CP Rewired
Can a seventy-six-year-old news service make itself relevant to the newspapers of the nineties? Should it even try?
“If CP didn’t exist, we’d have to create it.” That’s the traditional view of fans of Canadian Press, Canada’s only national news-exchange cooperative. After 76 years in business, CP can certainly be called an institution in Canadian journalism. But in the newspaper world of the nineties, it’s threatening to become a misfit. CP is a […]
Journalism Inc.
The media once got to the bottom of things now they go only as far as the bottom line
It’s impossible to serve two masters at once-we have no lesser authority than the Bible for that-yet the news media try to do it every day. Working journalists like to think their primary role is to serve the public by letting it know what’s really going on. But the higher-ups, the media managers, have a […]
Selling the farm
The ad appeared on page 93 of Harrowsmith number 95, the first issue of 1991. It read: “A disposal concept 2 billion years in the making.” Atomic Energy of Canada had paid Telemedia Communications, owner of Harrowsmith, about $5,000 to advocate its plan to store nuclear waste in the Canadian Shield. In that same issue […]
Reflections on the Black Press
Left: After enduring six years as editor of the militant newspaper Contrast, Lorna Simms launched Dawn, a much softer, reassuring publication the staff of Contrast had just put the most recent issue of the weekly newspaper to bed. Editor Lorna Simms and production manager Paulette Grant completed the art boards and packed them into a […]
Hail and Farewell to the Whig
At least as we knew it
One day in September 1990 Neil Reynolds, the editor of The Whig~Standard of Kingston, Ontario, strode into the office of the publisher. Reynolds was an astute man and something had been bothering him for the last 10 days. Much as he had for 11 years as editor, he elected to share his concern with his […]
Issues First, Journalism Second
Spacing magazine's Spacing Votes blogged the Toronto civic election daily. The catch? Other than seasoned commentator John Lorinc, Matthew Blackett's “army of young guns” had little journalistic training
he Monday evening at Revival is growing old. It must be hot on the crowded platform, where the mayor and his interrogators exist in close quarters beneath stage lights and a Spacing sign. David Miller is taking a swig from his water bottle between questions, the sound of TTC chimes signals when his airtime is […]
