The Hub asked Jake Doherty, former publisher of The Owen Sound Sun Times, Kingston Whig Standard and the Hamilton Spectator, about the changes in newspapers over his career. Parts One and Two here.
-by John (Jake) Doherty
The essential questions in South Africa then were more racial than religious but more lethal most certainly. And thus less open to visiting journalists. To get my visa application signed, I had to promise its ambassador to Canada that I was prepared to look at both sides of the apartheid policies that gave total control to the white minority with no black representation in government or its police and military.
To work around this, I constructed a template of crosshairs that ran west to east and another that went north to south. The first represented the importance of South Africa's pivotal position between western democracies and the then Soviet Union; in effect democracy versus communism. The second reflected the social justice issues championed by North American democracies (particularly Canada) and the totalitarian regimes in the southern hemisphere. Put together, did they represent the gun sight on a lethal weapon, or the cross of redemption?
My test came quite quickly after a brief stop in Kenya to visit aCanadian correspondent posted there by the company that owned The Spec. Southam Newspapers then had several foreign bureaus than all over the world. (Southam was later swallowed by Black's Hollinger and Osprey Media.) I arrived in Pretoria believing that all my first interviews had been pre-cleared by the South African Ambassador to Ottawa. Instead, I found that only one had been cleared, the national education minister. Luckily, he slid a major report on the disparities in education funding across his desk, not mentioning that it really was a bombshell. Black children, I recall, received only a small fraction of the annual budget.
That evening, my late wife Monique and I went to a movie, met an Afrikaans couple and were invited for drinks. When asked why I was in South Africa, I repeated what I had promised the ambassador in Ottawa. The gentleman seemed pleased, and when we returned to the hotel, the concierge passed along a teletype that all my appointments had been approved. Only later was I told that our room was bugged and that my new friend in the bar was a plant. The government even knew what movie we had chosen – Fort Apache The Bronx.
The point of this piece, however, is not that I can recall these stories, privileged to have seen see the world on behalf of our readers. Obviously the memories are lasting. But editors now don't have the resources to explore the world and become world-wise as my former boss would say. In retrospect, I'm grateful for the opportunity.
So, who's responsible for shrinking our newsrooms as revenues declined? In many respects, we all are, switching to television in great numbers and then the internet. I'm as guilty as anyone. I do try to read more than one news source, news junkie that I am and a political activist. My sources are wider than reading the Saint John paper on the living rug as a child but I am not a child now and wonder what we have lost, particularly the critical thinking. Too much information now seems pre-digested at times, just a click away. Too easy.
Yes, too easy for the Google generation, the all-everything internet site for instant research. Just one finger tap away that feeds, for free, on our few remaining newspapers and radio and television systems like the CBC, CTV, TVO etc., perhaps even Wicki.
I was both delighted and alarmed recently by the insights of a former Sun Times editor now with Post Media, Michael Den Tandt in a national series in the thick of our federal election campaign.
Thankfully, the Sun Times gave his work great space in the first section, warning that European countries such as Spain vainly tried to force Google to pay publishers for material it scoops up for free. Google replied by taking its service off line. Could it happen here and diminish our sense of an informed electorate? Thanks for caring Michael and Post Media.
