In today’s media world, where the latest headlines are instantly accessible via computer or Blackberry-or while riding in an elevator, waiting for the subway, even pumping your gas-news has become a commodity: cheap, plentiful, easily accessible.
In such a world, it’s perhaps easy to overlook the longevity and influence of newspapers. But why no respect for a medium that reaches 78.5% of all people age 18-plus in the country’s top 10 markets each day and attracts nearly $3 billion in annual ad revenues?
Perhaps it’s ageism. After all, the Internet was but a mere glimmer in the eye of one of Al Gore’s ancestors when the first Canadian newspaper-the Halifax Gazette-was published in 1752.
By the time Marketing arrived on the scene in 1908, the industry was flourishing. Including (a pre-Confederation) Newfoundland, there were 130 dailies being produced across the nation: 95 evening papers, 24 morning papers and 11 publishing both morning and evening editions.
According to the Canadian Newspaper Association, Canadian newspaper circulation nearly doubled from 650,000 to more than 1.2 million between 1900 and 1911, and by 1938, the number of general interest daily newspapers had peaked at 138.
Toronto alone boasted six dailies at the time of Marketing’s inception-The Globe, the Mail and Empire and The World all published in the morning, while the News, Star and Telegram were evening papers. Toronto may have been an extreme example, but multi-paper markets certainly weren’t uncommon, with 43 nationwide.
A century later, the advent of free papers has led to similarly competitive newspaper markets across the country. Today’s Montrealers, for example, can choose from six publications in the country’s two official languages: Canwest’s English-language daily The Gazette, Gesca’s La Presse, Quebecor Media’s Journal de Montreal, the independent Le Devoir and the free dailies 24 heures and Métro. That’s not counting national dailies The Globe and Mail and National Post.
Today, the CNA lists 94 daily newspapers representing a variety of political beliefs and principles-which many of the older publications have adhered to since their inception. In the early 1900s, the Evening Star-the forerunner of the country’s largest daily, the Toronto Star-was known for its strong social conscience, a trait its descendant boasts to this day. Under the leadership of Joseph “Holy Joe” Atkinson-whose Atkinson Principles continue to guide the paper-the Star championed social causes like old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and health care.
Many times, the papers themselves made the news, as the Edmonton Journal did in 1938 when it became the first non-American newspaper to win a Pulitzer Prize-awarded for “public service” for its leadership in the defence of freedom of the press.
The saga began a year earlier, when the staunchly Conservative Journal squared off against Premier William Aberhart’s Social Credit government after it passed an act decreeing that newspapers be forced to carry a government rebuttal to any stories it deemed incorrect.
“Where then would be the liberty of the citizen to free expression of opinion? The press bill now before the legislature is a dictatorial challenge to every freedom-loving Canadian whose home is in Alberta,” thundered a front page story in the Journal, which fought the bill all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was ruled invalid on March 4, 1938.
That’s not to say the newspapers of the day, even including the altruistic Star, were above covering more sordid stories in their relentless pursuit of readers. In fact, their fondness for “yellow journalism” drew a pointed rebuke from Marketing in a 1914 editorial: “There is still too much of the ‘sensational’-the murder, the rape, the ‘down under’ stuff -in the columns of the daily press to go alongside good clean advertising.”
They may have been good and clean, but by today’s standards, the newspaper ads of the early 20th century were rudimentary, often crudely illustrated and prone to overwrought copy. “Did the howling blast sow the seed of sickness in your throat and lungs?” read an ad for Shiloh Cough Remedy below an image of people being assailed by a winter storm. And dubious claims were frequent. Beer maker Schlitz, for example, introduced its Schlitz Brown Bottle brand with the dire warning that “Any beer in light bottles is in danger of decay.”
And as the recent green and socially conscious marketing trends indicate, advertisers like nothing more than a good cause to rally around. In 1914, the outbreak of the First World War provided a perfect platform for marketers to espouse loyalty to the Dominion of Canada. An ad for Dawes Breweries of Montreal showed the name of its Knigsbier beer brand crossed out and replaced with Kingsbeer. “Are you doing your duty as a Canadian?” asked the accompanying text, sanctimoniously. The Gillette Safety Razor Company of Canada, meanwhile, introduced its new Gillette Bulldog razor as “British to the hilt.” To underscore the point, a picture of a British Bulldog was prominently displayed next to copy reading “For years we have been talking practical patriotism-urging Canadians to buy the Canadian-made Gillette Safety Razor in preference to cheap German makeshifts. The war has clinched our arguments.”
In the aftermath of the First World War, a wave of closures and consolidation gradually transformed the newspaper industry. In Toronto, the World was absorbed by the Mail and Empire, which itself merged with The Globe 15 years later. Most of today’s older papers have been treated almost like hot potatoes since their formation. Since 1908, for example, The Globe and Mail (including its forerunner, The Globe) has been variously owned by the Jaffray family (1888-1936), George McCullagh (1936-1952),R. Howard Webster (1952-1965), FP Publications (1965-1980), Thomson Newspapers (1980-2001) and, most recently, CTVglobemedia.
Others simply didn’t survive. A moment of silence, please, for, among others, the Vancouver Daily World (1888-1924), Edmonton Bulletin (1880-1951), Toronto Telegram (1876-1971) and the Winnipeg Tribune (1890-1980) . The most recent closure is the The Daily News in Halifax, shuttered by owner Transcontinental Media on Feb. 11 after operating for 24 years. It was replaced by another incarnation, the seventh, of the freebie Metro.
In Montreal, too, there was significant attrition among the English-language papers, with The Gazette ultimately prevailing. The Herald closed in 1957 after publishing for 146 years, while FP Publications’ Montreal Star -which consistently outsold The Gazette-couldn’t recover from a lengthy pressman’s strike that cost it $14.6 million and 50,000 readers. It closed in 1979 after publishing 110 years, prompting the headline “A Star is shorn” in Time magazine.
The trend towards consolidation/closures would continue through the 1940s and ’50s, hastened by the 1952 arrival of television-which would ultimately come to dominate the national advertising sector. By the 1970s, the Canadian newspaper industry was largely controlled by three companies: Southam, the oldest; Thomson, which specialized in small-market papers; and FP Publications.
Concern about continuing consolidation would ultimately lead the federal government to strike two committees to examine the newspaper industry-both of which were scathing in their assessments.
First came the Davey Committee in 1970, which accused publishers of embracing a “give-’em-as-little-as-possible syndrome”-reflected by a lack of journalistic resources and “a whole raft of decisions aimed at generating greater profits rather than a better newspaper.”
The report findings were characterized as “inaccurate” and “unfair” by Thomson head Ken Thomson, yet the Davey Committee’s concern that the three empires could become two in the face of continued economic pressures came to pass in the late 1970s, when Thomson purchased FP.
This, along with the subsequent closure of the Ottawa Journal and the Winnipeg Tribune led the government to strike the Kent Commission in 1981. The Kent report opened with the following words: “The Commission was born out of trauma and shock.”
In the 1980s, three chains (Quebecor, Gesca and Unimédia) controlled 90% of the French-language newspaper circulation, while three others (Southam, Thomson and the Sun group) shared two-thirds of the English-language circulation. The Kent Commission called for “serious corrective action” to remedy the situation, describing the phenomenon as “monstrous.” It recommended a series of measures including prohibiting the expansion of existing chains owning or controlling five or more daily newspapers, and prohibiting any future chain from acquiring more than five papers.
But while the dailies were grappling with issues of media concentration and competition from other media, a smaller, but no less vibrant, subset of the industry was flourishing. Indeed, community newspapers and farm publications have been a vital part of the newspaper landscape since the birth of the country itself.
The Canadian Community Newspaper Association was founded in 1919 as the Canadian Weekly Newspapers Association (CWNA) and today is an umbrella group for seven regional associations representing more than 700 publications with a combined circulation of more than 7 million. In a 1972 report, Marketing referred to community newspapers as a “vibrantly viable industry,” but also focused on what is still a familiar gripe among publishers of weekly newspapers-a lack of support by national advertisers.
“The connotation of weeklies in many ad agencies is of a Mickey Mouse type of operation,” lamented Inland Publishing head Doug “Dougie” Bassett in an interview with Marketing. “They spell it weakly, not weekly.” Bassett went on to point out that while total ad lineage for the nine papers belonging to the Inland Publishing Group increased 32% in 1971, only 870,000 of the 21 million lines sold came from national advertisers. The weekly industry has done much to bolster its image among advertisers in recent years, however, most notably with the 2002 introduction of the national ComBase readership study, which provides advertisers with audience numbers for community newspapers across the country.
But while ads are the financial lifeblood, at their heart newspapers are about stories, and perhaps none are more colourful than those of the frequently instense rivalries between the papers themselves. In Toronto, for example, the Star and Telegram were bitter rivals until the latter ceased publication after 95 years in 1971.
“The competition was intense,” recalled the Star’s executive editor, Mark Harrison, in the 2000 book Canada’s Newspaper Legend: The Story of J. Douglas MacFarlane, written by the iconic newsman’s son, Richard. “Our feeling was that the Tely would do anything for a story.” Then, apparently unable to put the rivalry behind him even years later, he added: “We whipped them more than they did us.”
In response to the Telegram’s 1971 closing, the Star took out an ad in Marketing’s Nov. 1 issue featuring a message from then-publisher Beland Honderich: “Fierce competition in the afternoon newspaper field has been a way of life for so many years at the Star that it will be strange to be the only afternoon paper,” it read. “In spite of this fact, Toronto is still a highly competitive community with two vigorous newspapers remaining.”
For all intents and purposes, the Telegram was reborn as the Toronto Sun shortly afterwards. But in an interview with Marketing the year after the Telegram’s demise, David Harrison, vice-president of media and broadcasting for MacLaren Advertising (and the current chair of PHD Canada) complained that the Star had grown “dull” and “arrogant” in the face of decreased competition. “I think that the Star’s lack of competition is not a good thing,” he said.
Meanwhile, upon the news that the Telegram was folding, the Globe launched what Marketing termed “an all-out attempt” to attract its readers, with ads on radio, transit cards, newspaper boxes and box cards-even in the Telegram itself. Though the Globe’s vice-president and general manager, Earle Richards, said at the time that his paper was asking readers to make a choice between his paper and the Star, the Sun would go on to be a worthy third daily in the competitive market.
The Sun was led by pugnacious founding editor Peter Worthington, a former foreign correspondent with the Telegram who boasted a significant claim to fame: He was an eyewitness to the 1963 assassination of JFK killer Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. “What remains fresh in my memory is the long, painful groan-“Oooh-ooh”-emitted by Oswald as he crumpled when Ruby surged from the crowd and fired his revolver into Oswald’s left side,” he wrote in a 2005 column.
In 1977, the Sun-with a circulation of 150,000 up from 60,000 in 1971-introduced the slogan, created by Toronto agency Pellow Ambrose Carr, with which it became synonymous: “The little paper that grew.” And grow it did, first expanding into Western Canada with the Edmonton Sun (1978) and Calgary Sun (1980) before moving into Ottawa and then Winnipeg.
More than 30 years after the hostilities ceased between the Star and Telegram, Toronto was again at the centre of a much larger and bloodier newspaper war that began with the October 1998 launch of Conrad Black’s National Post. Like the Sun before it, the newcomer was brash, antagonistic and a definite thorn in the side of established dailies such as The Globe and Mail.
The two papers took to lobbing insults in the trade press, and each report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations and the Newspaper Audience Databank produced a volley of boasting and creative number-spinning.
The new century also brought about yet another shift in newspaper ownership. The once formidable Thomson group retreated from the industry almost entirely (though it did retain an interest in The Globe and Mail), while multimedia groups like Canwest and Quebecor Media snapped up the former Southam and Sun Media Corp. properties respectively.
Recapping the newspaper industry in the 75th anniversary issue of Marketing in 1983, writer Rob Wilson wrote that the industry had successfully weathered all challenges that had come its way and was now embracing new technologies. “They’ve survived all their internal wars. Survived radio. Survived TV,” Wilson concluded.
The incursion of two more threats-the free dailies and, more significantly, the Internet was still more than a decade away at that point, although in a remarkably prescient column appearing in the Jan. 28, 1980 edition of Marketing, futurist Gordon Thompson, manager of communications for Bell-Northern Research, predicted that “personal portable telemail units” would enable consumers to get personalized news delivered directly to them.
“Looking ahead into the 1990s we will probably see a further expansion of the individualized electronic newsgram service where each of us gets our own specially-prepared digest of the world’s current happenings, tailored to our own interests,” Thompson wrote.
He may have been a decade off the mark, but he was right on the money.
