Even As The Newspaper Legacy Henry Burgoyne And His Family Built Is Being Celebrated, It Continues To Be Dismantled – Brick By Brick

A Commentary by Doug Draper

In a week when many in Niagara, Ontario have been mourning the death and celebrating the life of Henry Burgoyne – a person who was a great friend and supporter of community-based newspapers – we are witnessing another example of what happens when our family, independently-owned papers fall in to the hands of corporate chains.
This past February 7 – the very same day Henry passed away – Sun Media, owned by Quebecor, a corporation with a notorious reputation for wielding axes at newspapers, handed out walking papers to at least four more people at the St. Catharines Standard and 18 at the Welland Tribune.

It is apparently true that none of these people were directly involved in reporting or editing the news, but many of them were involved in the operating the presses and in other roles that make what was once called a “daily miracle” show up at your front door every morning or evening with things worth reading in it. Back at the time – more than a decade ago now – when Henry was still publisher of the St. Catharines newspaper his family built and nurtured for more than a hundred years, the people putting together the pages and working were often a reporter’s last line of defense when it came to producing a story that mattered to community readers.

I cannot begin to recount the number of times these people setting the pages of the paper up for printing – many of whom lived and worked in the community much longer than many of us younger types in the newsroom did, would catch us in everything from messing up the name of a street to missing out on contacting someone that would give the story we were working on more depth and meaning. They played an important role in the process of putting out the best newspaper possible for the communities we served because they and their families lived and worked in the communities we served.

Unlike the out-of-town corporations and shareholders that are now sucking the lifeblood out of these newspapers for profit, they had a stake in our communities.

Now more and more of the work these layout and press people, and even the editors and reports and columnists at your local newspapers were doing has been out-sourced to contractors in other regions of the province and country – to faceless mercenaries that do not live in our communities and have no real knowledge in them. I leave it up to you to consider what that means for what heart and soul is left or, further to the truth, has been lost in the pages of the newspapers now coming to your door.

In a front-age obituary that ran February 8 in The St. Catharines Standard, now-publisher Judy Bullis was quoted saying; “Henry Burgoyne represents the deep and wonderful history of newspapers. … He leaves a legacy.”

A few days later, when Bullis was contacted about the latest layoffs at The Standard and Tribune, she reportedly told one reporter; “We’re doing what every other responsible business is doing and that’s looking at efficiencies” – that comment channeled through her, from a Quebecor corporation that enjoyed a 19 per cent increase in profits for its shareholders last year and whose CEO, Pierre Karl Peladeau, doesn’t seem to mind donating millions of dollars (made on the backs of newsrooms he is sucking dry) to a controversial arena-building plan in Quebec.

It is likely that Bullis, being the good corporate minion she would have to be to keep her job at a paper owned by likes of Quebecor, was just mouthing talking points from headquarters, with all the jibber jabber about business plans and efficiencies. But in that jibber jabber grows the cancer newspapers and the role they can and should play in a healthy democracy.

The St. Catharines Standard and newspapers like them, once owned and managed by people who lived in the communities where the papers published, had an organic understanding that investing in new content was at least important as sucking up advertising revenue. In fact, they knew, and any advertisers who were smart knew, that if you wanted to produce a paper that was a page-turner in the sense that people might stumble across the ads, you needed to splash the pages with quality news content.

The Burgoynes and their peers at other family-owned newspapers across this country and continent instinctively knew that. These corporate morons who have taken over too many of these papers and run them as nothing more than a “business” rather than a sacred trust for the communities they are supposed to serve, do not.

(Visit Niagara At Large at http://www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary of interest and concern to residents in our greater Niagara region.)