All posts tagged Calgary Herald

‘Freddy Lee’ Morton, the journalistic sequel: We’ve already seen this horror movie, thanks!

by David Climenhaga on February 21, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics, Media with 3 Comments

Freddy Lee Morton, in happier times, with your blogger. Below: Firewaller Tom Flanagan; the entire separatist 2001 Firewall team (grabbed from the National Post).

Freddy Lee “Ted” Morton, the worst premier Alberta never had, was back in the pages of the Calgary Herald the other day, bloviating at length about the need for brutal attack on public service salaries because this province’s frequently fluctuating principal revenue source has gone and fluctuated again.

Alert readers will recall Dr. Morton describing himself as “every liberal’s nightmare, a right-winger with a PhD.” He was also the owner of the mysterious “Frederick Lee” semi-official government email account.

Later, Dr. Morton’s defiance as finance minister effectively brought down premier Ed Stelmach – setting himself up to succeed “Honest Ed” as the leader of the Progressive Conservatives and the premier of Alberta, or so he thought.

Dr. Morton first came to public attention back in the early Zeroes as the neoconservative University of Calgary professor and American-born Alberta independentiste who signed the Firewall Manifesto along with such other well-known Western separatists as Stephen “The Big Kahuna” Harper, Tom “I’m Feeling Manly” Flanagan and Ken “No Notes” Boessenkool.

Well, it’s nice to know that nowadays when Dr. Morton, PhD, is in semi-retirement, he can still pick up a little extra cash cobbling together completely predictable opinion pieces for the Calgary Herald, the newspaper lately known to its non-union employees as The Nightmare on 16th Street SE.

“Do we need another Klein-era five-per-cent wage rollback for the entire public sector?” asked Dr. Morton, rhetorically. “Probably. It would get the job done in a hurry, and it is less hurtful to families than massive layoffs.”

This would be especially true if the families in question were those of well-off, largely superannuated, public service double dippers (the Legislature and the University of Calgary) such as Dr. Morton, who is mostly out of danger of his own economic remedies. Mind you, Dr. Morton is still, according to the Herald, an “executive fellow” at the U of C’s School of Public Policy, where he is listed as teaching a single course, so there’s a small but worthwhile cut that could be made to save a few petro-shekels.

Well, Dr. Morton’s five-per-cent pay cut idea would get the job done in a hurry all right.

It’s a fight Alberta’s public service unions would almost certainly lose, but at least they’d have a chance of taking the double-talking government of Premier Alison Redford down with them, which would get Dr. Flanagan’s Wildrose government off to as easier start in 2016.

As for the health care professionals – specifically mentioned on the list of targets for wage cutting in Dr. Morton’s op/ed piece – they could move by the thousands to British Columbia and the United States, just as they did back when premier Ralph Klein last tried that stunt in the mid-1990s, leaving the Alberta health care system in a shambles from which it is yet to recover.

As a good friend of mine recently remarked, this is a person whose own government wouldn’t pass his anti-gay “religious freedom” Bill 208 in 2006, and whose Firewall Manifesto was chucked into the garbage can by Premier Klein in 2001.

His recent electoral record is similarly (un)impressive:

  • The Progressive Conservatives rejected him as their leader in 2006
  • They rejected him again as leader in 2011
  • The voters of his Foothills-Rocky View riding rejected him as their MLA in 2012

So why would anyone, even the Calgary Herald, be interested in Dr. Morton’s opinion now?

We’ve already seen this horror movie, thanks very much. It wasn’t very good the first time.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Who leaked Alberta’s budget details? And who plugged the leak?

by David Climenhaga on February 11, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Legislature, Alberta Politics, Media with 1 Comment

Some of the members of Alberta’s Treasury Board are pictured above. While not exactly as illustrated, they are all suspects in the leakage of budget details, in the office, with an email to the Calgary Herald. Below: Columnist Don Braid, detective Sherlock Holmes and Treasury Board President Doug Horner.

It’s a whodunit, a little like the one about the dog that didn’t bark.

Why didn’t the Calgary Herald create a huge front-page brouhaha when its columnist Don Braid ferreted out some pretty startling facts about Alberta’s March 7 budget?

Certainly, that’s what most newspapers would have done if their trusted political columnist had sufficient confidence to publish a story stating the government of Premier Alison Redford was about to bring down a budget with an “operating deficit” of about $300 million. Alert readers will recall that just months ago the very same government had vowed no such thing would ever happen on its watch.

In fact, I could go farther. That’s what the Calgary Herald would have done back in the day when the premier’s office didn’t necessarily have its publisher on speed dial.

In the event, Mr. Braid’s oddly subdued column ran on Saturday morning as the so-called Alberta Economic Summit was about to kick off, but with no accompanying news story on the Herald’s front page and no follows or commentary in any other media on the significant discoveries the story outlined.

The information, Mr. Braid’s column indicated, came from within the Treasury Board, the powerful government committee headed by Finance Minister Doug Horner that oversees the civil service and most of the operations of the government.

But at least the column ran, which indicates that the Herald couldn’t question Mr. Braid’s reporting – even if the phone lines running from the premier’s communications staff to the editor’s and publisher’s offices were burning up Friday afternoon and evening.

It certainly would have been fun to have been a fly on the wall when the Herald’s august editors and managers met to decide what to do about Mr. Braid’s column and the no doubt clearly expressed wishes of the premier’s communicators that it not see the light of the next morning.

There may not have been sufficient details in Mr. Braid’s column to let the Opposition credibly call for the resignation of Mr. Horner as finance minister and president of Treasury Board, but there were certainly enough there to have the government launch a full-scale effort to relentlessly track down the leaker. Count on it that Mr. Horner was furious.

You may be sure the other 12 members of Treasury Board are none too happy to find themselves on their boss’s list of suspects, and officials in the board’s offices should brace themselves for a full-blown witch-hunt commencing this morning.

This must be an especially unhappy turn of events if your name, like that of Treasury Board Vice-Chair Kyle “Leaky” Fawcett, so obviously lends itself to a mean nickname!

The premier ended the summit with a news conference in which she tried to blow off Mr. Braid’s revelations, calling out the columnist by name and telling the passive gathering of reporters that the numbers were not from the budget and that was all she had to say about that.

Your blogger was not there, alas, not being paid to attend these things, but can report that no one else in the gathered press corps seems to have followed up with a pointed question.

I have known Mr. Braid for years, he is an excellent reporter and I have confidence in his facts. If his numbers are not from the budget, it’s only because the government has four weeks to recalibrate sufficiently.

As to the motive of the leaker, that remains a mystery. As has been previously reported here, Ms. Redford is sufficiently unpopular with elements of her own caucus to offer a possible explanation.

Meanwhile, a partial list of suspects – at least those who are members of Treasury Board – is reproduced below.

And the dog that didn’t bark? Readers will recall that Sherlock Holmes solved that mystery with the following observation: “Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”

Never mind the meaning of the curried mutton.

List of Alberta Treasury Board Members

Doug Horner, Spruce Grove-St. Albert – President
Kyle Fawcett, Calgary-Klein – Vice-Chair
Mike Allen, Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo
Wayne Drysdale, Grande Prairie-Wapiti
Doug Griffiths, Battle River-Wainwright
David Dorward, Edmonton-Gold Bar
Ric McIver, Calgary-Hays
Robin Campbell, West Yellowhead
Len Webber, Calgary-Foothills
Jeff Johnson, Athabasca-Sturgeon-Redwater
Cal Dallas, Red Deer-South
Donna Kennedy-Glans, Calgary-Varsity
Jonathan Denis, Calgary-Acadia

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Putting Christ back in Christmas: maybe Christians themselves need to ‘press reset’

by David Climenhaga on December 25, 2012 in Christianity, Economics with 10 Comments

Jesus, centre, separates the sheep from the goats. Don’t ask what happens to the goats. Below: St. Paul and modern Evangelical favourite Ayn Rand.

Today is Christmas, and thus an opportunity for many who think of themselves as adherents of the Christian faith to lecture everyone else sternly about the need to “put Christ back into Christmas.”

This is, after all, His birthday, they remind us – although, actually, it’s almost certainly not, but that doesn’t really matter as Dec. 25 stands in for it at a conveniently miserable time of year when European pagans would otherwise quite sensibly have gone on celebrating the imminent return of shorter and warmer days to their deeply chilled continent instead of the somewhat less imminent, as it turned out, return of their saviour.

Notwithstanding all that, the point of this particular little Christmas homily is that if Christians want to put Christ back into Christmas, an excellent place to start would be by paying attention to what Christ taught them – which seemingly nowadays has very little to do with the things that most concern a very large percentage of practicing Christians.

This is especially true of Evangelical Protestants – like the good people who raised me – who nowadays seem to be mostly focused on the Three Gs, with a side helping of Israel and the End Times. The Three Gs are, of course, Guns (they like ’em), Gays (they don’t) and Gifts (well, who doesn’t, eh?). By the way, unless you’re a black-helicopter conspiracist, Geometers and Geometry don’t come anywhere near this particular string of Gs.

However, as St. Paul (the saint, that is, not the city) most certainly didn’t say, the greatest of these is Gifts.

Indeed, so great is the last of the Three Gs, that some observers have theorized North America, and this would most certainly include its stubbornly secularist northern half, “is now firmly in the grip of a different religion: shopping.”

This fact, naturally, is the very thing that prompts annoyingly self-righteous Christians to decry consumerism and demand the immediate restoration of Christ to Christmas – especially if the Christian doing the decrying is the family patriarch (or, in possibly a majority households nowadays, the matriarch) contemplating the coming struggle to pay off the Visa bill.

But what, as we are constantly being asked by these same people in other circumstances, would Jesus say?

Depending, of course, on your view of the inerrancy of Scripture, we actually have a pretty good idea, since it was all taken down and (on at least one occasion) used against him in a court of law.

And so, speaking of courts, here’s an interesting commentary by Jesus himself (who most certainly was opposed to needless violence and never uttered a single word on the topic of homosexuality) on what the future holds – a commentary, it is said here, that should be attended to by followers of the Christian religion, in particular those who mix what they think of as their religious fundamentalism with economic market fundamentalism.

On the theory that what the adult Christ had to say is likely more relevant to how Christians ought to live than the story of the infant Jesus – which is bound to be reprinted anyway on the editorial page of the Calgary Herald, that old friend of values most associated nowadays with much of Christianity, such as narcissism, personal greed, intolerance and the absence of mercy – our text today comes instead from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25, starting at Verse 32.

“…And before him shall be gathered all nations; and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

“For I was an hungered and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger and ye took me in; Naked and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came unto me.”

And the righteous, on his right hand, sounding more than a little perplexed, respond with questions:

“Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? Or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

“And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. …”

If the righteous sound mildly surprised by all this, as if their reward were quite unexpected to them, perhaps this was because so many Christians have been taught by the actions and the words of their leaders that charity – and, it is said here, the extension of charity into earthly government – was of no consequence at all, or even a bad thing.

As for those on his left hand, the ones who failed to do their charitable work, I won’t trouble readers about what happened to them, save to say that Pastor Alan Hunsperger late of Alberta’s Wildrose Party would have understood their fate even if he were surprised by the sin that provoked it.

No, Jesus didn’t have anything good at all to say about the “virtue of selfishness,” which to hear a lot of Christians nowadays you’d think was part of the Gospel of Jesus, not the gospel of Ayn Rand. Rather, he taught us about the need to provide food and drink for the hungry, clothing to the poor, offer mercy to those in prison, and proper care to the sick. You know, like those social workers the late Ms. Rand, the atheistic market-fundamentalist avatar, held in such deep contempt.

Not incidentally, by the way, Jesus also instructed us to pay our taxes. (Matthew 22:21)

Jesus most certainly did not teach us that the accumulation of wealth was virtuous on its own merits or any signifier of favour in the eyes of God. Indeed, he said the opposite: “…It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24)

So if it’s rampant consumerism that bothers modern North American Christians, they ought to speak up about the corporations that encourage this behaviour and the right-wing governments that slavishly enable them, indeed, the whole capitalist system that depends on it.

Above all, if Christians want us to put Christ back into Christmas – where, arguably, he belongs – they need to start the process themselves by letting his teachings govern their actions.

If they won’t, who but Christians themselves can be blamed for the “war on Christmas”?

Happy Holidays!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

HMS Alberta Tory: All hands to damage control! Is Commodore Mar aboard?

by David Climenhaga on November 30, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Alison Redford, Calgary Herald with 5 Comments

The scene in the Alberta Legislature yesterday, with Premier Alison Redford at the centre of things. Actual Alberta politicians may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Gary Mar, Premier John Brownlee, Vivian MacMillan.

I suppose the question has to be asked: Is it too late for the Tories bring back Gary Mar?

Mr. Mar had his flaws. Give me a minute and I’ll see if I can remember what some of them were. Oh yeah, there was that payment to a former aide for doing nothing, or not much anyway, back when Mr. Mar was a member of Ralph Klein’s cabinet. Plus there was something about the way his fundraising letter to pay off his Tory leadership campaign last year mentioned his current job as Alberta’s trade “envoy” to Asia. However, an investigation by Alberta’s ethics commissioner cleared him of any problems connected to that one and Mr. Mar returned to Hong Kong after a brief suspension.

Mr. Mar didn’t sign no stinkin’ bazillion-dollar contract with his ex-spouse, that’s for sure! Of course, not having an ex-spouse was probably handy in that regard.

Well, neither did Alberta Premier Alison Redford, according to the stout defence she put up in the Alberta Legislature, but opposition parties of all stripes kept up the pressure on Ms. Redford yesterday. Everyone piled on and accused her of trying to lie her way out of the imbroglio caused by the CBC revelation Wednesday that she, or someone, had hired her ex-husband’s law firm for some litigation against Big Tobacco that could run up some pretty significant bills over the next few years.

The NDP called the Progressive Conservative argument that Ms. Redford was no longer justice minister when the decision was made nothing more than hair-splitting. Yesterday party leader Brian Mason demanded that the premier temporarily step down until an investigation by the ethics commissioner can be arranged.

Wildrose Opposition House Leader Rob Anderson called the affair “the biggest scandal in the premier’s office in history, period. Certainly in my lifetime.”

Alberta Diary respectfully disagrees. It is said here the business of what happened between Premier John Brownlee and Vivian MacMillan, his family friend and secretary, still holds that title. But in fairness to Mr. Anderson, he most certainly wasn’t born in 1934, when the action was begun against Premier Brownlee under the Alberta Seduction Act. (I’m not making that up.)

Mr. Brownlee, by the way, was found not to be liable for damages under the act, but his political career was in tatters by that time and he resigned in July 1934.

Alberta law doesn’t define doing deals with an ex-spouse as a conflict, and it’s far from clear from this vantage point whether the current premier did anything wrong at all. But count on it that no amount of damage control is likely to fix her reputation with Alberta voters any time soon.

And surely a lot of Mr. Mar’s plentiful former supporters – of whom there were many more than Ms. Redford had at the start of her leadership bid – must be muttering, “I told you so!” It’s hard to believe, at any rate, that an old hand like Mr. Mar could have been more inept in handling a revelation of this nature than Ms. Redford and her party insiders have been.

Alas for Mr. Mar’s well-known ambitions, it seems unlikely that the PC Party could ask him nicely to come back from Hong Kong now and get the ship of state back on course. No, expect this ship to continue drifting, trailing smoke and jetsam.

The opposition parties will persist in their demands for Ms. Redford’s resignation, of course, or at least for an investigation by the ethics commissioner. But they will be fervently praying nothing of the sort will happen.

No, they very much want the smell of this mess to be clinging to her and her party when the next Alberta general election rolls around in 2016, which suddenly looks a lot closer than it did even a week ago.

+ + +

The Calgary Herald started out in a tent at the junction of the Bow and Elbow rivers, but when I first worked there in the 1970s it was in a fine, marble-clad building at the corner of First Street and Seventh Avenue.

The Herald’s newsroom had a low ceiling, but was big enough to feel as if it belonged in a big city, which is what Cowtown strove to be and what the management of the Herald encouraged with evangelical fervour.

We all smoked at our desks, so the ceiling tiles were stained an unattractive yellow. Legend has it that when a crew was hired to clean them, one member was injured when he lifted out a ceiling tile over the News Desk and was hit on the head by the empty whisky bottle that slid out. Further investigation revealed hundreds of such dead soldiers scattered across the ceiling tiles above the more populous parts of the newsroom.

As I recall, there was a mild brouhaha about a year ago when it was announced that building was soon to be pulled down. Last time I was in Calgary, though, the old place was still standing.

In 1981, the Herald moved to a brick bunker in a depressing industrial section of the city’s east side. But the new newsroom there was a sight. The place was equipped with the latest in soon-to-be-obsolete technology, including a complex new vacuum tube system for moving paper stories from the newsroom to the pressroom. The ceilings were too high to store our empties, but the room was big enough to house the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

Now I hear the Herald has leased that massive newsroom to a payroll company and the staff must move into the old editorial library, which back in the day, appropriately enough, we knew as “the morgue.” Staff didn’t find out about it until someone saw a classified advert – on the Internet.

The move to the morgue is said to be only temporary. Next year they will move on again. One wonders if it will be to a tent. Alas, the old spot at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow is no longer available, since it was long ago zoned as a park.

How the mighty have fallen!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Brock Ketcham, 64, newsman and trade unionist; polite, positive and determined

by David Climenhaga on September 13, 2012 in Lives Lived with 5 Comments

Brock Ketcham, left, and the author on the picket line at the Calgary Herald, circa 2000.

My old brothers and sisters from the Calgary Herald strike will be saddened to learn of the death on Saturday of our dear comrade Brock Ketcham, a solid journalist, a sweet guy and an unlikely student of the sweet science. He was 64, less than a year shy of qualifying for a well-deserved retirement.

Precisely spoken, carefully dressed, sober of mien, unfailingly polite, perpetually upbeat, willing to pitch in and finish the rotten jobs that prima donnas disdain but that must nevertheless be done in a metropolitan daily newspaper’s newsroom, Edgar “Brock” Ketcham was the antithesis of the caricature of the 20th Century journalist that prevailed in the years he worked as a newsman.

But for all that Ketcham looked like a guy sent over from Central Casting to play the role of the straight man to the investigative journalist, he was no slouch when it came to doggedly pursuing major investigative stories wherever he worked in Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario. He was awarded the Governor General’s Award, the Roland Michener Award for Meritorious Public Service in Journalism, for his careful and thoughtful investigative work.

There may have been a couple of harder working newsroom journos around somewhere, but I never met them.

As a trade unionist, Ketcham was a rock, a guy who always wore a tie and a nice hat on the picket line, never spoke an unkind word to a scab or a security goon, and who never wavered in the confidence he was doing the right thing by standing up for all of us and our legal right to be represented by a union.

When he worked as a copy editor in a business where it’s easy to slip into casual meanness, Ketcham always treated reporters with kindness and their work with respect, but for all that he was determined to make the changes that their stories required.

Speaking of rocky characteristics, apparently Ketcham could have thrown a good punch, too, if he’d ever been of a mind to do so, which to my knowledge he never was. Leastways, when he was in his mid-forties, he developed an interest in boxing and to his chickenhearted co-workers’ astonishment bravely stepped into the ring with the kind of guys who hang around boxing clubs, took his lumps, and presumably handed out a few as well.

Our former co-worker Joe Hvilivitsky described Ketcham on his online obit page as “a journalist of both great skill and integrity.” I don’t think you could put it better that that, really. Hvilivitsky completed the portrait by adding, “and he was a heck of a nice guy.”

When the strike ended his career in journalism, as it did to many of us, Ketcham dusted himself off with fortitude and dignity and uncomplainingly built a new career as an Alberta public servant, ending up as a director with Service Alberta.

Cancer finally took him Saturday morning, his family says in his memorial notice, after a 21-month illness. He is survived by his wife Charlotte, his parents, a brother and two sisters.

There will be a memorial service at McKernan Baptist Church, 11103 – 76 Ave., in Edmonton, on Friday, Sept. 28, at 1 p.m.

If you wonder why there are no honorifics in this story, and the dates are all properly abbreviated, well, it’s because back in the day, Ketcham and the CP Stylebook wouldn’t have accepted anything else.

Chuckwagon carnage: Three horses die and Calgary Stampede blames the lead horse!

by David Climenhaga on July 14, 2012 in animal cruelty, Calgary Stampede with 12 Comments

A chuckwagon race at the Calgary Stampede in 1957. Canada’s greatest city? Below: One resident of Canada’s greatest city camps it up for the occasion.

“Autopsy shows lead horse in chuckwagon accident died of ruptured aortic aneurysm,” shouts a headline in yesterday’s Calgary Herald.

So… what? The Calgary Stampede’s going to blame the chuckwagon crash that killed three horses Thursday night on “equine error”? Shoulda seen a vet, that dumb hoss…

Have you noticed that in such situations it’s usually the driver that gets blamed? If a passenger jet skids off the runway with fatal results, it’s pilot error. If a bus plunges into a ravine, it’s the driver’s mistake. If a kid piles an ATV into a tree, well, he was inexperienced and wasn’t wearing a helmet. Not our fault! It’s reassuring to consumers, and, more important, may limit the liability of the company that serviced the jet in China, sold the ATV, or whatever.

But in Calgary, during a Stampede chuckwagon race, it would violate the unwritten laws of Cowtown to blame the driver – at least if he’s a macho man in a Stetson hat and a pair of high-heeled boots with jingly spurs – so this time the poor horse will have to take the rap.

Still, you’ve got to admit, blaming the “mishap,” as the Herald’s stenographer neutrally put it, on a horse is a new one.

What’s next for the Herald’s headline writer in Hamilton, Ont.? “Autopsy shows crippled rope-calf had congenital trick knee”? Nope, here’s the Herald’s actual alternative headline: “Record attendance Thursday at Calgary Stampede; Centennial year drawing in the crowds.” Now that’s the Herald we know and love! When in doubt, count Stampede gate receipts.

There’s scant satisfaction in saying “I told you so,” but as was predicted in this space on May 25, and again on July 5, horses were certain to die cruelly at the Stampede this year, as they die every year and will continue to die every year, as long as the Stampede insists on treating animal cruelty as a suitable spectacle for entertainment.

There’s really no getting around this obvious interpretation any more. The wagon driver’s no doubt sincere on-air tears for his horse, which he described as a pet, won’t do it. The Stampede’s pathetic excuses certainly won’t do it. Nor will the Stampede’s meaningless promises to improve its “Fitness to Compete Program.”

When a Stampede spokesperson says, “the Calgary Stampede, and the people who bring their animals to the Stampede, care deeply about the welfare and well-being of those animals,” you’re entitled to laugh out loud. It’s all stuff that’s found on the floor of the Stampede cattle barn.

This is about money. The money you can generate in substantial amounts by holding exciting events. The money you can make in prizes pushing your horses hard around the tight corners of the chuckwagon races.

And if animals are put in danger to generate the excitement required to make money, well, too bad, Durango. That’s the true attitude of everyone involved in this disgrace.

Our sour prime minister goes around telling the world that Calgary’s the “greatest city” Canada. Well, I’ll give him this: it’s a pretty enough town in a suburban sort of way, and the streets are clean. But every year at Stampede, “Canada’s greatest embarrassment” would be closer to the truth.

Meanwhile, Calgary City Council is considering a ban on shark fin soup at the city’s Chinese restaurants. I’m certainly not saying this isn’t a worthy cause if the trade in sharks’ fins is endangering the species worldwide. And no one’s saying horses are an endangered species – except every year during the Stampede.

Just the same, Calgary’s aldermen – as they still insist on calling themselves – would do better if they turned their minds to cleaning up their own back 40 first.

Real men don’t kill horses for fun. It’s time for the Calgary Stampede to man up and end this practice.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald to shed more staff as newspapers struggle to survive

by David Climenhaga on July 11, 2012 in Advertising, Canadian Economy, Media with 7 Comments

Peering through the fence at the newspaper business in 2012. Canadian newspapers may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Edmonton Journal editor in chief Lucinda Chodan.

The newspaper industry was officially pronounced a dead man walking on Sunday, July 8, 2012.

The declaration was made by no less an authority than the New York Times, the world’s remaining newspaper of record, which hopes to be the last newspaper standing when all the others have fallen at its feet. So it should know, eh?

Times journalist David Carr began his gloomy story with a terrific lead – worthy of those days of yore when good newspaper leads were still appreciated, and not just by journalists: “While the rest of us were burning hot dogs on the grill last week, the newspaper industry seemed to be lighting itself on fire.”

He went on: “Between operational fiascos and flailing attempts to slash costs on the fly, it’s clear that the print newspaper business, which has been fretting over a looming crisis for the last 15 years, is struggling to stay afloat. There are smart people trying to innovate, and tons of great journalism is published daily, but the financial distress is more visible by the week.”

Back in the day, local newspapers in Alberta often picked up stories from the New York Times News Service. No so much any more, though. Costs too much.

But even if my local newspaper, the Edmonton Journal, did use the New York Times News Service, you wouldn’t have seen this story – it ran on a Sunday and the Journal has just stopped publishing its Sunday edition. Costs too much. The last one rolled off the press on June 24.

Oh well, at least they kept the New York Times Sunday crossword, although they had to move it to Saturday for obvious reasons. And there are still a few journalists worthy of the title drawing paycheques at the Journal and the Calgary Herald, the two Alberta papers owned by Postmedia News, which not so long ago used to be Canwest Media, and which before that used to be Southam News as generations of owners cut their losses.

However, there will be fewer soon. Buyouts are again being offered again to staff at both papers, in several departments, with a plan to eliminate 25 jobs at the Journal and about the same number at the Herald. Work will be consolidated somewhere else in the chain – for example, at Postmedia’s combined editing and production unit in Hamilton, Ont.

Lucinda Chodan, editor in chief of the Journal, confirmed the target is for 25 jobs (or full-time equivalents, as is said in the jargon of human resources departments) to be eliminated at her paper.

Ms. Chodan said Journal management has not yet determined how many people will be left in the paper’s newsroom when the dust has settled, and she took pains to mention names of the “strong staff additions” she has made over the past year. What’s more, she added, Postmedia will launch “an exciting new project based at the Journal” headed by multimedia journalists Karen Unland and Brittney LeBlanc. We’ll see the first results of their efforts on the Journal’s website today, Ms. Chodan promised.

But the fact remains that despite these efforts to attract readers to the Journal’s website, the paper’s newsroom will be a much shallower pool than it used to be and it seems likely that many of the journalists who accept the voluntary package will be veterans of Edmonton news who know the city and its secrets best.

Other sources familiar with the Journal say management is having trouble finding volunteers to take the buyouts. Demand for the packages may have run out after about five staffers took similar packages in the spring of 2011 and another 18 or so in the fall of 2010.

So there are fears among Journal staff members that, since neither Alberta paper has a union, it will be easy for managers to push journalists who aren’t ready to retire over the side. But Ms. Chodan was firm that this is not the plan. Positions for which volunteers cannot be found will be eliminated by attrition, she said. “That is to say vacant positions that will not be filled.”

Regardless, however the journalists involved may feel about it, these deep cuts are bad news for the rest of us. For all their imperfections, the Herald and the Journal are both still pretty good newspapers. After the dust settles from this latest round of layoffs, it’s hard to see how they can amount to much more than their dreadful principal competition at Sun Media.

Mr. Carr’s sombre story in the New York Times was short on analysis – it’s not at all clear why the author thought the straits the newspaper industry finds itself in are so dire.

It’s one thing to blame the industry’s troubles all on the Internet, but by the sound of it the Internet news business isn’t doing so well itself. Leastways, Reuters News Service reported Monday “the bottom is dropping out of the online ad business.”

And not just at online newspapers – which increasingly, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and most days of the week the New Orleans Times Picayune, used to be print papers – but at big-name online outfits like Microsoft and AOL that set up Internet advertising ventures that had no historical links to print.

The culprit, at least according to Reuters, is the success of features like Facebook and Google advertising that have replaced on-line display advertising on newspaper websites – not surprisingly, one supposes, since the newspapers were simply trying to reinvent the profitable display ad business model of yore that appeared in the pages of their traditional paper editions.

Turns out that was another idea that didn’t quite translate to the Internet the way the great minds of the industry assumed it would.

“Marketers today have more choices than ever, as Internet penetration swells in emerging markets and popular websites like Facebook multiply the amount of available online pages,” said the Reuters report. “Advertisers now question the performance of display ads more as Internet users train themselves to avoid such marketing.”

Declaring the newspaper business all but dead in the summer of 2012 may be overstating things a bit. But if another recession hits, as the Journal’s business columnist prognosticated Monday may be about to happen, it’s hard to see how the newspaper business as we have known it can survive for long.

CLARIFICATION: The Edmonton Journal does not expect to be able to meet its plan to eliminate 25 jobs (full-time equivalents) through a combination volunteers willing to accept buyouts and attrition. Accordingly, Editor-in-Chief Lucinda Chodan says, “if those two elements do not total 25 FTEs, there will be involuntary buyouts.”

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Big money speaks quietly to the recalcitrant Calgary Stampede on its 100th anniversary

by David Climenhaga on July 5, 2012 in animal cruelty, Calgary Stampede with 3 Comments

Cowboys in the aftermath of a bad chuckwagon spill at the 1937 Calgary Stampede. Below: Chuckwagon races as they’re supposed to appear; Stampede Programming VP Paul Rosenberg; Bell Canada logo of yore.

Money talks, and what money is saying now, the day before the 100th opening of the Calgary Stampede, is that Canadians are turning away from animal cruelty as entertainment.

Sometimes a whisper is louder than a shout, and the big money was barely whispering on the topic of harm to animals at the Calgary Stampede, which opens for the 100th time tomorrow. But rest assured those sibilant sounds from the upper reaches of Bell Canada’s corporate office in Montreal are being heard clearly in the boardroom of the Stampede Board as the “Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” marks its centennial.

The Calgary Herald, which like its namesake city is nowadays all hat and no cows, briefly reported yesterday that the Canadian telecommunications giant had quietly pulled its support from all rodeo events at the Stampede.

This is not the biggest deal on God’s green acres, seeing as Bell Canada has merely switched its support to other Stampede events that aren’t seen by large numbers of Canadians as being openly cruel to animals, but it’s a sign of the times and of what’s to come.

It does not mean that such events as the unquestionably exciting chuckwagon races, which every year are responsible for the deaths of at least a few horses, or calf roping, a particular bête noir to certain animal rights groups, will stop at once. Count on the Stampede Board, the Calgary rodeo’s powerful governing body, to find alternative sponsors as long as it can.

But Bell Canada’s sponsorship decision marks the beginning of the end of these events because it shows public disapproval can bite when it’s tied to something that has the potential to cost the corporations involved in these affairs money. And when that money – or, rather, the lack of it – threatens to trickle down to the corporate bottom line, things start to happen.

So while Bell Canada was very careful not to say anything that suggested customer email campaigns like the one organized by the Vancouver Humane Society had anything to do with its withdrawal of support for the rodeo events, it is said here you can be confident that’s at least part of the story behind the sponsorship switch.

Bell Canada can be forgiven for not making the point explicit, and possibly for easing out of the Stampede instead of just marching away, spurs a-jingle-janglin’. The company may not wish to suffer a noisy counter-boycott from some rodeo boosters, or to have its executives’ mothers’ virtue abused on-air by publicity craving right-wing television commentators.

Just the same, this perceived success is likely to embolden opponents of the Stampede’s most egregious events to extend their campaign to other companies that sponsor activities widely perceived as needlessly cruel to animals.

For its part, the Stampede would prefer to dismiss the campaign as an effort by “animal activists who may be just as interested in the fund-raising possibilities that a campaign of this nature offers” and a few misguided bloggers.

In a post on the Stampede’s website yesterday, Programming Vice-President Paul Rosenberg compared the strong feelings of many Canadians about “the participation of animals in exhibition, competition and education events” to the debate between vegetarians and the rest of us who eat meat. He took a subtle dig at the Vancouver Humane Society for not operating an animal shelter, and promised to continue practicing “strong animal care,” whatever that means, at the Stampede.

As for the Herald’s brief and not terribly informative report on Bell Canada’s sponsorship decision, it trotted out the familiar refrain that rodeo is a Western cultural icon. The annual 10-day event, it said, “is a celebration of cowboy culture that features the rodeo and chuckwagon races.”

There’s a good case to be made, however, that the story the Stampede is all about the cowboy’s trade, a vital part of our Western culture and all that, ain’t much more than an entertaining yarn to be spun around a campfire.

As a real farmer commented on this blog in response to a recent post on this topic, “the Calgary Stampede was an exercise in urban nostalgia 100 years ago and it was a perverse distortion of the reality of ranching then and still is today.”

“Those calves used in roping used to come into the local auction markets in September mostly broken and crippled,” the commenter wrote. “Now they disappear. People who actually make their living raising cattle never resort to yipping, yelling or horseplay. A few oil-fueled start-ups do it for a few years while blathering on about free enterprise, while taking advantage of government supplied community pastures, support programs, and any other welfare they can grub up, before they flip the land and move on – good riddance to bad rubbish.”

The Stampede Board, made up largely of powerful business figures to whom too many Southern Alberta politicians all but owe their souls, will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th Century, let alone the 21st. That might be a useful project on which someone can practice his or her otherwise obsolete lassoing skills!

But it will happen, as long as money keeps talking as Bell Canada quietly did this week.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Pulp friction: Edmonton Journal quits toothless Alberta Press Council; Calgary Herald to follow

by David Climenhaga on March 13, 2012 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments
The future of the press in Alberta, what’s left of it? If you didn’t shoot that angel, your only option is to sue. Below: Edmonton Journal publisher John Connolly.

If you have a problem with something written in the Edmonton Journal, you can forget about seeking help from the Alberta Press Council.

Early last month, the Journal quietly pulled out of the 40-year-old voluntary organization that was set up to help resolve conflicts between newspapers and the people they write about. Journal management told APC officials that they no longer saw any value in the organization the newspaper once enthusiastically supported.

Actually, given the pathetic state of Alberta’s newspapers nowadays, you have to concede that Journal Publisher John Connolly, who naturally hails from the advertising side of the industry, had a point of sorts when he informed the Press Council of the paper’s decision to yank out the plug on membership.

After all, goodwill gestures like allowing readers an option to resolve disputes without the expense and inconvenience of a defamation lawsuit may be the ethical thing to do, but they add nothing to the bottom line and may even involve some modest expenses – say $10,000 or $15,000 a year.

What’s more, with high-priced lawyers on the paper’s retainer, it’s usually pretty easy for them to get all but the most determined and deep-pocketed complainers to give up and go away, no matter how justified their complaints.

Naturally, readers won’t find any of this reported in the pages of the Journal – or for that matter in those of its Sun Media rivals, which pulled out of the Ontario Press Council months ago, also without fanfare, and were never members of the Alberta version. In the past, some Journal managers mocked the Suns for their irresponsibility of not being part of the press councils. No more!

In a terse statement on Feb. 7, the APC’s directors said they “are saddened to announce that after many years of involvement the Edmonton Journal is no longer a member-newspaper of the Alberta Press Council.” As far as I can see, this was reported nowhere in the mainstream media.

Well, the APC’s directors should be saddened, because when the Calgary Herald also pulls out in May, as news business scuttlebutt suggests it will, the organization will be moribund and all but irrelevant. The only newspapers still involved in the Press Council will be small dailies in Medicine Hat, Lethbridge and Red Deer, plus Alberta’s 100 or so weeklies, and it’s hard to believe that they won’t soon follow the example of the major metropolitan daily newspapers.

Now, I have to confess to some ambivalence about the Alberta Press Council because, in a crunch when a newspaper was really determined to behave irresponsibly, the APC turned out to be a well-intentioned but essentially toothless organization.

Back in 2000, when the employees of the Calgary Herald were on strike for a first collective agreement, the Herald published a particularly unbalanced piece of propaganda designed to undermine the strikers and assist the company’s goal of busting the union, in which it was ultimately successful.

A complaint was made by one of the strikers to the APC. The complaint said the report made false allegations about the striker, and that the striker was given no opportunity to respond.

In its ruling, which as a member of the Press Council the Herald was obligated to publish in a timely fashion, the APC at least demonstrated its independence and good will. The Press Council ruling said:

“At its June 2, 2000, meeting the Alberta Press Council upheld a complaint by Mark Lowey, reporter for the Calgary Herald, against the Calgary Herald for a story published on Dec. 11, 1999. The story quotes the Herald’s editor in chief, Peter Menzies, alleging Lowey swore at him on the picket line and Menzies stands behind this claim. Lowey denies these comments and has asked for the opportunity to reply to them.

“What the Press Council must decide is whether the story printed in the Herald represents a fair and balanced report on the subject matter and whether the Herald has allowed Mr. Lowey the opportunity to respond. According to the Code of Practice of the Alberta Press Council, ‘it is the duty of a newspaper to allow fair opportunity to reply when reasonably called for.’” (Emphasis added.)

“The comments attributed to Mr. Lowey could be seen to damage the reputation of any individual who is not given to abusive language or behaviour. This attribution, within the tone of the entire article which was clearly not an objective account of the matter, was meant to elicit an unfavourable impression of Mr. Lowey as a professional and a person, by his words and behaviour and description given. The reporter made no attempt to contact Mr. Lowey either to verify the incident or allow him the opportunity to respond, which should be included in any fair and balanced report published in a newspaper. Neither did the Herald’s staff and management contact Mr. Lowey before publishing the story, allowing him the chance to respond. … The Herald, as a member of the Alberta Press Council is bound by the Code of Practice, and must therefore give Mr. Lowey fair opportunity for reply when reasonably called for.”

In the event, the Herald did not publish the ruling of the APC until after the strike had ended, and no action was taken by the Press Council to try to remedy this or even raise the issue of the newspaper’s inaction. To my knowledge, Mr. Lowey was never given an opportunity to respond.

This left me to harbour the opinion that one ought not to deal with an organization that would demand a reader with a complaint agree not to sue in return for the promise it would arbitrate the dispute, then prove unable to deliver its part of the bargain.

On the other hand, in normal circumstances – when the newspaper itself did not have a direct interest in the outcome of the dispute – press councils have probably done more good than not by resolving disputes and ensuring that newspapers made an effort to abide by reasonable and ethical minimum standards of practice.

But in this undemocratic era, in which what’s left of the mainstream media is thoroughly dominated by the advertising department and neoconservative ideologues at head office, such notions as fairness, balance and journalistic ethics must seem increasingly quaint and impractical to the people running our news media.

These managers, complacent after 30 years of neoconservative domination of the media and commercial sectors, forget that press councils were originally voluntarily set up in the 1970s to forestall the possibility of legislation that would force media to treat the subjects of their attention in a professional and honourable manner.

Now that the “marketplace of ideas” associated with the concept of freedom of the press no longer exists in Canada, and those at the helm of the mainstream media have demonstrated their lack of commitment to providing groups and individuals attacked and defamed in their reports with some form of redress, it is not impossible that some future government will consider a reasonable level of regulation to ensure this institution is forced to behave responsibly.

In the mean time, however, if you have a dispute with what a daily newspaper in Edmonton or Calgary has written, you will have no option but to proceed directly to a lawsuit for defamation.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The last insignificant link between the Calgary Herald and downtown Calgary will fall soon … but so what?

by David Climenhaga on January 10, 2012 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments
Brian Brennan, at left, accepting a piece of paper from a copy boy. Your blogger remembers that haircut, and thinks he had one a lot like it himself. As for the copy boy? That’s Roman Cooney, now VP of Communications for Alberta Health Services. Below: Brennan today.

It seems that the Calgary Herald is the only media organization some corporate executives will talk to when it comes to the news stories they’d rather not talk about.

This convoluted fact goes a long way to explaining why, even though the last link between that newspaper and downtown Calgary is about to fall, it makes little difference because the ties that mattered were severed ages ago. And not just in Calgary.

The other day, a blogger working for one of those online news aggregators – no doubt for mere pennies – plaintively recounted a problem she had encountered while researching a story about extreme corporate executive pay packages.

She wrote: “In the case of Niko Resources Ltd., whose CEO Edward Sampson pocketed $16.4 million in 2010 … an operator at the head offices explained that the company only entertains media requests from The Calgary Herald.” (Emphasis added.)

Well, you can hardly blame Niko Resources or Mr. Sampson, now, can you? I’m sure they’d be just as happy not talking at all about how much the boss took away last year. But since it sounds as if the Herald’s mandate now includes not reporting the sorts of things oilpatch CEOs don’t want reported, how convenient for them!

Alas, we’ve come a long way from 1930, when the Herald and four other Alberta Newspapers were honoured with a special Pulitzer Prize for what my friend Brian Brennan called in a recent post on his blog “its spirited crusade against the Social Credit government’s attempt to gag the press.”

In the post in question, Mr. Brennan lamented the fact that the 100-year-old Herald Building at 7th Avenue and 2nd Street in downtown Calgary, where both he and I worked together in the early 1970s, is about to be torn down to be replaced by a 50-storey office tower.

“A lot of good journalism was done in that building,” Mr. Brennan wrote – a good deal of which, I should add, was done by him. “A columnist for the competing Albertan used to dub our paper ‘The Old Grey Lady of 7th Avenue,’ which he intended as an insult but which we accepted as a compliment because of the obvious comparison with The New York Times. … We earned that trust by dint of hard work and independent reporting. We didn’t pander to politicians and we didn’t pander to advertisers.”

“I always felt we were standing on the shoulders of distinguished predecessors,” Mr. Brennan went on, “who believed their fight to preserve the freedom of the press was a fight for democracy itself.”

Well, he was right about that. That’s what we thought, and we were right. Alas, that fight is over now. It’s been lost – and not just at the Herald.

Indeed, it’s a little unfair for me to slam the Herald for the demise of journalism that is more than perfunctory because that is a trend throughout the media business – and it has been ever since newspapers like the Herald started, metaphorically and literally, to leave their cities behind.

They did it by abandoning their downtown offices for suburban plants where they could more easily distribute their products during rush hours, and they did it by abandoning their local ownership to out-of-town media barons would saw towns like Calgary and Edmonton as profitable cash generators but looked down their noses at local journalists and the local issues that mattered to them.

It was business decisions like the moves to suburban plants like the one the Herald opened in 1981 near Deerfoot Trail and Memorial Drive that contributed long before the Internet to the unhappy, and increasingly unprofitable, situation in which most of Canada’s urban dailies find themselves today.

The Herald’s new building – known as “The Bunker” during my tenure there – was a long enough and expensive enough cab ride from downtown, where the political and corporate decisions still got made, that it wasn’t long before corporate bean-counters in Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, or wherever they happened to be located that week, were discouraging such fripperies as actually going to an event to report on it. (The notable exceptions, of course, were hockey games.)

As Mr. Brennan put it better than me – as is so often the case – the Herald Building “was connected to the downtown’s beating heart in a way that’s never possible when you live in the suburbs. City Hall, the police station, the courts, the library, the school board and the corporate head offices were all within easy walking distance. We did most of our interviews in person, not over the phone. If a freight train had derailed near the Palliser Hotel, the Herald’s reporters and photographers would have gotten to the scene before the fire trucks.”

The irony of course, is that the technology and business practices that mandated the move to the Bunker on Calgary’s east side were soon irrelevant – the Herald switched to morning publication, partly eliminating the need for a suburban press location, and communications technology not long thereafter meant the press and the newsroom hardly needed to be at the same address.

As Mr. Brennan wondered back in 1981, why not leave just the editorial offices downtown? That’s what the Edmonton Journal did, and perhaps that’s why the Journal is arguably a marginally better newspaper than the Herald today.

Similarly foolish decisions were being made all over Canada at about the same time – another disadvantage of chain ownership.

Here in Ottawa, for example, where I am momentarily residing, the press and offices of the Citizen were moved in the same general time period to a location so far in the city’s west end that it’s practically on the Prairies – remote from all the things on Mr. Brennan’s list, and Parliament and the Supreme Court as well!

Canadian newspapers everywhere also switched from afternoon to morning publication at about the same time as the Herald – mainly to solve the traffic problem of moving papers from the downtown core at rush hour. This was also the problem the move to the suburbs was also supposed to fix. Morning publication guaranteed the news in their pages was almost a full day behind the electronic news cycle – another shot in the foot.

And finally, there was chain ownership – soon concentrated into the hands of people like Conrad Black and Izzy Asper. This resulted in an editorial creep toward the right, as well as the bleeding of editorial opinion into the news columns.

For all the constant justification by newspaper bosses that this reflected their readers’ biases – and their claims that what resulted was “fair, balanced and accurate” – it is said here readers didn’t like it. When the Internet came along, it was the opportunity many newspaper readers were waiting for to get out of info-dodge and find their news somewhere more agreeable to their centrist sensibilities.

Newspaper profits began to fade. Newspaper executives, whose minds and hearts had long ago left their cities and the people who lived in them, couldn’t figure out how to pick up the pieces.

Postmedia News, which owns the Calgary Herald, continues to talk about “transformation and revenue development” but like most of the rest of us remains unable to figure out how to generate sufficient profits from the Internet. According to a report in the Globe and Mail earlier this week, Postmedia still relies on print advertising, a dying medium, for 63 per cent of its revenue.

As for providing the kind of genuinely fair, balanced and accurate news coverage readers crave, it’s become instead the favoured medium of executives who want only to massage the news, or keep things out of it.

So yesterday the Globe reported on how Postmedia is begging Ottawa to let it sell its Canadian newspapers to foreigners. There was a day that would have seemed like an outrage. Today, it hardly matters.

As Mr. Brennan rightly noted, the Herald Building itself is of no particular architectural significance. Still, he wishes Calgary wouldn’t destroy the landmark.

On this one, though, I have to say think he’s guilty of sentimentality. Let it go. The last real links between the Calgary Herald and downtown Calgary fell a long time ago and nothing is likely to restore them.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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