Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter
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The classroom, the newsroom and the road ahead
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It wasn’t quite time traveling, but returning to my alma mater to speak at the faculty club did have me feeling like it was 1986 all over again — especially with two of my former history professors in the room.
Nostalgia is a funny thing; it’s imbued with a sense of comfort while also tinged with sadness. Standing before a group of retired academics from a generation raised on newspapers — and who love reading the Free Press today — made 1986 feel even more appealing.
My time at the University of Winnipeg was long before algorithms dictated what we read, before the endless scroll of disinformation, before the industrial production of AI slop.
It was a time when a newspaper like the Free Press was a “cohesion machine,” as journalism professor Christopher Dornan noted in an essay of the same name. “A time when the media were the custodians of a less hysterical conversation; when almost everything we knew about where we lived and the world beyond came delivered to our doorstep in a physical package of paper and ink — a daily digest of information that set the metronome of what mattered. This was the 20th century, the Age of the Newspaper.”
As tempting as it was to keep reminiscing about the Age of the Newspaper, the retirees at my talk knew we had to get back to the future. So they asked what the Free Press is doing to secure that future, to ensure Manitobans will always have a trusted place to turn for reliable and reasonable information.
I walked them through our plans and our initiatives. I also made sure to spend some time talking about our efforts to connect the Free Press with students on campus at the University of Winnipeg as well as the University of Manitoba and Red River College Polytechnic.
For the past two years, we’ve provided free digital access to students for the length of their programs. We want the Free Press to be part of their education — and, we hope, something they’ll value enough to subscribe to after graduation, when they enter the workforce.
And perhaps, decades from now, some of those students will become professors themselves and express their affection for the Free Press to whoever has the privilege of helming this cohesion machine in 40 years.
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Paul Samyn, Editor
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ONE GREAT PHOTO
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