for a year and half Langan did spot business news in the studio every hour and filed reports for CBC Radio. He retired from the CBC in April of 2011.