By Doug Draper
“What a long strange trip it’s been,” wrote the late San Francisco songwriter Jerry Garcia of Greateful Dead fame.
Doug Draper on the job in the early years before newspapers were gobbled up by corporate chains.
What a long strange trip it has been, indeed!
Garcia and his band mates penned those lyrics nine years before I began my first job in journalism at the St. Catharines Standard in 1979. That was 30 years ago when good newspapers were still a vital force in our communities in so far as we felt we needed to spend some of our day reading through them before deciding who to vote for in the next election or whether to participate in a public meeting over taxes or a proposal for new development down the street. Now we are witnessing too many of those papers die a slow and undignified death thanks, in no small part, to the greed and lack of interest in good journalism of the corporate chains that have taken so many of them over. Continue reading
