END OF ERA IN MOOSE JAW
Times-Herald closes after 128 years
MOOSE JAW The Moose Jaw Times-Herald newsroom died on Monday night, aged 128, with the closing of a back door.
Reporters had just performed their final acts of newsgathering: Writing a late brief, grappling with a sentence on A1, putting the next day’s paper to bed.
They toasted each other with champagne served in plastic cups, and shared chocolate cake and gallows humour — “it’s the end of days,” someone noted wryly — then they separated into the Moose Jaw night.
“I hope nobody ever has to think about the death of their newspaper ever again. That is my wish for this world,” news editor Sarah Ladik said earlier in the day. Now it’s 7 p.m. in an empty newsroom, and her nightly ritual of thinking ahead to the next paper has been rendered moot, because there is no next paper.
So she steps outside and closes the door.
We walk along the back of the building towards the parking lot, Ladik and I, and we see something startling: A big double door, used for loading and emptying, is wide open to the world. Nobody thought to close it. Through that door lies access to the entire building.
So back we go, and we fight those doors for 10 minutes, trying and failing to get the deadbolts to align. We kick it, we bodycheck it. I slice my hand open, contributing a personalized touch of blood to the sweat and tears of the last week.
Ladik finally spots a reinforced two-by-four beside the doors, and discovers that it fits nicely into two braces on either side, clamping everything shut from the inside. How foolish we feel.
She leaves the building a second time, in what has turned into a fittingly anticlimactic departure. The place is sealed tight. We shake hands in the parking lot. She’s been at the Times-Herald since April; I hadn’t been in the building since I left in 1996, after six years as a sportswriter. We’re two of thousands who have earned paycheques from the place.
On Tuesday, newsroom staff cleared their spaces. Wednesday, the Times-Herald published its last edition — 16,000 copies, distributed across the city. Today, they’ll have a public meet-andgreet from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. — a wake for employees and readers. On Friday, the website goes black.
There’s no hard news in that 36-page final edition — just history, reminiscing, guest columns and letters. There’s also a pointed Times-Herald editorial.
“For the past several months, we have used this space to periodically excoriate the business community for not supporting what is, in the end, a fellow local business,” they write. “We have also used it to plead with readers to value what we do. It is clear that both those messages have fallen on deaf ears.
“Moose Jaw, you get what you pay for.”
When I worked at the TimesHerald in the 1990s, it was a solid, forever place — populated with newcomers and old veterans, covering every aspect of the community.
The circulation topped out at a little north of 10,000, in a city of around 35,000.
When owner Roger Holmes announced a month ago that he was killing the paper, its paid circulation was less than 2,000. Newsroom staff, shrunken by years of debilitating cuts, turned over frequently. The Times-Herald and the city grew increasingly estranged.
“It not a sudden death. It’s been a slow death,” says Doug
Lix, the Times-Herald’s director of reader sales and distribution, and a veteran of 35 years in the industry. “It’s been sick for quite a while. To see what we built up over the years ... we made good money here. We were strong. We hit three-quarters of the households in the city. And when you get down to less than 2,000 subscriptions, the writing ’s on the wall. People just didn’t want it anymore. We’ve lost that touch with the community.”
Holmes was pouring his own money into the paper, which returned nothing the other way. It was financial quicksand.
He bought the Times-Herald from Transcontinental as part of a larger transaction on May 30, 2016. Moose Jaw’s sister paper in Prince Albert, the Daily Herald, remains alive. There’s no immediate plans to close it, Holmes says, and the hope is that it can continue as a daily.
“It’s sad for Moose Jaw. It’s sad for the industry,” Holmes says. “I’m disappointed, even with my own performance. You look back, and you say, ‘Well, I could have, would have, should have.’ Hindsight is fantastic. But you do the best with what you think is the right thing at the time, and then you deal with the consequences.”
Dorothy Johnstone, who has subscribed for 55 years, checks the obituaries every day. She scans headlines, and reads what interests her. Friends tell her there’s not much in there anymore, but she likes it anyway.
“We like to sit in the evening in the family room and look at the paper, not go to the computer and do it,” she says. “We spend enough business time on the computer. And if the phone rings, we can put the paper down, answer the phone, then get back to the paper when we’re ready.
“We’re sad to see it go. It’s a loss to the city.”
As reporters cleaned their desks on Tuesday, Ladik came across reminders of Moose Jaw stories she wanted to tackle, that will never get told.
“I’ve never worked at a really big paper,” said Ladik, who previously laboured in the Northwest Territories and is now headed to Newfoundland, where she’s landed another newspaper job.
“They have a character that is important and necessary and really good for this country. But equally important are those smaller news outlets that show up and report on council, that show up to the police commissioner’s meeting and report on that. Even the stuff like going to the charity balls and the fundraising events, doing the local community stuff ... you need to tell your story.”
But the daily model of the past century — the idea of picking up a made-in-Moose Jaw daily newspaper, day in and day out, and reading what your friends, neighbours and city councillors are up to — formally collapsed this week. The cause of death?
It’s complicated.
“I was unable to find the formula that would make it work,” Holmes says simply, and sadly.
We hit threequarters of the households in the city. And when you get down to less than 2,000 subscriptions, the writing’s on the wall.