Source : maikins.com

Canada is losing its independent newspapers. Kingston already has.

The story of how Canada's leading small-town paper became just another link in a chain.

Published in Diatribe Magazine, April 2006 Issue, p 8-11.

Saturday readers of the Kingston Whig-Standard will open their paper to find the Ticket, a weekly offering of a lightweight fare of movie and album reviews, gossipy advice columns, and syndicated travel articles. About half of it is taken up by the TV guide and event listings. The Ticket is the Whig's effort to reach a younger, trendier crowd.

Twenty years ago, readers of the Whig's Saturday edition were confronted by a very different supplement: the Whig-Standard Magazine, a weekly feature replete with in-depth book reviews, long idea pieces, and hard-hitting investigative journalism – all of which were entirely locally-produced.

The contrast between the two supplements is indicative of a deeper change at the Whig. Throughout the eighties, the Whig was known as one the top newspapers in Canada—and the top small town paper—competing with the big city dailies for Canadian journalism's top prizes.

From 1978 to 1990, under the stewardship of owner and publisher Michael Davies and editor-in-chief Neil Reynolds, the Whig won eight National Newspaper Awards, four National Magazine Awards, three Nathan Cohen Awards for dramatic criticism, and two Michener Awards for public service journalism. A July 7, 1986 Toronto Star article, entitled "Kingston's Little Paper Not Afraid of the Big Stories," noted that the Whig "has won more major media awards than any newspaper of its size, and many larger, in the country."

The Whig stood out during this period not only because of the quality of its content, but by virtue of the fact that it was one of Canada's few remaining independently-owned daily newspapers. Owned since the 1920's by the Davies, a local Kingston family, the Whig was a relic of earlier times when community newspapers were community-owned.

"You had this kind of paternalistic ownership in the Davies family," says Maureen Garvie, who worked as the Magazine's literary editor during the eighties. These days, she works at the Queen's University Writing Centre. Garvie has fond memories of her time at the Whig. "We were very well respected," she says. "Our little paper had a national reputation."

But the Whig's days as an independent paper were numbered. Shifts in the newspaper industry and rising competition from giants like Torstar convinced Davies that he no longer had the resources to fund the Whig. On August 26, 1990, he sold the Whig to Southam, one of Canada's largest newspaper chains. Within two years Reynolds would leave, and the Whig would undergo a series of cutbacks at the hands of its new owner. Today, the Whig's newsroom is about half the size it was at the end of the eighties, and its circulation has dropped by 35%.

"It was a fool's paradise," Garvie says.

The Whig's heyday.

"Did she say that?" Harvey Schachter laughs when I mention Garvie's phrase to him. "It was a fool's paradise. Oh, it was wonderful. We were all like kids, we were playing journalism."

Schachter worked in the Whig's newsroom as a senior editor for fifteen years. He was brought there by Reynolds in late 1978, soon after Reynolds had assumed command. Schachter had worked in the same Toronto Star newsroom where Davies, in search of big-city journalist who could rejuvenate the Whig, had found in Reynolds the editor he was looking for.

"The Whig then [in 1978] was kind of ordinary," Schachter says. "The reason that Michael Davies made Neil editor was that [Davies] was tired of the criticisms and wanted to be publisher of a better paper."

Neil Reynolds stands at the centre of the Whig's success during the eighties. Even from his bare biographical details one gleans a sense of an extraordinary, iconoclastic figure: the son of a Free Methodist preacher, a socialist-turned-libertarian who once made a quixotic run at Parliament as leader of the National Libertarian Party, a long-time journalist, and the editor-in-chief at various points of the Ottawa Citizen, Saint John Telegraph, Vancouver Sun, and of course, Kingston Whig-Standard. Those who worked with Reynolds describe him with a kind of reverence, including his publisher Davies.

"It was like having a tiger by the tail," Davies tells me, chuckling.

"He was an amazing, charismatic visionary," Schachter says of Reynolds. "Clearly the great editor of Canada for the past twenty-five years because he went on to success everywhere else. Nobody has been associated with as many award-winning projects as him."

The first time I hear Reynolds' voice over the phone, I have to keep from laughing out loud, for it's the same deep, gravely voice I've heard mimicked with remarkable accuracy by former Whig staffers over the course of various anecdotes.

"There's no question that it was a remarkable time at the Whig-Standard," says Reynolds." We were pretty young, we were gung-ho, we had a great publisher. I've worked for a lot of publishers and all newspaper publishers have aspirations for quality, but I think Michael Davies, more than any other publisher, gave us the means and the support, the money, to really reach as far as we could. So a lot of things came together at that time and that place."

"It was kind of a dream team," Garvie says of Davies and Reynolds. "Michael put up the money, Neil put up the ideas, and there was a huge staff."

Reynolds notes that the Whig's plentiful staffing allowed him to assign specific beats, such as the university, the prison system, or the courts, to his reporters, something generally only done at big-city papers. "Our reach into the community was superb," says Reynolds. "At a time even then when many papers were losing readers, we were gaining readers. I think that newspapers do have to judge themselves by a market test, which is can you keep people reading it? The Whig-Standard had 40,000 circulation [at its peak] during this period. We were there at its pinnacle."

He tells me that his tenure at the Whig remains his proudest accomplishment: "That's my epitaph: I was editor of the Whig-Standard."

The Whig's bulging newsroom also meant that some reporters were free to disengage themselves from the hectic pursuit of daily news in order to focus on longer-term projects. During Reynold's tenure, the Whig often produced remarkable works of investigative journalism, from Sylvia Wright's 1978 exposé of how a US aluminium plant was polluting the Akwesasne native reserve on Cornwall Island, to Anne Kershaw's moving 1989 piece "Rock a Bye Baby," which told the tragic tale of the abuse, self-mutilation, and suicide of young woman who had spent most of her life in the prison system. Kershaw's piece won two National Magazine Awards and a National Newspaper Award, and later evolved into a book of the same title.

The Whig's willingness to literally go the distance in its reporting led to its most famous story: a series of articles written in 1985 about five Russian deserters held by the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, during the time of the Soviet invasion. The Canadian government had promised to help the Russians emigrate as refugees to Canada, but, due to bureaucratic red-tape and logistical difficulties, had not delivered on the promise. The Whig flew reporter David Prosser and photographer Jack Chiang to Peshawar, Pakistan, where they snuck across the border—with Chiang donning a woman's veiled chador in order to hide his Asian features—and met with the five Russian prisoners. The resulting story, which ran in news outlets across the country, helped pressure the Canadian government into saving the Russians.

"That was a case of where in order to fully write a local story, we had to go to Afghanistan," Reynolds explains. "The minister of external affairs at the time was Flora McDonald, who represented Kingston, and Flora McDonald had made a speech in which she promised that Canada would help retrieve these people."

Though the Whig's coverage often extended far beyond the confines of Kingston, Reynolds always sought to maintain a local perspective. "We dealt with national issues, of course," he says, "but we always dealt with them locally – it was the local debate about the national or international issue." He saw the Whig as means of connecting the Kingston community to a wider web of ideas and issues. "I wanted the paper to be the centre of discussion in town," he explains. "So I think that we had a lot of success in taking intellectual ideas, political, philosophical ideas, trends, issues, all those things, and then writing about them and debating them at a level that a lot of the community could share in. Not elitist, but definitely idea-oriented."

Nothing better exemplified the Whig's unusual blend of the intellectual and the community-oriented than its Saturday magazine, which featured classical music reviews, short fiction, and long, in-depth—even ponderous—articles with titles like "Religion in the age of psychology" and "Mission to Ethiopia." Its book section, renowned for its literary acumen, was voted the best in the country in a 1987-88 Writers Union of Canada survey.

The magazine's content was entirely locally-produced and drew on a variety of community resources, from the expertise of local university professors to the colour print by a local artist that adorned the cover of each issue. "The cover was enormously important to the local arts community," says Garvie.

Schachter emphasizes that the Whig's success was dependent on Davies' willingness to fund it. "It could not have been done without the financial resources," he says. "[Davies] developed a sort of premium pricing strategy in the sense that the Whig was more expensive to buy than a small town newspaper would be. There was a period of time when we were more expensive than the [Toronto] Star or the Globe. And that, plus some pretty good advertising revenues, allowed the paper to have a larger newsroom."

"The rough rule of thumb in the business is that your newsroom staff should be 1/1000 of your circulation," says Schachter. "That formula is pretty standard in the industry and the Whig had at its height around fifty-seven people, something like that. We were nearing sixty, and on a 38,000 circulation it should have been thirty eight, so chalk that up to the premium pricing and a publisher who was committed to quality."

"I was prepared to invest in the newsroom," says Davies. "I wanted to run a good newspaper."

The Times they are a-changing.

But while the Whig maintained its exceptional quality and local ownership throughout the eighties and remained, in an important sense, unchanged, the Canadian newspaper industry was changing rapidly.

The role that newspapers played in people's lives was decreasing; the popularization of television and the rise of cable news networks meant that newspapers were finding it harder and harder to provide breaking news first. According to the Canadian Newspaper Association, from 1981 to 1996 average daily newspaper circulation dropped by almost 2%, while during the same period the Canadian population grew by 18%. The rise of television was particularly difficult for afternoon dailies like the Whig. "It was hard for the Whig to come out in the afternoon and compete with the Globe and the Star and television which all arrived in the morning and told people the same news," recounts Schachter.

The big newspaper chains had also tightened their hold on the market. These giant companies had the capital available to take advantage of technological changes like colour printing and computerised typeset. Davies was concerned that, as an individual owner, he did not have the same resources.

"I was trying to look into the future," Davies recalls, "and all of a sudden I didn't like what I saw."

Most worrying were changes in the advertising strategies of the department stores and retail outlets, who made up the bulk of the Whig's advertising sales. "It was a whole change, starting in the seventies, of concentration of retail outlets," says Davies. "Instead of having ten or twelve large independent stores in your community, you ended up with Sears." Chain outlets like Sears began to switch to flyer, or ‘pre-press' advertising that would be inserted into the newspaper instead of being printed inside. The Whig began to face increasing competition for this sort of advertising from home delivery services and weekly ‘community newspapers' or ‘shoppers' like Kingston This Week, which was bought in the eighties by newspaper chain Torstar. Quebec giant Power Corporation owned several local TV and radio stations.

"He saw himself up against the big guys," Schachter says of Davies. He recalls the first intimations of financial pressures at the paper. The only time that Davies ever spoke to him about money was about a year before the sale of the paper: "He showed us charts about how our spending was through the eighties: we would get a budget each year and Neil would overspend the budget, and he would get an increase in his budget the next year based on the overspending. Michael had this beautiful series of charts showing exactly that and he said: ‘It now ends. You have to keep in line with your budget.'"

By the end of the eighties Davies had decided to sell the Whig. The paper was then at its height, with a national reputation, a circulation that was just under 40,000 (it had briefly broken 40,000 in 1988), and a solid financial situation. "I think it would have been very, very hard for Michael not to have sold it at that time," says Reynolds, "at the very peak of its value and worth as an economic entity."

Davies found a buyer in Southam News, which was at the time one of Canada's largest chain. On October 26th, 1990, the top headline of the Whig read: "THE WHIG-STANDARD IS SOLD TO SOUTHAM."

"I am a firm believer in the free market system and the condition of the current market in the Kingston area has persuaded me that the owner of the Whig-Standard needs more resources than I possess in order to keep the Whig-Standard financially healthy into twenty-first century," read Davies' front-page editorial.

Schachter remembers the shocked expressions of his colleagues in the newsroom that day. I ask him if he felt betrayed by Davies' decision. "No, not betrayed but stunned," he replies. He laughs bitterly. "I don't think I realised what was coming." Did he feel any trepidation? "Not the kind of trepidation that I probably should have had," he says.

Initially there was hope that the Whig was in good hands with Southam, a newspaper chain that had been known for its hands-off approach towards its papers. "In those days the Southam papers were more like independent fiefdoms," Schachter says.

But, like the Whig, Southam was an anachronism under siege. The newspaper chain was an anomaly in an industry characterized by top-down centralization. When the back-to-back recessions of the early nineties hit, Southam's financial situation worsened rapidly. In 1991 Southam lost $153 million on revenues of $1.2 billion; in 1992, Southam lost $263 million.

Faced with a cost-cutting publisher, Reynolds left the Whig in May of 1992. "The Whig was a gem of a newspaper," he says. "Southam bought it because it wanted the gem, but then, as all corporate things unfold, the desire to maximize profit from that paper over time became more a dominant impulse than their pride at owning a gem of a newspaper. That's the difference between an individual and conglomerate – nobody in a chain of newspapers is going to think that any one small-town paper is really that important, are they?"

After Reynolds' departure, Schachter was made editor-in-chief of the Whig. Schachter maintains that he enjoyed his time with Southam. Still, he saw it as a "troubled company" undergoing fundamental upheaval. "Southam had traditionally been a very delegatory chain," Schachter says. "Certainly there were people who no longer saw that approach as sustainable, people who thought they needed centralization."

During this period St. Clair Balfour, Southam's ailing patriarch, was trying desperately to keep two circling wolves at bay: Conrad Black and Paul Desmarais, the respective owners of media giants Hollinger and Power Corporation. Back in 1985, Balfour, in an attempt to stave off hostile takeovers, had cut a deal with Torstar whereby the two companies exchanged large blocks of shares in order to form a voting trust. This move was challenged as anti-competitive by the Federal Competition Bureau, and in 1990 the trust was forcibly dissolved. In 1993, eager to acquire the Southam papers, Black bought out Torstar's 25% stake in Southam. Desmarais, hungry for the same prize, attempted to outmanoeuvre Black by buying original Southam family's shares.

But neither tycoon was able to best the other, and in late 1993, Power Corp. and Hollinger cut a deal, jointly becoming Southam's largest shareholder. By 1996, Hollinger would buy out Power Corp., giving Black majority ownership of Southam, a chain he once famously described to the Globe and Mail in 1993 as a "rusticated diaspora" through which "soft, envious, leftist pap flowed like sludge."

Back in the Whig's ‘rustic' newsroom, Schachter was feeling the squeeze. "After Southam bought it, the recession was getting heavy, and circulation went off of a cliff," he recalls, "I mean we went down about fifteen-hundred papers in a summer and people were quitting, they said, because of the price, and I remember that the circulation manager who had been around for years said that they never gave that reason before. It was always ‘you're a lousy paper, you're this, you're that', but they never gave price as a reason." From its peak in of 40,000 in 1988, the Whig's circulation would drop steadily throughout the nineties, eventually reaching its current figure of 26,000.

"When you're in a recession," Schachter tells me, "and the paper's losing money, I think everybody is less concerned with discussions about journalism and more with stopping the red ink." Near the end of 1992, the Whig Magazine, so often a source of pride at the Whig, was cut, and replaced with the Companion, a more cost-conscious supplement that relied fairly heavily on wire-service articles. Garvie was made co-editor of the Companion.

"We had a really limited budget," she says. She recalls the whole process as agonising. "It was humiliating to hear people say ‘what's going on at the Whig?' There was a real sense of violation in the community while this was going on. People felt like they owned the newspaper, but they didn't. Somebody could take it away from them."

In September 1993, Southam re-launched the Whig in a new, "light and lean," more colourful format. Around this time, the Whig abandoned its premium pricing strategy. Schachter had a sense of what was coming next. "I called the managers together," Schachter recalls, "by then we were about forty people in the newsroom. I said: ‘I want you to plan for us to lose six to eight people in the next year. I haven't been told that's going to happen, it may not happen, but it just stands to reason that at some point we're going to become the one-per-thousand and we're going be thirty-three people."

The irony was that a few months later, on February 1, Southam would hit the one-per-thousand standard by firing most of the Whig's senior editors, including Garvie and Schachter. I ask Schachter how he feels about the incident. He pauses, and then begins slowly: "I was trying to take the Whig to a new place. I didn't know where that was, and I knew it couldn't be like it was in the eighties, and I was extraordinarily disappointed that I didn't get a chance to finish a job that I thought was my mission."

The Whig today

The Whig is now owned by a publicly traded company, Osprey Media, which, with its twenty-one newspapers, owns the most dailies in Canada. There's no doubt that the Whig has changed since the eighties, if only in staffing and circulation. Its weekly circulation is around 26,000, and there are twenty-nine people in its newsroom, putting the Whig's staffing level just above the one-per-thousand rule. It does still wins National Newspaper Awards: three in the past twelve years, though they were all in the ‘Local Reporting' category, which was created in 1997 for small town papers.

Its local coverage is also spread considerably thinner than it used to be. Christina Spencer, the Whig's current editor, explains there simply aren't enough reporters in the newsroom to assign more than two full-time beats. "We don't really have the luxury," she says. "We've got a full-time court reporter, we have a full-time city hall reporter, but even our police reporter doesn't do it full-time, he does many, many different things."

The Companion was replaced last year by the Ticket, which offers a slew of articles on movies, television shows, and bands. About half of the Ticket is taken up by TV and event listings. You won't find local artwork on the cover, though you might find some local talent – the cover of the first issue of the Ticket featured a photo of Avril Lavigne.

Fred Laflamme, the Whig's current publisher, explains to me that the Ticket was created in the hopes of drawing in a younger crowd. "It's a much younger, much hipper product than the one that it replaced," says Laflamme. He's proud of the Whig's current financial health. "We had record year in 2005, it was the best year in the history of the newspaper," Laflamme says, "and we're 168 years old or something. No matter how you measure it, suffice to say that for the Whig 2005 was its best year ever."

Spencer tells me that she thinks the Whig is a better paper now than it was in the eighties. "I think it's actually more well-written in terms of the language and of the literary style of its writing," she says. "I think it is probably more accurate than it may have been in its past."

Spencer denies feeling pressure from Osprey to keep costs down. "If you're asking me whether I feel financial pressure, no I don't," she says.

Her newsroom, however, seems to see things differently. Since April 15th, the Whig's reporters have been withholding their bylines in protest of what they perceive as anti-union tactics on the part of Osprey. Debbie Newton, president of the Kingston Typographical Union, explains that the union is currently in bargaining with Osprey. "[The reporters] felt the language that is being proposed would allow the company to use more and more freelancers," Newton says, "so they see that as an erosion of the newsroom."

Spencer declined to comment on the bylines issue, on the grounds that the bargaining process was still underway.

While the details of the Whig's story might be exceptional, its basic plotline is not. Canada's independently-owned newspapers are nearly extinct. A 2003 Senate report noted that 5 out of the 102 dailies in Canada are independently-owned, and that together they accounted for only 0.9% of total daily newspaper circulation.

It was not always this way. Prior to the First World War, there were 138 daily newspapers – and 138 publishers. In 1935, there were 89 dailies and 57 publishers. By 1969, with the chains accounting for 66% of daily circulation, there was enough public concern over the concentration of ownership that the Senate established a special commission on the matter.

The commission argued that "this country should no longer tolerate a situation where the public interest, in so vital a field as information, is dependent on the greed or goodwill of an extremely privileged group of businessmen." Its recommendations led to the establishment of Canada's first press councils, but little was done to halt the growth of the chains.

Over a decade later, the Royal Commission on Newspapers was set up by the Trudeau government, partially in response to the events of "Black Wednesday," August 26th, 1980, on which Thomson closed the Ottawa Journal and Southam closed the Winnipeg Tribune, giving each other monopolies in their respective local markets.

The recommendations of the Royal Commission were more radical than those of the Davey Commission: the commission's report, named after its chairman, Tom Kent, proposed legislation that would force the big chains to divest themselves of certain papers, and that also would set limits on further ownership concentration. The Kent Report was denounced on the editorial pages of newspapers across the country as an infringement on the freedom of the press. The Trudeau government did propose a watered-down version of the recommended legislation, but later dropped the bill in the face of vociferous opposition.

"We predicted that unless the government took the sort of action that we were recommending, the concentration of the media, the papers and broadcast, would get worse, would increase," says Kent, now a fellow at the Policy Studies department at Queen's University. "And of course it did so, very much so. On the whole the quality of journalism in Canada declined because of it."

Kent sees the problem of newspaper ownership concentration as being twofold. Firstly, there is the concern that newspapers owner will use the monopoly over media outlets to influence editorial content. "There's no question, for example," Kent says, "that [Conrad] Black gave instructions to individual papers as to what they put in and what editorial lines they took." The second concern is that, given the monopolies that most small-town papers enjoy, profit-maximizing chains will coast by on a low calibre of journalism. "To run a good newspaper you got to be prepared to spend rather more than you absolutely need to," says Kent, "given the limited competition in order to sell the paper and advertising."

However, it is not simply ‘chains' that are profit-maximizing, but businesses in general. And newspapers are, in the end, businesses.

"You've got to remember," Laflamme tells me, when I bring up the subject of the Whig in the eighties, "that when the newspaper was sixty people, it was losing money. At what point do you say that you're putting out a great product, but you can't continue to do it because you're losing money?"

Kent argues that journalism is not simply another product, like copper or sneakers. "It's the essence of a free, democratic society that people have access to plentiful, diverse news and opinion," he says.

But perhaps the best test of journalism really is what Reynolds called "the market test." And this raises an important question: can the Whig's decline simply be traced to the financial logic of big business? Or, given the Whig's sharp circulation decline, have the readers themselves voted with their dollars? With a plethora of online news sources now available at the click of a mouse, perhaps there's just no need for a small-town paper that seeks to connect its readers to a wider world of issues and ideas.

Laflamme makes it clear that he believes the Whig should limit its ambitions to covering local news. "That's why people buy us," he says. "They don't buy us for the stock reports; they don't buy us for what's happening in Ottawa. We're more local than anything else. We weren't always that way, but when I became publisher in 1996, the evidence was clear that we needed to be more local."

Still, Schachter sees something important being lost. "Maybe someone who's into stock car racing can filter out online what they want to see about car racing better than some editor could," he says. "There's certainly an argument there. But you do lose something shared when everyone goes off in their own direction. We used to share a lot more things in common."

Yet he has little optimism for a revival of the Whig as it was in the eighties. "Could the Whig's today have a premium pricing strategy?" Schachter muses. "Could it have forty people in the newsroom and put out a better newspaper? I personally don't think it could. I think it was a strategy that the eighties could handle but in this era, with so much on the internet for free, with people's time so crunched, with people not reading papers, I'm not convinced that that strategy could work today. And that's a shame."

It also seems unlikely that another benevolent publisher, more concerned with his or her local reputation than his or her bottom line, will come along anytime soon. Though Spencer points out to me that Osprey's CEO, Michael Sifton, lives just down the road Belleville, she is, in an important sense, wrong: Osprey's—and the Whig's—owners live all over the country, perhaps even all over the world. And they own their shares in Osprey for one reason: to make a profit on their investment.

Laflamme's job is to make sure they get it. "You have shareholders, in a public company, who expect to get a return on their investment, and typically they're looking for more than ten percent and quite often not less than fifteen percent," he says. "Otherwise, why would they give you the money? They could put it in the bank, or put it in IBM, in Bombardier, or Loblaws, or Tim Hortons."

For Reynolds, there's no sense in lamenting a bygone era. "I do think that the world lost something very, very rich when individual proprietorship disappeared," he tells me. "But that belonged to a period in our history that won't be repeated, there's no point in being nostalgic about it, it just used to exist, it doesn't any more, and people who are in the newspaper business are going to have to confront quality issues from a different perspective than they did in the past. In the old days, the owner of the paper lived in the community himself – that will never happen again. The urge for small city papers to have a great reputation will have to come from some source other than the pride of the owner."

© Matthieu Aikins

Matthieu Aikins is the winner of the 2008 Dalton Camp Award

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