Swan song
I’ll never forget some advice that I received in 2005 from a sage of Canadian journalism.
It came immediately after I was promoted to editor of the Georgia Straight, a Vancouver alt-weekly.
“Keep your byline out there,” said Peter C. Newman, author of several bestselling books and former long-time editor of the Toronto Star and Maclean’s magazine.
Newman explained to me that editors are always eventually fired. And those who kept their bylines in the public eye found new jobs more quickly than those who didn’t.
I took that advice to heart. I was able to keep writing for the Georgia Straight for another 17 years thanks to a fleet of outstanding copyeditors and proofreaders working in the background. They made writers like me appear smarter than we actually were.
Martin Dunphy, Pat Ryffrank, Brian Lynch, John Lucas, Amanda Growe, Patty Jones, Steve Newton, Mike Usinger, Janet Smith, Gail Johnson, Craig Takeuchi, and Stephen Hui are among those who performed janitorial work on my articles, cleaning up the syntax, grammar, and spelling of words and names.
On September 27, I was finally fired as editor of the Georgia Straight. My employer, Vancouver Free Press, also terminated all the remaining staff. It was explained to me that this was a “liquidation” in connection with the bankruptcy of the parent company, Media Central Corporation.
Because I kept my byline out there, I’ve been approached by people who might want to work with me in the future. We’ll see where these discussions lead.
The buyer of the Georgia Straight, Overstory Media Group, did not fire me. I’ve explained this in many direct messages to well-wishers. I’ve also mentioned this in responses to a couple of erroneous tweets.
I don’t know what arrangements Overstory Media Group had with Vancouver Free Press. I don’t know how much Overstory Media Group paid for the Georgia Straight name, website, social media accounts, and trademarks. I don’t know what conditions were attached to this transaction. But I do know that it was an “asset sale”.
I have not signed a nondisclosure agreement.
I tip my hat to the Media Central debtholders’ representative, Wei Lin, for spending monumental amounts of his time to ensure that the Georgia Straight will remain a part of Vancouver. It could have very easily perished, given the financial circumstances this summer.
Some of my former colleagues are upset that they’re going to have to fight for severance, vacation pay, and compensation for unpaid work. I wish them the very best.
I will say this: of all the potential buyers, I believe that Overstory Media Group was probably the best for-profit media company to take the Georgia Straight into the future. I’ll explain why later in this article.
Here’s the back story leading up to the sale, which many readers might already know.
The Georgia Straight suffered an enormous hit after it was bought by a Toronto company in March of 2020. The CEO at the time made some brutally damaging comments and took actions in response to COVID-19 that led to costly litigation with long-term employees, including the company’s most successful marketing representative.
Meanwhile, some revenues that used to go to the Georgia Straight in Vancouver before the pandemic ended up supporting the parent company in Toronto. The parent company did not pursue crowd funding, nor did it secure money from any foundations that support journalism.
In the face of this, I soldiered on, often taking on tasks performed by laid-off former employees. The Georgia Straight survived for two-and-a-half years but a large wrongful-dismissal award and the end of the federal wage subsidy sealed the fate of Vancouver Free Press.
I never had more freedom at the Georgia Straight than from November 2020 until this summer. The happy times ended with the wrongful-dismissal award. On the day of the decision, I told the judge that if he ruled in the plaintiff’s favour, a whole bunch of employees were going to lose their jobs. That’s precisely what happened.
It didn’t help that major public-sector organizations with significant marketing budgets gave the Georgia Straight no support over many years. Vancouver Coastal Health, B.C. Hydro, and ICBC are just three examples. The City of Vancouver forked over $80,000 to Glacier Media in 2021 and nothing to Vancouver Free Press.
No wonder the paper went broke. This lack of institutional support over the years is another factor behind employees being left with no severance or vacation pay.
Three pillars of the Straight
The Georgia Straight was created in 1967 with three major objectives. One was highlighting the folly of the Vietnam War and “sticking it to the man”.
In the early years, the Georgia Straight also focused tremendous attention on environmental issues. In addition, it played an important role in building a more cohesive arts community in Vancouver.
From 1970 to 1975, the Georgia Straight had the first LGBT columnist in Canada—Kevin McKeown.
The cofounder, publisher, and long-term owner, Dan McLeod, had a keen interest in international issues, which were covered from an alternative perspective in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In later years, the Georgia Straight expanded its coverage to movies, food and drink, tech, and other areas. The paper’s greatest editor might have been Charles Campbell, who hired me in 1994.
Those three cornerstones—sticking it to the man, covering the environment, and promoting the arts—remained a part of the Georgia Straight through much of its history. They were certainly in place when I joined the company.
As the editor, I tried to stick to this vision, including covering international issues from an alternative perspective, and I do not feel that the editorial department lost its way. It certainly lost resources for a bunch of reasons, including the rise of marketing vehicles like Facebook and Talk Shop Media, but those underlying objectives remained in place.
I tried to ensure that the Georgia Straight continued focusing on the climate. We also highlighted the genuine causes of rising home prices, which sharply escalated after the 2010 Winter Olympics. The real estate coverage sometimes alienated many long-time readers because they had bought into the notion that money smuggled out of China was the primary factor driving up costs. Articles by Ng Weng Hoong and Travis Lupick—as well as a recent provincial inquiry—questioned that assumption.
For running these pieces challenging the conventional wisdom on housing and countering racist narratives, I was regularly pilloried over social media. But it did not deter me.
We also got clobbered by the mainstream media when we ran a controversial piece about former Vanoc CEO John Furlong in 2012. Among those who helmed one-sided stories in support of Furlong was former CTV National News anchor Lisa LaFlamme.
We only published the original article after the writer, Laura Robinson, had secured affidavits from eight Indigenous people sharing their experiences of attending a Catholic day school in Burns Lake. She said she could get more. I thought eight affidavits would be sufficient for the story. In retrospect, I should have sent Laura back to Burns Lake to collect more sworn statements.
One of the Georgia Straight’s important contributions in recent years was elevating awareness about the overdose crisis. Lupick led the coverage in this area, ably assisted by photojournalist Amanda Siebert. Those articles set the stage for more great work by journalists in the mainstream media, but it was Lupick who lit the spark.
In the past year, I wrote many articles about the provincial government’s lacklustre response to COVID-19. I did this because very few B.C. journalists were bothering to read scientific literature on the subject, particularly regarding aerosols, airborne transmission, and the effects of the virus on the immune system.
Someone had to point out that the government was practising ableism of the worst type with its COVID-19 policies. I felt it was necessary to let readers know that B.C.’s human rights commissioner has the power to do more than write letters and issue reports about ableism. Under the Human Rights Code, she can order a provincial inquiry, which she has refused to do.
One B.C. journalist who has done an exceptional job covering COVID-19 has been Brishti Basu at Victoria-based Capital Daily. The managing editor of Capital Daily is Jimmy Thomson, who’s an outstanding environmental journalist.
Capital Daily is owned by Overstory Media Group.
Another Overstory Media Group publication is Vancouver Tech Journal. I’ve long been a fan of its founder, William Johnson, whom I featured in the Georgia Straight’s Best of Vancouver issue last year.
I was a subscriber to another Overstory Media Group publication, the Burnaby Beacon, until my email account at the Georgia Straight was cancelled. The small staff at the Burnaby Beacon are working their butts off to compete with the Burnaby Now, which is owned by Glacier Media Group.
In light of what I’ve seen at Capital Daily, Burnaby Beacon, and Vancouver Tech Journal, there are grounds for believing that Overstory Media Group might indeed restore the Georgia Straight. It’s an uphill battle, though, because there is no shortage of public relations firms eager to cannibalize the publication’s revenues.
I’m also encouraged by the appointment of Steve Smysnuik as the publisher of the Georgia Straight. Steve interned at the paper many years ago and he impressed me with his intellect, writing skills, and work ethic. He’s a good fit for the Georgia Straight. Steve has told me that he wants to retain a news section.
Would I prefer that the Georgia Straight had fallen into the hands of Postmedia, Daily Hive, Narcity, Glacier Media, or the hoary Globe and Mail, which might have put it behind a paywall? Absolutely not.
But let’s not kid ourselves. I was never the owner of the Georgia Straight and it didn’t matter what I or other employees thought when it came to its sale.
I want to emphasize that nobody owes me a job and I certainly don’t see myself as a victim after getting 28 years of work at the freest decent-sized publication in Canada. I’m a very lucky man.
That said, I certainly wish that Overstory Media Group hires my former colleagues. They’re very talented. I also think that had any of those other companies bought the assets of Vancouver Free Press, we still would have been fired and forced to make a case for being rehired.
In the meantime, local competitors of Overstory Media Group have good reason to be worried about its growing footprint in community news. If you read articles on these competitors’ websites trashing Overstory Media Group, consider the source and the possible motivations. The media has more than its share of savvy marketers who craft narratives for a living or use social media as a battering ram. Frankly, I’m sick of it.
This is a long, rambling post, but I felt that it probably needed to be said after the social-media swarming of Overstory Media Group following Vancouver Free Press’s mass firing of employees. I’ve been in the midst of many social-media swarmings over the years. They’re rarely pleasant but like a thundershower, they pass quickly.
Here are some of the things that I’ll be keeping an eye on going forward.
1. Will Overstory leave my articles about COVID-19, David Eby, and Kevin Falcon on the Georgia Straight website?
2. Will Overstory keep Laura Robinson’s landmark 2012 article about John Furlong on the Georgia Straight website for the benefit of historians of the future?
3. Will Overstory resist any temptation to merge with Glacier Media, which owns community papers across the western part of Metro Vancouver?
At this stage, I’m guessing that the answer will turn out to be “yes” to all three of these questions. If I’m right, I am entirely comfortable with ending my tenure as editor of the Georgia Straight.
I don’t expect it will be the same in the future. Some things will improve but it’s also conceivable that there will be less of a damn-the-torpedoes approach to covering provincial political leaders. I doubt that the next incarnation of the Straight will be as concerned about the rise of Hindutva extremism in India. I focused considerable attention on that because no one else in the Canadian media made this a priority.
The Georgia Straight was Dan McLeod’s gift to Vancouver and I was its editorial custodian in recent years. I’m really looking forward to seeing what the next generation of journalists with Overstory will do with the Georgia Straight in the years to come. It has the potential to be really great with a sufficient financial backstop and far more advertising support from large public-sector organizations.
And to the next editor, here’s my sole piece of advice: Keep your byline out there. Because one day, inevitably, you too will be fired.
To my friends out there, I’m happy, healthy, and looking forward to taking on new challenges. For me, life is good. Please save your sympathies for those who are truly suffering in society.