Halifax Daily NewsThe news earlier this week that Transcontinental Media was discontinuing publication of the Halifax Daily News was probably as inevitable as it was unfortunate for the 92 people who worked there. They joined scores of other newsroom and media workers who have been pink-slipped over the past little while in what is probably one of the worst employment periods for the journalism business in decades.

For those of us who worked at the News in what might charitably be called its heyday under cowboy founder and publisher, madcap Fleet Street refugee David Bentley, the news of its demise brought back — shall I say — interesting memories. My good pal Sherri Aikenhead, who was a summer cub reporter on the News the year I started there, recalled for a Globe and Mail story this week the night we ran a sensational scoop under the headline, “Agonies of a princess,” that, contrary to all rules and protocol that prohibited directly quoting one of the British royal family, directly quoted Diana, Princess of Wales, on the pain she felt when the media wrote nasty things about her. You’d think we’d nominated Hitler for sainthood the way the local and international media excoriated us for breaking the so-called rules.

Other headlines were less salutary. One that I’m sure still evokes chuckles in the bedroom community outside Halifax where the paper was founded as a weekly, featured an utterly indistinct photo that purported to show a couple making out under the wonderful headline, “Rooftop sex shocks Sackville.”

Because no one would believe him without reading it for themselves, a colleague of mine used to carry in his wallet the front-page story that, thanks to a rookie reporter who misread a news release and made an unfathomable leap to a faulty conclusion, suggested — wrongly, of course — that Mother Teresa was actually the bastard daughter of a Nova Scotian sailor.

Then there was the night it took the combined efforts of all of us in the production department to dissuade Bentley from running the header, “Stan snuffed,” on the story reporting the death of folk music legend Stan Rogers, one of 23 passengers who succumbed to smoke inhalation when a fire started in the washroom of an Air Canada plane in 1983.

Crime and grime were the everyday staple of the News where the old tabloid watch phrase, “If it bleeds, it leads,” was damn near a commandment. One reporter specialized in covering murders and other grisly happenings that, when they occurred in the Annapolis Valley outside Halifax, always invoked the lead, “This sleepy Valley town is still reeling today…”

But the paper was generally a marvelous and high-energy place to work, and we all relished the not-infrequent experience of scooping our more establishment rivals at other media outlets in the city. I got to cover premiers and prime ministers, leadership races and labour battles, and lived Pulitzer’s exhortation that the role of the media is “to afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted.” The first half of that was downright fun, the second just plain heart-warming.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, notwithstanding I was eventually fired for being, as Bentley told me when he canned me, too difficult to manage. Part of that difficulty doubtless stemmed from my reluctance to take orders from a dyspeptic and washed-up hack of an editor whose common practice it was to drunkenly phone in some rumour he had picked up at whatever bar he was favouring with his custom that night and insist it be run down and turned into a story for the next morning’s edition. In a strange way, it made me a much better reporter and, for 20 years now, a pretty good media relations practitioner insofar as it forced me to master the art of the pitch. If I couldn’t come up with, and successfully pitch, a better story to this guy, then I would be stuck covering whatever dreck he thought was news that day. So you can believe I honed my news-sniffing and story-pitching skills to a razor-sharp edge. I’ve earned my living by them ever since.

And, in a equally strange way, the Daily News vastly improved the practise of journalism in Halifax. The last royal commission to examine newspapers in Canada said there was no city in the country worse served by its daily newspapers than Halifax, a reference to the so-called “Old Grey Lady of Argyle Street,” the Chronicle-Herald and its afternoon sibling, the Mail-Star, that at that time had a monopoly in the city. When the News evolved from suburban weekly to city-wide daily, it forced the Herald papers to become more populist, while the appearance at about the same time of the national edition of the Globe and Mail improved the Herald’s more serious-minded coverage.

I don’t know what the Daily News has been like these past many years, but I’m sure it lost much of its cowboy edge when Bentley sold it. Bentley himself never lost his appetite for scandal-mongering and used at least part of what he made on the sale to found the scurrilous gossip magazine, Frank.

For friends of mine who still worked there, along with all their colleagues, Monday was a bad day. But so, too, was it a bad day for journalism in Canada when a 25-year old alternative can’t compete in a city like Halifax and the only option is that it be replaced by a factory-produced free tabloid designed not so much to inform anyone as to provide a vehicle for national advertisers.

Halifax never embraced the Daily News so much as tolerated it, but the city surely is poorer for its demise.

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