Mark Colley

Mark Colley covers the intersection of sports business, media rights and major professional franchises for the Toronto Star, alongside feature reporting on news and trends. His sports stories focus on how ownership decisions, broadcast deals and league expansions shape teams and the wider sports landscape, rather than on scores and game recaps. At the same time, he writes general-assignment and feature pieces on subjects such as extreme weather, aging, health, crime and culture.

Sports business and franchise ownership

Colley’s sports coverage often centres on the corporate structures behind the teams and leagues that dominate Toronto’s sports scene. In his reporting on Rogers Communications acquiring Bell Canada’s stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, he broke down how the deal reshapes control of franchises including the Maple Leafs, Raptors, Toronto FC, the Argonauts and other club properties, explaining the ownership split in clear terms for readers following the business side of sport. He tracks how these changes intersect with existing broadcast arrangements, noting how Sportsnet’s rights to Blue Jays games and significant portions of Raptors and Maple Leafs coverage fit into the new ownership picture.

League expansion is another recurring thread in his work.

When the WNBA officially announced a new Toronto franchise, Colley reported on the details of the team’s launch, the role of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment chair Larry Tanenbaum, and the plan to play home games at Coca-Cola Coliseum while also travelling to other Canadian cities. He highlighted how the team’s leadership and multi-city strategy position the franchise within both the Canadian and North American basketball ecosystems.

This focus on ownership, governance and long-term positioning distinguishes his sports reporting from more routine game or player coverage.

Broadcast rights and sports media

Colley pays close attention to the media and broadcast side of sports, particularly the future of TSN and other major Canadian sports networks. In coverage picked up by industry publications, he examined rumours that TSN could face significant changes and contrasted those narratives with Bell Canada’s public assurances that fans would continue to see Maple Leafs and Raptors coverage through long-term rights deals. He detailed how key regional and national contracts are set to expire after the 2025–26 season and outlined the negotiations that will be required to establish fair market value for those rights.

His reporting noted that any renewed agreements will take place in a more crowded marketplace, with streaming platforms entering competition for marquee sports content. By following the path of these broadcast rights and explaining how they might move between traditional networks and digital services, Colley situates local teams within broader shifts in sports media. These stories are built around contract timelines, rights splits and corporate strategy, giving readers a structured view of how their ability to watch games is shaped behind the scenes.

Features on aging, health and environment

Beyond sports, Colley writes feature pieces that blend reporting with human stories about aging, health and the environment. In a New Year’s feature on older adults, he gathered advice from Toronto seniors on staying active, maintaining relationships and aging well, working with researchers and community partners to frame their experiences within broader discussions of “super aging.” The piece combines expert insight with direct voices from older residents, showing his interest in how research translates into everyday life.

Another feature explores the link between biodiversity and mental health, built around the simple question of how the number of bird species around a person might affect their well-being. In that story, Colley connects scientific findings to daily experience, using specific examples of local birdlife to make abstract research more tangible. His work on historical extreme heat in Toronto, including a detailed account of the 1936 heat wave that melted asphalt and caused hundreds of deaths, fits the same explanatory pattern: he anchors data and archival detail in the lived impacts on residents and the city’s infrastructure.

General assignment and culture coverage

Colley also handles general-assignment and trending stories that sit outside traditional sports or science beats. In his reporting on a long-running case involving “butter bandits,” he covered an unusual crime story with a feature sensibility, focusing on how investigators pursued the thefts and the broader economic and consumer context that made the case noteworthy.

He has written practical guides around major cultural events, such as a piece on what attendees should know before going to Taylor Swift’s shows in Toronto, which packages logistical details and context into an accessible, service-oriented format.

These assignments underscore that his remit at the Star extends across breaking news, features and cultural talkers. Professional profiles describe his role as spanning news and sports, with experience on fast-paced desks covering trending stories as well as longer-form features. Outside the Star, his work has appeared in a mix of national dailies, wire services and niche sports outlets, reflecting a background that combines general reporting with dedicated sports coverage. Taken together, his portfolio shows a reporter who can move from deep dives into ownership and broadcast strategy to human-focused features and quick-turn explainers on the stories people are talking about.