Early work

McLean first joined CBC Radio as a researcher for Cross Country Checkup in 1974,^[12] later becoming a documentarian for the radio program Sunday Morning.^[13] He won an ACTRA Award in 1979 for "Operation White Knight", his Sunday Morning documentary about the Jonestown Massacre.^[14] From 1981 until 1984 he was the show's executive producer.^[15]

McLean was a professor of journalism at Ryerson University from 1984 until 2004, when he retired and became a professor emeritus.^[1] When he died in 2017, former students of McLean recalled how he concerned himself with their success in the journalism industry. CTV reporter Scott Lightfoot remarked, "I went to university twice, I took a lot of courses, I never had another professor offer to make phone calls on my behalf."^[16]

During the 1980s and 1990s, he was a frequent contributor to and sometime guest host of Morningside,^[13] for which he often produced human interest documentaries and audio essays about everyday people and places.^[17] He would later characterize his Morningside work as celebrating "the importance of being unimportant",^[18] and as ultimately helping him find his own voice as a writer.^[19] Morningside host Peter Gzowski remembered fondly the work McLean did for the program: ”On the surface, they seemed inconsequential, but in fact they were exquisitely crafted pieces of journalism.”^[20]

McLean eventually compiled a selection of his work for Morningside in his first book, The Morningside World of Stuart McLean.^[21] The book was a Canadian bestseller and a finalist for the 1990 Toronto Book Awards.^[1][22] Following the success of his first book, McLean was approached by Penguin Books to write a travel memoir about life in small-town Canada.^[20] Released in 1992, Welcome Home: Travels in Smalltown Canada^[23] featured stories from seven small communities, and won the Canadian Authors Association for best non-fiction book in 1993.^[24]

McLean often reported for CBC news programs The Journal and The National, where he focused on human interest stories, talking to "regular people" and delving into their often funny or poignant experiences. These segments about everyday people helped to inspire The Vinyl Cafe, which in the same vein looked at the lives of average Canadians.^[7]

The Vinyl Cafe

In 1994, McLean launched The Vinyl Cafe as a summer series featuring stories about a fictional second-hand record store.^[25] Although the early stories focused on a diverse group of characters loosely linked through the titular Vinyl Cafe record store, by the time the series became a permanent one the stories were focused more squarely on the store's proprietor, Dave, and his family and friends.^[26] Following the show's second summer run in 1995, McLean published Stories from the Vinyl Cafe, his first book in that series.^[27] The show joined CBC's permanent regular-season schedule in 1997.^[28]

Beginning in 1998, McLean took The Vinyl Cafe on the road to theatres across Canada and the United States.^[13][26] Some stories would be repeated at multiple shows—in particular, an early story about Dave's awkward attempt to cook a turkey for Christmas dinner became one of the most famous and most frequently performed stories of McLean's career^[29]—but McLean would often perform slightly different versions of the stories to keep his audiences engaged.^[30] One episode of The Vinyl Cafe each year was also dedicated to the "Arthur Awards", McLean's own awards program to honour acts of kindness and community engagement by ordinary Canadians that might otherwise "go unheralded and even unnoticed".^[31]

The Vinyl Cafe was broadcast every weekend on CBC Radio, and later as a weekly podcast.^[32] McLean's books of stories from The Vinyl Cafe won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour three times.^[1] Several albums of his performances of Vinyl Cafe stories were also released. In the 2010s a spinoff edition, Vinyl Café Stories, aired on CBC Radio in a weekday afternoon time-slot, featuring two previously broadcast stories on interrelated themes.