I was astounded and dismayed by the loss of jobs and downsizing at the The Telegram, the daily newspaper in my hometown of St. John’s, Newfoundland, last week.
The newspaper, which had served Newfoundland’s capital city for 145 years, was recently bought by the Toronto-based Postmedia as part of that publishing company’s acquisition of the insolvent SaltWire Network Inc., as well as the Halifax Herald Ltd., which together formed Atlantic Canada's largest newspaper chain.
Postmedia announced that the company is cutting 30 per cent of The Telegram’s newsroom jobs, from 13 to nine, making the newspaper into a weekly meaning the entire province will not have a daily newspaper for the first time in almost a century and a half, and the newspaper’s long-standing printing plant, which was not part of the sale of The Telegram, will be shut down.
The loss of the printing press means, on top of about another dozen jobs lost for people that worked there for decades, that the now weekly newspaper will have to be printed outside of the province for the first time, along with a number of smaller publications in the province that used the printing press.
The newspaper was my inspiration to get involved in journalism in the first place.
I remember when I was in Grade 4 and my class visited the The Telegram’s newsroom and I was enthralled with all the activity there as more than 40 reporters and editors who worked in their large building at the time scampered around and banged out stories on their typewriters (this was the age before computers).
I had no idea what I wanted to be when I was older up to that time, but I found the newsroom so interesting that I decided, even at that young age, that I wanted to try to pursue a career in the news industry.
After I graduated high school, I went to university and received a degree with a double major in English and history, and then studied journalism at Ryerson Politechnical Institute in Toronto before heading back to Newfoundland where I worked as a reporter for a small weekly publication in the northern part of the province.
My whole plan was to get enough experience in the field so that I’d have a good enough resume to get my foot in the door at The Telegram in St. John’s and then I could settle down in my hometown with a decent job as a reporter and I would spend the rest of my life there.
But, despite my best efforts and frequent visits to talk to the editors at The Telegram, all I ever managed to achieve was to sell the newspaper a few freelance stories and promises that when (if) anything ever opened up, I would be considered for a position.
But jobs were scarce at the time in St. John’s and across the province, as they still are, and the reporters and editors at The Telegram held on to their positions at the newspaper as if their lives depended on it, which they did, so there was little turnover among the staff there.
In fact, a number of those who lost their jobs last week were working at the paper all those years ago and I have to wonder what they will do now after working so long at the newspaper with so few jobs in the industry available in St. John’s right now.
After many years of fruitless efforts to get a job at The Telegram, and working at any job that I could find in the city in the meantime, I finally decided to follow so many Newfoundlanders before me and head to the Mainland (which meant anywhere else in the rest of North America) to try my luck elsewhere.
I ended up on Vancouver Island where I also worked a number of jobs before I approached Peter Godfrey, the editor of the Nanaimo Daily News before he passed away in 2005, who saw my work and immediately hired me to be a weekend reporter, and after a month of that, he offered me a full-time job.
I was astonished, after many years trying so hard to get a position at The Telegram, how easy it was to get a job at a daily newspaper and wondered why I hadn’t moved west a long time before.
I stayed with that newspaper for 16 years before, like so many dailies across the country at the time, it was shut down and I was transferred to the Cowichan Valley Citizen, where I’ve spent the last eight years.
I’ve always enjoyed writing and doing my best to keep the community informed of what is going on around them, but the downsizing of The Telegram is yet another indication that the newspaper industry is in a ongoing period of transition.
It seems that more and more people are choosing to get their news(?) from other sources on the internet, but I have to question the integrity of many of those sites.
That's why we need real news.
