Join us on a new journey for News and Commentary in the Greater Niagara Region

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.

I grew up loving newspapers and joined the St. Catharines Standard at a time when it was still a proud independent paper, owned by members of Burgoyne family who lived in this region and who therefore shared a real stake in the health and welfare of our region, and who founded the Standard more than a century ago because they too loved newspapers. And that is an essential point. The Burgoynes were enterprising people who could have earned wealth starting any other kind of business – a hardware store, foundry, etc. – but they loved printing words on paper and they ultimately came to love delivering to their community one real, honest-to-goodness newspaper that served the community they lived in and cared about well.

I was fortunate enough to be hired by these fine people when local, independently owned newspapers were still in their heyday. And for more than 15 years, I worked for the paper as a fulltime environment reporter – a position that is virtually unheard of at any smaller or medium size newspaper today. The Burgoyne publishers and the editors I worked for – most notably former managing editor Murray Thomson – believed that the issues I was reporting on around the contamination of our air and the waters of the Great Lakes, etc., were important enough that they sent me to meetings the Canada-U.S. International Joint Commission held on Great Lakes environment issues as far away as Montreal, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois. They once sent me to Europe to tour toxic waste facilities being held up as models of a toxic waste facility the province was pushing to build here in the West Lincoln farm fields of Niagara.

Investing in a reporter from a smaller to midsize paper on this continent to travel and cover those kinds of issues then was impressive, but not necessarily unheard of. But it is virtually beyond the realm of options for reporters at most newspapers today where the budgets for newsrooms have been raped to the bone by their current corporate chain masters.

Earlier this year, when Walter Cronkite, the legendary news broadcaster and former anchor for CBS News died, I re-read the memoirs he wrote a decade ago called ‘A Reporter’s Life’. In the final few pages of that book, he summed up what has gone wrong with our newspapers better than possibly I could as someone who directly experienced once-independent papers lose their soul under corporate control.

“The shame is that most of our newspapers…have passed from the hands of individual publishers to large chains,” said Cronkite. “These corporate behemoths are forced by their stockholders and the “get mind” mores of the nineties to seek constantly expanding profits. Adequate profits are obviously necessary to the survival of any institution, but stockholder green now demands super profits, and their ‘maximization.’ …

“Newspapers and broadcasters, insofar as journalism goes, are public services essential to the successful working of our democracy,” Cronkite continued. “It is a travesty that they should be required to pay off like any other stock-market investment….

“To play the downsizing game, the boards and their executives deny to their news managers enough funding to pay for the minimum coverage necessary to serve their consumers well. They reduce the amount of expensive newsprint available until editors do not have enough space for the news they need to cover. Good reporters, writers and editors are spread so thin that they cannot spend the necessary time developing the stories that the public needs and deserves. A more responsible press depends not upon individual journalists but upon more responsible owners. That is the real bottom line.”

But that doesn’t mean we have to settle for this bottom line.

Those of us who care about the role good news and commentary plays in a democracy and in the life of our communities need not give up. There may be ways, if we work hard enough at it, of getting some kind of an independent voice when it comes to meaningful and engaging news and commentary back

This online news and commentary site, Niagara at Large, is an one effort – and with your support and contributions we could succeed in becoming a model for using the “new media” to take back what corporate chains and their shareholders, that treat the news as nothing more than a “product” they wedge between ads, have ripped away from us.

I ended my career at the Standard more than 10 years ago when Conrad Black and Hollinger were doing their bit to gut that paper. It was heart wrenching to watch and I quit voluntarily. I was making more than $50,000 a year at the time and had more than eight weeks of paid holidays and full benefits. I gave all that and a job I once loved up because I simply couldn’t stand to see what was happening to a newsroom that was never perfect but, for the most part, tried to live and work in the spirit of Cronkite and other giants in the profession.

I begin this new journey with some passionate supporters with no income coming out of it, but with a belief that we have to do something as communities to get journalism, as a pillar of democracy, back. Thomas Jefferson once observed (and I paraphrase) that if he had to make a choice between government and newspapers in starting out a community, he would start with newspapers. I truly believe that.

Niagara At Large is an attempt to bring back a focus on news and commentary of interest and concern to our communities across the greater Niagara region.

Please join us by being a contributor to articles for this Niagara At Large site, or by offering your comments or tips on issues we should be focusing on.

Let’s do our best as people who live and work and care about our communities to make this site work as a vital source of news and debate for addressing the challenges we face together for building a healthier, more prosperous region for all of us.

Finally, I want to recognize all those out there – many of whom have been loyal readers of my stories and columns over the years – who have told me they have always preferred to read news and commentary on paper. They don’t know if they can ply that same interest online.

To those folks, I say that I would prefer to have it on paper too if you could do it. And I would gladly be part of a team that launched a new paper on paper if some kind philanthropist would grant us the millions of dollars it would take to pay for the printing, circulation and other infrastructure we would need to make it happen. But we are not likely to get that kind of support.

That leaves us with the wild and wonderful world of the internet to deal with. At least here, a group of dedicated people can make an effort to start a new source for information for our communities using some of the great software that is available for creating these sites out of offices in our basements.

Having said that, this is a new way to go for this reporter too. I’m ancient enough at this point that I was taught to type on an Underwood typewriter (and I still have one sitting on a desk next to me as a museum piece) and I entered a newsroom that was still using electric typewriters before converting to computers that were only a little more sophisticated than Etch-a-Sketch games by today’s standards.

But we’ve got to move on with the tools we have if we are going to take back the news from the corporate chains. We have got to move away from the status quo if we want to grow.

Late this November, I was back in Cape Cod, Massachusetts visiting friends for American Thanksgiving. While there, I took another run up to the tip of the Cape, to Provincetown, where I once again looked for the grave of one of America’s great writers, Norman Mailer, who lived in P-town and died two years ago. I have long had a quote from Mailer in my office that read; “What’s the use of being a writer if you can’t irritate a great many people.”

Not that I believe writing should necessarily be about irritating people. But I think I know what Mailer meant. He was talking about writing that provoked people a bit – that jolted them out of their usual thought patterns.

On Mailer’s white marble grave, there was chiseled a line by him that read like this “There is that law of life so cruel and so just that some must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.”

Whether we like it or not, nothing remains the same. So we are here now and if you have followed me to the bottom of this column, lets journey forward together and try to make Niagara At Large work as a new dynamic site for news and commentary for our region.

Doug Draper, publisher, reporter and columnists for Niagara At Large.