WE Still Stand Happy New Year Canadian Newspapers

[Ken Gigliotti]

 A Newspaper Story : We Still Stand in 2020 

An- Updated from a 2011 Holiday Message - Dedicated to the 148 Year Old  Winnipeg Free Press and our 90 plus paid dailies and various other precious print and picture media across this great country. Also Don Cherry makes a cameo appearance for an interesting historic equivalent.

We Still Stand.
Let us just celebrate that thought. We are all tired of encouraging feel good words from politicians and strategists and business leaders and especially from me. The short version of this long post is, those who came before gave everything to the business of journalism. It is your turn now. The decade is turning, It is the New Year. Congratulate yourselves,you are still standing, still writing, still photographing and still alive. Keep it going by any means necessary. In the year 2020 Journalism needs to see in 20/20.
If you think journalism can't change,it can, it is unfortunate that change occurs as a next to last resort. The HBO doc  Breslin and Hamil Deadline Artists looks at “new journalism” forced on New York city papers in the 1960's. It was said that the NY Times was no longer a local newspaper and the smaller competitors jumped into a fierce competition for local readers. The documentary outlines the reasons  and the method ,two outliers emerged  Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamel. They redefined “local,” wrote in an artistic impressionistic form, and they redefined story telling. When papers become too much alike they suffer in the marketplace. In this case the columnists led the charge. Today everyone is reading from the same songbook and readers are looking elsewhere. It is market forces and customer stimulants.
I think the isolated northern communities are the last frontier for Canadian papers, and postcards to and from the north might be a move towards reconciliation and understanding but the writers need to be authentic and true.
There are signals flashing and journalism has missed them and they still flash.Dispatches trading a day in the life a few paragraphs at a time and comparing big cities to small communities.


The newspaper business is said to be dying since the advent of radio,100 years ago,
and television gave us a good run too.
Today the friendly,unfriendly social internet is giving us a pretty good boot up the ass,
 a wake up call and a grave teaching moment to boot.


I have to admit I didn't see the whole Breslin Hamel doc until today when I watched it again. A Couple of things stand out as historical re-enactments. Trump is in the documentary and so is Nixon's playbook on dividing the public as a route to power. And the Don Cherry “you people,” incident repeated with Breslin and an uncomfortable similarity. Digging down it was the inability of his background and ego to apologize was mistaken for racism and a staking of claim of a new generation over the last and how a lifetime of controversy would be an undoing with a new mob in town. Breslin comes off like an Archie Bunker like character. Breslin would take on the mob in the early days of AIDS,support Civil Rights even helping to subdue Sirhan Sirhan after shooting Bobby Kennedy. Journalism is an expression of anger in that it always opposes power in it's simplest form, the anger turns  and turns eventually consuming in a complete circle.
 
The journalist becomes the power and the mob  turns against it. It is still only a mob but a different mob.The forest burns and a new forest grows. And it all repeats. Print Journalism will get another chance, living to fight another day. The destructive issues of the day have cover from a glowing seventy year perspective. The subsets of the last forty years are shocking and revealing. Journalism just hasn't seen it yet,but they will.Smart reporting will include a necessary context not seen in day to day incremental reporting. Be ready.This new generation of reporters will rise fast in what is left of the newspaper business,they will bring their experience living in the digital wake and their experiences now will lead them back to the common person approach to reporting. This new group will be the next common person living fresh within this narrative. The old guard has built wealth in ways the present group cannot and therefore they are blinded to the intimate present.

And yet we still stand.
Still standing in 2020,
the long projected extinction date for Canadian Newspapers.
It said so on the internet. A factoid. Something said so often it is taken as a fact.
And yet,Still we stand

We felt profound human loss with our readers during WW1,

We roared in the Twenties,

Ate dust and sounded warning bells in the 1930's ,

We walked proudly and courageously ,

carrying typewriters and cameras through the second world war.

We withstood the next new media of television in the 1950's.
There was the Cold War, and above ground radiation from atomic bombs past over our pastures. And a there was also a cultural “shaking all over” Chuck Berry, Elvis,Beatles and Stones.
Devil Music.
And still , we stand .

We saw peace and prosperity, and grew healthily with our readers .

Our business is connected, from the forest to the front step. We are in the business of business . Trees, chemicals, paper, trucking, commerce, information and delivery, all move in a continuous thread. There is no apology for that. Canada was building and so were we.

We were at one time connected directly to nearly every working person and child .

The paper with once ,segregated sections, the woman's page, men's page sports, and colour comics for kids. The paper has evolved continuously from it's first edition.

Thousands of children delivered it across the continent, re-booting back with tens of thousands of new starts a year. Street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood. Primitive and healthy systems connected and renewed young to old and back again to reading.
These connections would begin to be broken with our customers, the smartphone and the “office of the future,” and “personal brand”would break the close personal connections within our newsrooms.

Our readers knew us personally, we created good will and made a difference. The newspaper was literally the first “laptop.” Writers, photographers, sellers of space all traveled the streets , events, shops and neighborhoods. There were vendors on street corners and kids at the doorstep to get to know our customers. The long history of the evening paper and re-plates would come to an end. The online product would actually recreate the feeling of evening paper,covering same day news.

Chain ownership took hold ,
Then slowly and unexpectedly things went completely off the tracks.

We found places like Vimy,Ypres, Anzio, Inchon, Khe Sanh, Srebrenicia, Mogadishu, Darfur, the Medak Pocket, the Swat Valley and Kandahar on world maps for our subscribers .

We told stories,cracked jokes,spun yarns,repeated lies,and found deep meanings to the fluid events of the day.

Like many, we totally missed the 1960's.
By the late 1970's our national chains were being investigated for poor journalism ,operation of newsrooms,and anti trust issues. There was the fall of Communism,then “Greed was Good,”and later the Credit Crisis. Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman rocked on with Rick Neufeld singing  Moody Manitoba Morning .
Loved the words of John Kennedy, Barack Obama and Sunny Ways of Justin Trudeau.

By morning's light,We were fooled by Haley's Comet,Y2k, H1N1,“weapons of mass destruction, confused by a good speech writer,fake news” Facebook, Teflon and cardboard candidates and in 2016, Brexit and Donald Trump.
Y2K the Internets first fake news event in the first minute of the new millennium. The problem fixed well before,but still a good story till 12:01 midnight.
Fake news would become a thing by 2016. Fine words were suspect without a plausible time line. People longed to be great again, and for others to just do their jobs and they voted in protest. And media missed those voices somehow. The crowds did not register with a half blind point of view. We are better now. It made us better. We can now see, sometimes with both eyes without corrective lens, that can start anytime. If the public broadcaster can see nearly 20/20 in 2020 the rest will fallow.

We don't laugh too hard, but our worst trait is enthusiastically threatening future fear. Only to be outdone by fighting actual wars. The Middle East would be set on fire, with Gulf War 1 then GW2,The invasion of Iraq,bombing of Libya, the Arab Spring unrest inspired food prices,and by social media, the Syrian revolution then beaten back with bullets. Globalism and liberalism are now being questioned. Millions flee or migrate. The poorest excuse for journalism was a the confused explanations of global warming, green house gas, then climate change and methane, now adding human induced  and rising ocean temperatures and deadlines. Extinction being the key word only a whisper. 
Newspapers were reeling by then,still smart but shouted down by 24 hour television news,
and yet we still stand.

Our hindsight always 20/20 and it makes us always brilliant. Predicting the future, not so much. We look for a “good story” and pick timely over timeless.

We are the ones that put news on the internet whether it is on our website or others .

We no longer compete with mainstream, we compete with everything in the world ,at the highest print and visual level.

We cannot be seen as “old media” in this world.

But,

We always tried to fix what was broken ,

We have lived and learned,won and lost. We ask questions and got answers.

We pushed boundaries both low and high.

We have been great, we have been bad, we will always strive to be better and there are no excuses. There will we no one to fill that void if we withdraw.
We merged and cloned media streams, and for the first time in our history we can react and deliver news as fast as TV and Radio.

We have taken “mainstream thought” as far as it can go . Change is needed and soon.

At our peril ,We have created a record of disconnected truths and combined it with a quantifiable measured attention span for the shortest of “best before dates.”

We have always been the parliamentary senate of media and Google might change that . We can also create a fast food “basic cable” or “a thousand channels” or stream versions of ourselves too.

Threatened,we can shrink,fragment,decline or amalgamate .

We will not disappear without a fight .
We still stand.

We have skills.
We are smart,smarter than we think,

smarter than we show.

We explained issues and reported facts.
We are brave, braver than we think.

We burned in the heat, soaked in the rain, froze in the cold and wind.

We prayed with a Pope,fallowed Kings and Queens,
We saw both Trudeau's and now three Mulroney's and both Ford's

We dined with the rich and the famous, and buried the unlucky .

We work hard at the things we do ,and we are good at it .
Our business still shrinks.

We cried with victims, celebrated with the victors , and raised money for the poor .

We welcomed political refugees, spoke up for immigrants and mourned the missing and murdered.

We heard those who could not be heard ,and for decades all media turned a blind eye to our own First Nation People and our farm roots .
Sadly and strongly we still stand.

We carried the fight and

Occasionally dropped the ball.
Many were lost just doing their jobs.

We have become desperate and eager to please.

Yet we always kept score, and always found ways to make things right. When we get it all right , there is nothing in the free world or any part of the world to compare.
Even though the world is getting less free,

We are continually trying to think things out.

When we were lost, we found ourselves again.

We exposed corruption and evil and gave comfort and closure.

We rise and fall, we dig and bury.

We are not East or West, left or right and yet we have at times been all that .We may be liberal but we consistently act conservative.

Our readers didn't think were are human and are always surprised to see us as real people . We are a company of people .

We heard Rolling Thunder,Enduring Freedom and withstood, wind storms, Desert Storms, the Great Depression, frequent recessions ,low grain prices, BSE, a 50's Flood ,the Flood of the Century , droughts, blizzards of 1966 and 97. We felt the ire and bluster of Brian Mulroney,Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Speaking of relentless there is  climate change and the silliest politics and the poorest leadership of the 2000's.

And we never forget. And yet we still stand.

The things that don't change or get worse make us irrelevant because we are not doing our job.

Journalism is presently at its highest point, but the things we don't understand would fill an ocean, and politics does not intersect every problem and we seek fair value for service.

Private and political communication specialists conspire against us, messages and access are restrictive, our methods are well known and their countermeasures are sophisticated and formidable. Name recognition and pandering and division take the place leadership. These are our biggest challenges .

 A new genre in news analysis is possible and very near, but one mainstream organization has to be strong and first, the rest will fallow.

The language of spin doctors and lawyers trying to stay attractive to voters has become inadequate and confusing to readers. If we ask politicians questions we will get political answers. We need to speak for ordinary people and widen our frames of reference.

Too many stories appear like ghosts from the past , repeating themselves over and over with every new wave of authors.
Our inward pathways are well worn by the usual suspects. There is a struggle within our present frame work to be relevant. We think less critically and more correctly to our detriment.

We have been battered and blooded along the way, and yet we still stand.
There is a leadership vacuum and we need to fill it.
There is a deficit of spirit and we can help with that.
There is anxiety and we can offer relief for that to.
There is fear and there needs to be strength and that we can offer that by example.

We are resilient because we have known the best people of our time. Bricks and mortar people ,strong and fast people who did not strive for ordinary. These extraordinary people survived scrutiny, and changed history in their favour. We knew them personally , and they changed our world. We knew their struggle and we saw the result of relentless courage and conviction to accomplish things thought to be impossible. They saw that change was needed .Opportunity knocked . None were perfect and not one of them started off striving to be, ordinary or “mainstream.”
Again we are threatened with another new, powerful but non-exclusive media. Our future is in our hands. The Game is“on” and we have to choose soon.

Married to our readers in good times and bad, through thick and thin, in hot and cold, in sickness and health,we are forever steady and true.

We have seen it all before.
Forever evolving, we start again into a brave and uncertain new world that owes us nothing, because we have already been paid in full.

Still here, still standing, still a struggle.

We lived it all in full, for 148 years and counting.
Dedicated to the Winnipeg Free Press and our precious print and picture media across this great country.

Happy Birthday, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year 2020.

k.gigliotti WFP photographer retired- an updated  Holiday Message  from- Jan.1 2011 updated Jan.1 2020