The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Conrad this. Conrad that. Our dear boy, who renounced his own country and his citizenship to buy a peerage in Old Blighty, has been getting more media time than Wolf Blitzer. A brilliant guy, the only man in the universe with a larger vocabulary than William F. Buckley Jr., once a lunch-companion of the scribbler (no longer), seems to be in a spot of bother. His problem, of course, is ego ? the size of Napoleon, one of his main heroes. But his main weakness is that he does not understand Canada, the homeland he deserted. Mackenzie King, that wise old bachelor who talked to his dead mother and his dead dog through séances, once said that Canada's problem was "that it had too much geography and too little population." True then, and still true today, especially for anyone trying to put their bucks into a national newspaper. What Conrad did not understand ? ego surpassing economics ? is what the airline industry could have taught him. Just as Canada could not support two national airlines ? witness the death of Canadian Pacific Airlines ? it cannot support two national newspapers. When my former lunch-companion launched the National Post, I could not understand when that very flirty, entertaining paper while reaching almost immediately the same circulation figures as the rival Globe and Mail was not attracting an equivalent advertising base. Obscure reporters were writing unreadable 18-inch stories to fill the blank spaces the advertisers were ignoring. One day I asked a senior Toronto advertising executive why this was so. He explained, as if talking to a seven-year-old, that Ontario (meaning Toronto where all the national advertising industry is based) is basically a very conservative province. And the advertising industry is basically a very conservative industry. It does not move (see CPA) when it sees only death as the obvious destination. One day I had lunch with a senior National Post figure. He confessed that the most stupid thing they had done was not to realize the power of the Globe's Births and Deaths page. Which of course is controlled by a deal with the funeral parlours. See 'The' P.# Con't from P.# My wife happens to be from Ontario. The first thing she reads every morning in the Globe is the boring (to me) vital Births and Deaths. Who of her classmates has had a kid, or a grandkid. Who has croaked. All Rosedale does the same. The embarrassed Post, shut out of the funeral homes, took to larding up its dead people with folk from Edmonton and Calgary. (It should be mentioned here, in the matter of personal interest, that any scribbler in the land ? as someone who has been fired by all of them ? would like as many papers in the land as possible to survive. Becuz we need the groceries.) But the money-losing Post, desperate with that advertising drag, this week raised its newsstand price from 50 cents to 75 ? Toronto Star and Toronto Sun remains at 50, the Globe is a loonie. The other indicator is the letters-to-the-editor pages. The Globe runs some 20 letters a day, serious arguments signed by people who have serious credentials and many would be recognized by name. The Post runs maybe five. Serious people don't read the Post. At least, they don't write to it. Chris Cobb, a very good Ottawa Citizen reporter who has worked in Israel, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, has just published a very good book, Ego and Ink: The Inside Story of Canada's National Newspaper War. He quotes the oft-repeated mantra of Globe publisher Phillip Crawley that "Black set aside normal business judgment to launch a money-losing newspaper, for which there was no business rationale, in order to use that newspaper to pursue a political agenda." What it means is that my old friend Conrad, while a great publisher, turned out in the end to be a lousy businessman. The ego took over the pocketbook. X X X AND ANOTHER THING Doug Fisher, the oldest and wisest sage in the Ottawa Press Gallery, has pronounced that both Paul (the ditherer) Martin and Stephen (hates the media) Harper will be gone within two years. True. Lurking in the weeds for the Grits are Newfoundland's Brian Tobin, just having bought a humongous home in Toronto's Rosedale while divesting himself of his nervous connection with Frank Stronach; New Brunswick's Frank McKenna, with his new connections on Bay Street; Allan Rock, with his juicy spot at the United Nations in Noo Yawk; and the slavering John Manley, cleverly declining Martin's offer to park him out of danger as Ambassador to Washington. We'll bet the farm on Manley.
