Distinguished alumnus Stephen Stohn ’66, one of the founders of Arthur newspaper and Trent Radio, has made an investment in support of both organizations.  Mr. Stohn has assisted Arthur with funds for a digital archive project that will provide job opportunities for students and ensure that over forty years worth of material will be available online. He also donated to Trent Radio to help replace the community radio organization’s broken transmitter. “I have to treat my two children equally,” he joked about the matching donations.

Stohn’s student interest in media and the arts has translated into an exciting career in the entertainment industry. As an entertainment lawyer, he is a founding partner in the firm Stohn Hay Cafazzo Dembroski Richmond LLP, which was recognized by Lexpert as one of the leading entertainment law firms in Canada. He is the president of Epitome Pictures Inc. and executive producer of the popular television series Degrassi. He has won 10 Gemini awards, has been nominated for two primetime Emmy awards, and has been inducted into the Canadian Music and Broadcast Industry Hall of Fame. Among many other pursuits, Stohn is also a songwriter and co-wrote the theme song for Degrassi.

Mr. Stohn fondly remembers his time at Trent. Since the university had only been in existence for two years when he arrived, he and his fellow students were able to follow their passions and build student organizations from the ground up. Stohn was the one who finally gave Arthur its name. In the first year of printing, the editorial staff changed the paper’s title almost weekly because they couldn’t agree on an appropriate moniker. A fan of the Beatles’ movie A Hard Day’s Night, Stohn suggested one week that they call the paper Arthur, after George Harrison’s haircut. It stuck, and Arthur has been printing under that name ever since.

The Arthur digitization project, a partnership with the Trent University Archives, began as a practicum project for Trent alumnus Dwayne Collins, steward of Sadleir House, as he completed his Master of Information Studies at UofT. He painstakingly photographed each page of each issue and uploaded them to http://www.trentu.ca/admin/library/archives/Arthur/. Volumes 1-5 (1966-71) and 13-20 (1978-86) are currently available online, and with the generous help of Stephen Stohn, students will be hired to continue the work that Collins started. The project will ideally be completed by 2014, so alumni celebrating Trent’s 50^th anniversary will have full access to old issues of Arthur.

Trent Radio’s transmitter failed in mid-January, taking the broadcast facility off the air for two days. Mr. Stohn’s donation fulfilled half of Trent Radio’s $12,000 fundraising goal to replace the transmitter and fix the server that crashed over the Christmas holidays. Three brave members of Trent Radio participated in the BEL Rotary Polar Plunge in Ennismore on February 3^rd to raise money for the transmitter fund, and other fundraising initiatives are in the works.