let alone responded to, the massive disruptions that the Internet has wrought on media the world over.
We are just now waking up to how badly Canadians have been caught off-guard by the global media revolution, and how much it affects us all. The hollowing out of Canada’s media is bad for democracy, and it runs counter to the claim that in the post–Stephen Harper era, Canada is somehow “back.” Actually, we have become a media backwater, and it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
For me, a former newspaper journalist, what is happening to Canada’s newspaper industry feels personal, which might partly explain why my distress at the parlous state of Canadian newspapers veers towards the intemperate. I feel like we are being robbed blind, mugged by the oligarchs, and fed a diet of content you wouldn’t serve in a hospital during a power outage.
I worked in newspapers for about a dozen years in all, both in my native Australia and here in Canada, and I loved the work. My first newspaper was a triweekly called the Whyalla News. Whyalla was a hard country town in South Australia, stinking hot most of the time, an industrial outpost of mostly immigrant workers who built ships and smelted iron ore. The Whyalla News was an incorrigible civic booster. Once I figured out what a reporter was supposed to do (I never went to college and was hired pretty much off the street on the strength of a somewhat fictional resumé typed by my girlfriend at the time), I had some early scrapes with the editor—me trying to get stories printed that rattled the municipal cage, and him succeeding in watering them down or keeping them out of the paper altogether.
It was an amazing—if sometimes discouraging—learning opportunity for me, and for the owners of the Whyalla News, it was a good business. The company ran a large printing press, mixing outside commercial print jobs with print runs of the News. This was in the days of hot lead, with compositors setting type line by line. When I finished my reporting shift, I would go into the shop. I loved the smell and the clatter of the place, and I was fascinated by the skill and speed with which the compositors would set type. I would stick around to watch the first papers come off the press. I thrilled every time at the realization that I could write something up in the newsroom and soon afterwards, through a complex series of social and technological navigations, everything from front-page stories to sports scores and the shipping news would end up on page after page that people would pay money for. It seemed like the work of alchemists.
I was a cub reporter earning almost nothing. So I couldn’t afford to, but I wrote away to Hatchards, one of the oldest bookstores in the UK, and in exchange for a fantastic amount of money, they sent me the five volumes of Editing and Design by legendary Sunday Times editor Harold Evans. Book 1: Newsman’s English. Book 2: Handling Newspaper Text. Book 3: News Headlines. Book 4: Picture Editing. Book 5: Newspaper Design. I have them still, in their impossibly luxe dust covers. I pored over them then, schooling myself in a kind of no man’s land between the high-mindedness of Evans and the low practice of covering agricultural field days in far-flung Australian country towns. I loved every bit of newspapering, including my shorthand teacher, as it happens. I quickly moved on to a bigger paper in Perth, and after a year there, spent two years covering Parliament in Canberra.
When I moved to Canada and got hired at the Vancouver Sun in the early ’80s, the transition to computers was underway, but the Pacific Press building at 2250 Granville Street was still anchored by a massive printing press. After the paper had gone to bed, but before I did, I would sometimes hang around the back shop watching the paginators do their thing, and just like in Whyalla, I would go down to the press room and watch huge newsprint rolls take their turn at hosting the day’s news. Compared to the quiet clicking of the newsroom, the press room was so muscular, so thunderous. All this to say that when it comes to being sentimental about newspapers, I’ve got form.
When I worked for the Sun, the paper was okay, but just okay. Even then, reporters reminisced about the good old days. The Sun was a mediocre newspaper in the 1980s, but while those days were very far from halcyon, they seem utterly brilliant compared to the pallor of today’s iteration. Then, at least, the Sun was not the utter embarrassment to the city that it is today.
After seven years as an editor and reporter, I quit the Sun to join CBC TV in 1988. That posting deserves its own nostalgic affection, even if those weren’t brilliant times for TV broadcasting either, because my gig was actually pretty good while it lasted. I got to do documentaries about important issues and, in particular, was privileged to travel to the far corners of British Columbia and interview Canadians, especially First Nations people, whose voices were otherwise unheard in our national discourse. It felt then that we were performing a very real and very distinct public service. But after successive funding cutbacks and the installation of one too many boneheaded executive producers, the CBC simply wasn’t fun anymore; I left in 1994 to found an environmental non-profit. But I never lost my affection for journalism and even, in small doses, journalists. More to the point, I have never lost my belief in the importance of journalism in public life.
In those so-so days at the Sun, I came to resent the fact that while we started every print run with blank rolls of newsprint, with a licence to put just about anything we wanted on those pages, we mostly filled the paper with garbage. It seemed like such an abuse, such a waste of everything, the high ideals of journalism lost in second-rate thinking by owners, then as now beholden to special interests and happy to hire mediocre managers who did their bidding.
The blood was already starting to drain out of the Sun when I started there in 1981, the same year the Royal Commission on Newspapers reported on the shocking state of concentration of Canadian newspaper ownership. Like a number of colleagues actively trying to arrest the decline of journalism even then, I joined the Centre for Investigative Journalism, becoming its vice-president for a spell, and I invited Ben Bagdikian—a well-known media critic who among other things helped the Washington Post get hold of and publish the Pentagon Papers—to be a keynote speaker at the CIJ convention in Vancouver in 1986. Three years earlier, he had published a seminal book, The Media Monopoly. Across North America, newspaper ownership concentration was seen as a dangerous blight, and Bagdikian chronicled the disease brilliantly. In the intervening decades, sadly, it has only gotten worse.
Chronicle of a death foretold
CANADA’S SLOW-WITTED AND flat-footed media companies have been on the wrong side of history for almost a generation now, and it is really starting to hurt. For more than half my adult life, I have lived in a great and growing city with two lousy and shrivelling newspapers. Most Canadians aren’t that lucky—either to live in Vancouver, or to have two newspapers, even bad ones, to choose from. Mostly, when it comes to newspapers, Canadians have no choice: they just take what their one local, lousy legacy rag offers up—or, increasingly, they get no newspaper at all. For the 2 0 per cent of Canadians, meanwhile, who don’t live in cities, the pickings are slimmer, and there’s no point arguing about quality because there isn’t any.
Then there’s television. Or in lots of smaller Canadian markets, there’s not, because local original content is too expensive to produce. In larger markets, there is greater variety to be sure, but the television product in this country is mostly so plastic and cosmetic that it’s as if the Mattel toy company bought up our media companies to provide jobs for their product line.
Magazines? Not so much. We lost a Beaver and got a Walrus in exchange, and what’s to like about that? Radio? Mostly noisome bingo callers, unless you are among the legions of Canadians who have had their brains cryogenically suspended in the gelid slush of Stuart McLean’s so-called storytelling in his Vinyl Cafe. Perhaps that’s where to lay the blame for the fact that Canadians have mostly slept through the great unravelling of our national media universe. Dave bastes the turkey while the nation’s media are cooked to a crisp.
But hey, look at us—we don’t all have blue hair
