Michael Hollett is co-founder and co-owner of NOW Magazine and Now Communications Inc., and has been Editor/Publisher since NOW's launch in September 1981. He is fiercely proud of NOW's independent status and is directly involved with the magazine, website and book publishing arm. He is also a founder and director of North by Northeast Music Festival and Conference.

Hollett retains an insatiable interest in culture and politics, traveling the world to cover stories for NOW, and attending international music and film festivals. He is the founding music editor of NOW and still plays a hands-on role in the department - from assignments to editing, as well as writing music features and commentary and he regularly contributes to the news section. He also actively involved in moving NOW forward with developing technologies such as iPad and iPhone apps, to ensure that NOW content is even more accessible to its current and growing readership.

Some of his interview subjects have been Rush, Woody Harrelson, Neil Young, and Iggy Pop and he has reported from behind the scenes at the Junos and the SXSW music festival, among others.

Coming from a newspaper family - his parents and grandparents were journalists - he loves battling big media and enjoys challenging the daily mega-corporations' representation of news, culture, opinion and life. Before starting NOW, Hollett edited small-town community newspapers in Orangeville, Caledon and Georgetown, picking up a nice stack of newspaper awards along the way.

"In many ways, NOW is a throwback to the turn of the 19th-century when cities of any size had at least a half dozen independent papers, most of them owner-operated, with widely divergent viewpoints," says Hollett.

"But despite drawing on rich, feisty and fun journalistic traditions the paper is fundamentally about today, about NOW."

Hollett was born in Oakville, grew up in Toronto's Flemingdon Park, and has lived in Ottawa and Montreal. He went to York University where he studied English, engaged in left-wing campus politics, and edited the student newspaper, Excalibur.

He is a proud member of the Black Stokes in the Downtown Toronto Men's Hockey League.

Hollett lives in Toronto's Riverdale neighbourhood and has three children.

michael@nowtoronto.com

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