

By Darren Atwater for The Tyee

During a short visit to my hometown of Vancouver, I did something most Vancouverites rarely do — I read the two daily papers, the Sun and the Province.

These two papers were once unusual in Canada in that they were both owned by the same company, with combined back offices but adversarial newsrooms. However, last year the papers’ latest owner, Postmedia, combined the two newsrooms with one editor-in-chief, a scheme that was replicated in three other cities where the corporation owns two papers.

Sure, we all like the idea of daily newspapers battling it out every day, with hard-bitten journalists exposing corruption in pages printed by ink-stained craftspeople in the press hall and delivered by bright-eyed paper carriers to eager citizens.

Except that’s fantasy now. Delivery is by adults in cars, printing is by low-bid third-party printers, and the hard-bitten journalists have mostly taken their buy-outs.

Unlike many people, I’m not opposed to the combined newsroom. Combining the newsrooms was an opportunity to finally create two distinctive papers, assign stories based on the best person for the job and distinguish them by editing and by story focus. But rather than re-invent themselves, the Sun and the Province chose to create two newspapers that are essentially the same. Same articles, same bylines. No difference in point of view.


9. But but but… everything’s on the web now

Forget the web. If you are writing stories that mean something to people, they’ll walk over broken glass to get to them. They’ll even pay $1.25.

What they won’t pay for is stuff that they can get for free already. I’m not sure why this isn’t really understood, but the Sun and Province have page after page of stories that I have already read online. Not the exact same article, but the gist. I paid you for this — why are you insulting me?


And only paywall the stuff worth paying for. Paywalling the garbage doesn’t encourage newspaper sales — and why were you printing garbage in the first place?


Those nine points should cover it nicely, but I think I could conflate them all into one simple point: “give a fuck about what you’re printing.”



This story was first published by, and is republished here with the author’s permission.