Desperate times call for desperate journalism.
Welcome back to the armchair mayor. I’m not speaking to all of my adoring fans so much as I’m speaking to myself. Every now and again I need to rant about the State of Things in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Often, I do it under the guise of any number of blogs I have littered the internet with. And then, every now and again – perhaps once a year or so – I do so under the guise of the Armchair Mayor. Today is that day.
This winter, The Halifax Chronicle Herald laid off one quarter of its newsroom. The last day of work for 24 or 25 reporters in Halifax was in early March – two or three weeks ago. And now we’re beginning to feel the effects. Subscribers to the Herald (myself included – I’m a 7-day-a-week reader of the paper version) are now being offered a pale imitation of what was landing on our porches and doorstops just a few months ago. The number of local stories and the number of bylines by actual Chronicle Herald staff (as opposed to Wire services) has drastically reduced. This past Monday, for instance, the Mail Star – the “local section” was predominantly obituaries and weather reports. This is sad.
Yes, this is sad.
What’s sad about it is that newspaper journalism is dying. Things are coming to an end in newspaper reporting: not just in Halifax, but across all of the western world. It especially hurts in regions such as Atlantic Canada, where the Chronicle Herald is (was?) the main information and news-gathering source. Other media outlets followed what the Herald discovered. The Herald may still be a leader, but the race is hardly as significant as it once was. I’m inclined to cancel my subscription due to the dearth of local reporting in the paper, but I have pangs of guilt at the thought of it, knowing that it would be one more micro-revenue source lost the paper, which may lead to less local news.
What is really, really, sad, though, is the manner in which the Chronicle Herald refuses to report on any of this. This has been the biggest news story in Nova Scotia this winter, and the paper won’t comment on it because it is a privately-owned family business and doesn’t have to make public its statements. All I’ve seen in the newspaper is a small business column several weeks ago talking about how the industry is bleeding and the paper is no exception. Instead, Haligonians must attempt to read between the lines in a Coast article that tried to speak to Herald ownership and management, who bickered and stalled and refused the whole time. And then, after the Coast article was published, they cried foul at the thought that their side of the story could not be heard.
Now, Herald editors are using Twitter to ruminate about non-profit media models, and are heaping scorn on the the Coast as yellow journalism, and and are “lavishing attention on the sailboat” when one quarter of their staff are now without employment. And it gets worse when the same editors then write columns for the paper telling Nova Scotians that they should care about CBC layoffs because it affects culture and reporting – without fairly conceding that the Herald done the same thing to the province this winter.
Sigh. I don’t have all the facts on this, I will admit. I don’t know what the financial statements at the Herald look like, and I don’t have a right to know, frankly. But I am bothered by the Herald’s pretenses in this mess. This company’s mission is to report – to provide the facts to its readers. But they’re not doing that. The reporters are not reporting, and the management are not talking. This can breed distrust between the organization and the community. I’m not a reporter, but I’m a pretty smart fellow, and I can cry foul at this one. There are many, many things wrong with this Herald situation, and Halifax and Nova Scotia isn’t hearing it. If the Herald really is the community paper and organization it claims to be, then it should be more open about what goes on its offices.
Armchair Mayor, Halifax 