Canadian newspapers are basically dead men walking. It is easy to conclude—although hard to accept—that frankly the sooner we stop throwing good money after bad newspapers, the better. The newspaper era is essentially over, even if the need for good journalism has never been greater. Old, slow, and lazy doesn’t win the race. It’s beyond urgent that we clear the decks and make way for the journalism of tomorrow, because the journalism of today is fast becoming yesterday’s news.
* Not to be confused, in Canada, with The Fifth Estate, a cleverly named and admirably executed CBC documentary television show that is very much a product of mainstream journalism at its best.
ONE
No Country for Old Media: Our Shrinking Public Square
IT IS PROBABLY fair to say that on any given day, in the hushed halls of power in Canada—on the oaken newspaper racks in our cities’ private clubs, in the lobbies of Fairmont hotels, in the offices of Cabinet ministers from coast to coast, on coffee tables in the carpeted confines of our corporate titans—you will be hard-pressed to find a copy of the Tofino-Ucluelet Westerly News.
A fatal crash on the Pacific Rim Highway between Tofino and Ucluelet, or a good-news story about the Clayoquot Oyster Festival—“Oyster Fest. shucks locals out of winter’s shell”—just won’t win many people’s attention when thousands of refugees are at the gate, Bombardier is once again at the trough, Rob Ford has breathed his last, and oilman Murray Edwards, shortly after climbing onto a stage with Alberta’s NDP premier to vaunt the coming of a carbon tax, has decamped for a more tax-friendly Britain.
Even by the standards of the traditional local rag, the weekly Westerly News is a poor excuse for a newspaper. After you’ve forked out your $1.25, the paper’s girth immediately drops by two-thirds when you extract inserts from Home Hardware, No-Frills, Staples, the Brick, and Buy-Low Foods. What’s left of the actual newspaper, all 16 pages of it,1 loses another half to ads. There is one page of amusements (crossword, Sudoku, etc.) and a total of eight stories written by the paper’s sole reporter, along with a sprinkling of other stories written by community members whose bylines qualify as “Local Voices.” That’s it. As for the stories themselves, well, let’s just say there are none that would cause even the slightest murmur in the aforementioned chambers of power. Nothing comes remotely close to fulfilling Finley Peter Dunne’s oft-cited maxim that good journalism is that which “comforts th’ afflicted [and] afflicts th’ comfortable.”2
From sea to shining sea: Journalism’s rocky shores
TOFINO AND UCLUELET are hardly alone in being dished up truly execrable fare when it comes to local “news” in Canada. They are two among hundreds of communities across the country that suffer the effects of getting news from one media monopoly or another. The Westerly News is one very small link in a chain of “some of the oldest, most trusted community newspapers in North America,” if you believe what you read on the website of Black Press, which claims to be the largest independently owned newspaper company in Canada. Its chairman, David (not Conrad) Black, bought his first newspaper in BC, the Williams Lake Tribune, in 1975. His company now owns 150 titles in BC, Alberta, Washington state, Hawaii, California, and Ohio.
What “elevates” (their word, not mine) Black Press titles is their “diversity” (ditto); their investment in “grass-roots journalism” (whatever that is) is carried out in “newsrooms with history dating back to the 1800s.” If that’s a tear of nostalgia threatening to break loose from the corner of your eye, wait till I tell you that, having become rich in inverse proportion to the impoverishment he has wished upon the journalistic quality of dozens of local newspapers a cross the West, Black also fashions himself as an emerging industrial mogul in the manner of his East Coast concomitants, the good family Irving.
Not content merely to make buckets of money (in 2013, the Financial Post estimated Black Press’s revenues to be more than half a billion dollars),3 Black announced in 2012 that he wants to build a multi-billion-dollar oil refinery in Kitimat, a port town in north-central BC that is already home to an Alcan aluminum smelter and a shuttered pulp mill, the town having been built in an era when environmental assets were routinely sacrificed for economic ones. Black correctly predicted that Enbridge’s poorly executed Northern Gateway pipeline project would founder, and certainly the 2015 election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government seemed to put the last nail in the Northern Gateway coffin when Trudeau vowed to ban tanker traffic of unrefined tar sands fuels from the West Coast.
Black claims his refinery plan is superior because it will ship refined product. He wants to diversify into the oil business because, as he says, “I am for creating thousands of good permanent jobs in BC. . . billions of new tax dollars for government coffers . . . r educing the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions . . . building an oil pipeline that will never leak . . . [and] building a new tanker fleet, owned by a BC company that cannot shirk its liability for a spill at sea, and that carries refined fuels that float and evaporate if spilled.”4 These goals have been freely expressed by Black and dutifully recorded in Kitimat’s Northern Sentinel newspaper and the nearby Terrace Standard, along with other northern papers. Both papers are owned by Black Press.
Although his claim that he can simultaneously refine Alberta bitumen and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions seems preposterous, it remains journalistically unexamined by two of his newspapers, although these papers did note that Black has since changed his mind and now champions rail over pipelines for getting crude to tidewater. “It’s safer and way easier,” he said.5 That claim, too, has gone unchallenged in newsrooms, historic or otherwise, populated by Black’s “grassroots” journalists.
SWITCH COASTS FOR a moment, and consider the case of J.D. Irving Limited, the sprawling New Brunswick conglomerate that, unlike David Black’s company, started out in the resource-extraction business and later moved into newspaper ownership. The Irvings have massive holdings in just about every walk of Atlantic Canada’s industrial life, and a stranglehold on East Coast journalism that once attracted the attention (and repelled the recommendations) of not one but two federal commissions of inquiry—the Davey Report (1970) and the Kent Commission (1981). The ownership concentration of Irving-owned Brunswick News was left unimpaired by Senator Keith Davey’s recommendation of passing legislation that would “require the break-up of regional monopolies, such as that of the Irving family in New Brunswick, by prohibiting the ownership of two or more newspapers having 75% or more of the circulation, in one language, in a defined geographical area.”6 Instead, Brunswick News today has 20 titles big and small, and boasts that “more than 60% of people in New Brunswick’s major cities read one of the publications” owned by the company.7 Good for them, you might say, but not so good for the citizens of New Brunswick, who are notoriously poorly served when it comes to anything approaching objective reporting about the biggest economic operator in the province—the owner of all its newspapers. “The newspapers shy away from covering internal divisions or leadership issues within the Irving family and companies,” Bruce Livesey wrote in Report on Business,8 then quoted Ken Langdon, a former publisher of one of the Irving papers, as saying, “The problem with the Irvings owning the papers is that none of that ever comes out.”
New Brunswick, which the Davey Report described as one of two “journalistic disaster areas” at the time (the other was Nova Scotia), was the subject of an episode of Jesse Brown’s cage-rattling podcast Canadaland in November 2014.9 “It’s like North Korea. It’s like the hermit province of New Brunswick,” Brown said. His show recounted a pretty thorough litany of all the ills you would expect of a powerful, rich, “notoriously secretive,” politically manipulative family monopoly. But it was an exchange from a later Canadaland episode that stood out for me. In February 2015, during a live broadcast from St. Thomas University in Fredericton, there was a panel discussion about a local