Niagara At Large Determined To Offer Independent, Alternative Media Voice

By Niagara At Large Publisher Doug Draper

“What’s the use of being a writer if you can’t irritate a great many people.”
– the late American writer Norman Mailer.

This August, while my family and I ventured out to the tip of Cape Cod to Provincetown, Massachusetts, we made a short pilgrimage to the grave of Norman Mailer.

Legendary American writer Norman Mailer's grave in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Photo by Doug Draper

Mailer, who died two years ago this coming November and who made P-Town his home for most of his Pulitzer Prize-writing years, remains one of my favourite commentators on so much of the madness I feel I’ve lived through during my short 59 years on this wonderful, mysterious and crazy planet.

Like him or not, Mailer was one of the most keen and courageous writers on the heroes and villains, and on so many of the good, bad and ugly events of our times. And yes, he did irritate a great many people.

Not that irritating people was Mailer’s sole goal. He was a far more multi-dimensional chronicler than that. The idea of irritating people, in my view, was Mailer’s take on that old line that one of the missions of a writer – especially those who call themselves journalists – should be to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’. And that is always what this journalist believes he or any other journalist worth their salt should do when it comes to those who are so comfortable in their positions of power, they have forgotten what it means to feel afflicted any more.

I embraced that belief in my earliest days as a reporter, going back more than 30 years ago now at The St. Catharines Standard in Niagara, Ontario when that newspaper – then independently owned by a local family, the Burgoynes – still cared about making honest, no-holes-barred news-gathering at least as much of a priority as gathering advertising revenue and chalking up ever higher profits.

Unfortunately, for everyone who -but gone in an age of chain-owned media corporations that place the interests of shareholders and advertisers above giving newsrooms the freedom and resources they need to deliver the depth of news the communities they work in deserve.

It is sad for those journalists still working in the mainstream media, it is sad for the communities they are trying to serve, and it is why I am out here today, working for nothing much more, at the moment, than a passion I feel that this region deserves something better when it comes to news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to our greater Niagara region.

Doug Draper at front gate of Norman Mailer's Cape Cod home.

I will tell it to you straight. I might still be at The St. Catharines Standard today, making more than $50,000 a year and enjoying more than 10 weeks of paid holidays and other benefits, if I had not voluntarily left that paper 12 years ago out of disgust. At that time  ‘His Lordship” Conrad Black, who until recently was ‘Prisoner #18330-424’ at an Orlando, Florida penal institution, was grand pupa of the Hollinger news chain that owned The Standard and sucked it and many of other community papers across this country all but dry of its newsroom resources. And why? To shove more profits into his and his shareholders’ pockets, and to rake off what was left of the spoils to prop up what was then his flagship paper, The National Post.

It is sickening to read, to this day, columns and letters to the editor from some of Black’s old sycophants and admirers in Canada, claiming he was a great trooper for newspapers and the news. That is nothing more than a steaming pile of manure. I wasn’t the only one  there, at ground zero, when Black and his minions were doing their number on once-fine newspapers like The Standard and it was clear to so many of us that newspapers meant no more to Black than a chain of car-wash outlets would if he thought he could make more money on them. And how disgusting is that!

Lest we forget, people in Canada and the United States fought and died over the past few hundred years for a free and open democracy that includes a vigorous press, unfettered by despots that might just as well include corporatists like Black, Quebecor and Sun Media and others that would rather lay off three more reporters covering your community to hire another ad salesperson.

So let me tell it to you straight again. I probably would have been fired by now, had I chosen to stay at The Standard, for my views on what a sad shell of its former self that paper and its sister chain papers, The Niagara Falls Review and Welland Tribune, have become. Those that are still there, in my view, either don’t care or are simply desperate to keep a job

That brings me to where I am today with Niagara At Large.

This online alternative is about trying to get back what we have lost when it comes to edgy, more indepth news and commentary in Niagara, and it is about taking it to a larger plain – meaning that we want to include the news and views of people on both sides of our Canada/U.S. border on matters of interest and concern to all of us who live here in our greater region.

 We are back now after a month-long rest. Please support us by visiting this site, by possibly contributing your own news and commentary to it, and by letting all of your friends and neighbours and associates know that we are here.

Some of what you read on Niagara At Large’ site  may irritate, but hopefully it will also inform and stimulate healthy debates on the challenges and opportunities facing our great region.

Thank You,  Doug Draper

(Click on Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to our greater binational Niagara region.)