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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/04/2005 (7726 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DURING a large percentage of my 51 years, five months, three weeks, three days and 13 hours (Pacific Standard Time, and still counting) as a newspaperman, an air of self-mocking defeatism hung over the newsrooms of this nation and beyond.

We were dinosaurs. Cultural climate change would eventually destroy us, dry up print’s watering holes.

This television thing had come along. People explicitly stayed home to watch The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, and other favourites, even stayed up for CBC’s late news with Earl Cameron. No one was known to stay home to read The New York Times. Few knew what Marshall McLuhan was up to — millions seconded Goldie Hawn’s “Marshall McLuhan, what’re you doin’?” — but everyone knew he was up to no good regarding print’s future. Newspapers were buggy-whip makers in an age of space vehicles on the moon.

So why the hell have three free-distribution commuter newspapers been frenziedly launched — within less than a month — in Vancouver, in the ear of our Lord Black 2005?

Because there’s money in free. The three new kids on the block are competing for advertising money with the four established dailies available in the area: The Vancouver Sun and The Province, and two national dailies, the Globe and Mail and the National Post.

A circulation war looms. Expect casualties. Andeen Pitt, vice-president, media, for an advertising company, understatedly told the weekly Business in Vancouver: “They won’t all survive.”

Still, at the very least, McLuhan’s obsequies for the newspaper as an institution appear as premature as the famous reports about Mark Twain’s death. It’s true that newspapers in most markets have been decorously losing circulation for years, hedging their bets by entering the world of the web. But their core business survives, due to much more eye appeal, new technology, clever marketing, targeted readership, energetic promotions, and tightened costs. They ridded themselves of most of the craft unions that stubbornly delayed, or ate up the economies of, the change from hot metal to the genteel click of the computer.

Back to the money. Surely a choice of four English-language dailies — print overload — was enough? Not as long as any jingle was left in a single pocket.

Allegedly, Vancouver is prosperous. The publishers of the new papers sized up the situation and — as in Montreal and Toronto — sniffed an untapped or under-tapped market that existing papers, despite relentless efforts, weren’t reaching: the golden demographic of the 18-to-34 age group, especially women, and mostly commuters.

First on the track was Metro Vancouver. For a tabloid, the inaugural issues looked quite sober and almost disappointingly reliable. It claimed a remarkable distribution of 145,000, in 2,500 signature-green boxes.

Then, 24 Hours materialized with more colour and sharper layout, including on almost every page a boxed vertical column headed “Briefly”, containing two-sentence ‘storoids’. Quick reads, indeed, but (hardened journalists would have to concede) textbook examples of tight writing.

The third paper is the strangely named Dose. It’s more nakedly aimed at the low end of the demographic — “Oral sex OK for ninth graders,” a headline in its first issue declared. Yet reverently stripped across the top of pages throughout were quotes from Pope John Paul II, one reading “On same-sex marriage: ‘A new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden.’ ” We live in interesting times.

I scientifically tested first-day reception of 24 Hours. Strategically placed in a restaurant overlooking one of its orange boxes in the downtown core, I watched fascinated for 40 minutes as indifferent persons passed by. At last, one man, wearing a tie and scarcely the image of the young non-reader that the new papers strive to reach (and to hook for the rest of their reading lives), removed a copy.

But then a man at the next table, having first studied the Globe business section, idly began reading 24 Hours. And read. And read. Clearly more than the five-minute-max read dismissively attributed to commuter freebies by fans of “real” newspapers.

Most wondrous is the tangle of ownerships. Metro is a venture of Swedish-based Metro International S.A., Torstar Corp. of Toronto, and Winnipeg’s CanWest. It’s printed by the Black Press Group — not his lordship, but Victoria-based publisher David Black, a considerable presence in his own right. Its stories are by its own staff, Torstar, Reuters, and, to add to the corporate mix, Corus radio station CKNW, “top dog” in Vancouver.

This gets interesting: 24 Hours is published jointly by Sun Media Corp., owned by Quebec powerhouse Quebecor, and — surprise entrant — Jim Pattison, raised in working-class east-end Vancouver and today on the world’s billionaire list. Mr. Pattison owns a magazine distributor, a chatter of radio stations, car dealerships, the grocery chain Save-on-Foods, and much more, and is not known for investing giddily, or losing his money lightly. (It’s early days, but almost every ad in 24 Hours is for Pattison companies.)

Most deliciously, the president of his news group is former New Democratic Party premier Glen Clark. Mr. Pattison, with a keen eye for talent of any persuasion, gave Mr. Clark a job after his bruising reign, and Mr. Clark worked his way up the ranks.

It is a wickedly funny turn of the wheel of fortune. As premier, Mr. Clark had withering opinions of the media and once singled out The Vancouver Sun as elitist and out of touch with ordinary people. This led the paper’s editorial board to banter about dressing elegantly for an upcoming meeting with him. Only one member, however, was silly enough to actually don a tuxedo and wave a gold pocket watch before the premier’s bemused eyes.

Mr. Clark may now enjoy eating his revenge cold by snapping, more insolently than painfully, at the Sun‘s heels.

The third entrant, Dose, is published by CanWest alone (in Vancouver and four other cities). Yes, CanWest, which is also a partner in competing Metro. And which also owns the Sun, The Province and a host of suburban Vancouver papers, as well as the Victoria Times Colonist and Global Television, a heavy player in Vancouver and Victoria.

Initial reaction to the three papers was not universally warm. A panellist on Bill Good’s popular CKNW program deplored: “We’re fighting a war on ignorance, and these aren’t our allies.” One caller vowed that he’d never buy The Province again and scorned CanWest’s Sun/Province monopoly — in fairness, begun by Southam — as having “way too much control” over what Vancouverites read. A woman aged 44 drily noted that she was thus “no longer targeted” by the newcomers.

For my part, looking at that list of media moguls, some in fierce competition elsewhere but in genial partnerships here, I have an equally genial question:

What would we in the media be saying if, for example, General Motors, Ford and DaimlerChrysler similarly got into a fluffy Vancouver bed together?

Trevor Lautens, a retired Vancouver Sun

editorial board member and columnist,

lives in West Vancouver, B.C.