‘A Paper for the People’
Through world wars and newspaper wars, the Star has never lost its progressive streak. This week’s announcement that the paper will be sold to private owners marks a new chapter in its lively 128-year history
As a new chapter opens for the Star, we look back at a 128-year history of fearless journalism and progressive values,
From the first issue in 1892, the Toronto Star called itself a paper for the people. It championed workers’ rights and public health reform. The city kept growing, and waves of newcomers arrived. War was declared. Skyscrapers rose. A king died. A king abdicated.
The Star brought the world to Toronto and narrated the city’s scandals by unleashing dozens of reporters to cover rum runners, prison breaks, teenage lake swimmers, politics, feats of strength and intrigue of all kinds. The mid-century Star was a pressure cooker of competition, the output “a baffling potpourri of the ridiculous and the sublime,” Pierre Berton once wrote.
Years passed. Newspaper wars were fought, the internet era dawned, a crack video emerged, and the Star kept pushing for change, kept writing the history of the city, the province and the country through128 years of big egos and even bigger scoops.
Earlier this week, the Toronto Star announced its sale, pending shareholder approval, to Jordan Bitove and Paul Rivett, who intend to take the company private. The news marks the end of a more than centurylong chain of succession among interconnected newspaper families.
“What’s partly sad about it is no one realized what an important era it was,” says Christopher Waddell, a journalism professor at Carleton University.
In 1892, the Evening Star was created by a group of printers locked out from a rival newspaper for demanding a fair wage. Their Toronto was a low-slung manufacturing city and financial hub, with impressive mansions along Church and Jarvis Streets, and crowded shacks where barnyard animals lived alongside working-class families. There were plenty of newspapers in town, but the Evening
Star would focus on the latter group.
“This is the age of gold,” the first editorial read. “Never as now did men recognize the evil which results from the accumulation of great wealth in a few hands.”
Toronto was a Protestantdominated city, but the Star was “even-handed” with Catholics in a way that the populist Toronto Telegram wasn’t, says Mark McGowan, a University of Toronto professor who specializes in 19th- and 20th-century Canadian history. “That really made it stand out as a voice for other groups those who were unrepresented in the rather elite-controlled partisan papers of the city.”
Joseph Atkinson, the man who would become inseparable from the Star’s legacy, became the paper’s editor following an ownership change in 1899. He deflated the circulation numbers to reflect reality and dispatched reporters to houses of industry, workhouses and slums to tell those stories. The paper became the Toronto Daily Star. (It was first called the Toronto Star in 1971.)
Atkinson’s outlook was forged by a childhood of poverty, hard work and evangelical Methodism. Born two years shy of Confederation, he lost his father, who was killed by a train when he was a baby. His mother raised eight children in a house filled with boarders, near Newcastle, Ont.
Atkinson went to work at a mill at 14 when his mother died. He never forgot the hard years or the acts of kindness that brought joy, like the time a woman bought him skates so he could join in the fun on a frozen pond.
At the Star, Atkinson used the paper’s talented writers and growing readership to raise money to ensure that every child, no matter their means, could escape the dusty city for summer camp and wake up to a gift on Christmas morning. To this day the Fresh Air Fund and Santa Claus Fund endure.
The Star has a long history of reporting stories that some don’t want to hear. In 1933, the Star’s European correspondent Pierre van Paassen reported on Nazi persecution of the Jewish people.
Hitler banned the Star from Germany, and some doubted the stories. A professor at Queen’s University wrote to the Globe: “Mr. van Paassen’s reports have sounded so incredible that I feel no level-headed person will accept his statement without definite confirmation from other sources.”
Later that year, Star reporter Matthew Halton spent two months in Germany, publishing a series of articles upon his return: “I have seen and studied the most fanatical, thoroughgoing and savage philosophy of war ever imposed on any nation … Germany is literally becoming a laboratory and breeding ground for war, unless I am deaf, dumb and blind.”
From their King Street skyscraper, where there never seemed to be enough typewriters, Atkinson and his son-inlaw Harry Hindmarsh loved to throw “battalions” of reporters at the day’s biggest stories all throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
Sometimes they would buy out entire trains to ensure the competition had no way of getting to a remote location.
Hindmarsh was a controversial figure in a three-piece suit. “Many have hated his guts. One reporter tried to kill him with a foot-long pair of copy shears … (Star reporter) Ernest Hemingway wanted to punch him in the nose,” Pierre Berto n once wrote in Maclean’s. “But Star reporters have always worked for him like beavers.”
Although the Star preached fair treatment for workers, it
“The Star has a consistent track record of challenging power while conveying information and insights which bolster the ability of everyday citizens to counteract myriad injustices.” CHRIS WILLIAMS TORONTO POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY COALITION
didn’t always offer the same. Atkinson was budget-conscious and every splurge was accounted for, usually with periods of austerity or sudden job cuts. Hindmarsh famously fired 13 men on Christmas Eve 1930. “Each Yuletide a group of exemployees would send him a Merry Christmas telegram, collect,” Berton wrote.
Star reporters unionized in 1948, the same year Atkinson died. Years earlier, Atkinson had created a charitable foundation, and in his will he left shares of the paper to the foundation, in the hopes that it would run the Star and use the profits for social, scientific and economic reforms for the good of the people of Ontario.
But not long after — suspiciously so, the Star believed — the provincial treasurer (and later premier) Leslie Frost introduced the Charitable Gifts Act, which decreed that charities could have only a 10 per cent stake in businesses. It applied retroactively.
“In the election campaign he (Harry Hindmarsh) wanted to make one thing clear: The Star did not support the government that passed the Act designed to crush it,” Berton wrote. “The Star was afraid of no one.”
By 1958, the Conservatives were still in power and the paper was sold for $25.5 million to five trustees of the Atkinson Charitable Foundation — J.S. Atkinson, Ruth Atkinson Hindmarsh, W.J. Campbell, Dr. B.M. Thall and Beland Honderich.
Hindmarsh died in the mid’50s and Beland Honderich, who had been working at the Star since 1943, took over, steering the paper back toward its social justice roots. He hired the popular Berton, cartoonist Duncan Macpherson and the gruff, outspoken Ron Haggart.
“That was one of the greatest newsrooms ever,” John Honderich, son of Beland, says of the turnaround. “He completely changed the nature of the paper, you know, stopped having sex all over on page one … He laid down some very strict rules.”
In the 1970s, as Toronto took over from Montreal as Canada’s city of finance, the Star moved to the waterfront at One Yonge St. and championed smart urban development, supporting policies that called for height restrictions and allowed old factories and warehouses to be turned into lofts.
Waddell says the Star has tried to play a “big role in the multicultural nature of Toronto, in terms of recognizing the role that immigration has played,” throughout the city’s history.
In the 1980s, as more Canadian newspapers became part of conglomerates, many lost their identities as corporate owners tended to shy away from strong political positions that might alienate readership, Waddell says. And although the Star was publicly owned, the five families who purchased the paper back in 1958 held nearly all of the voting shares, which “gave it the ability … to take some of those social stands and social positions,” he says.
The Star was an important liberal voice against free trade and supportive of economic nationalism. The paper’s coffers were full. “If I had known it was the golden era, I would have done even more and spent even more,” says former managing editor Lou Clancy.
The late 1990s saw the arrival of Conrad Black’s National Post. At a retreat with his executive team before the launch, John Honderich, then publisher of the Star, warned that the upstart would be a well-executed, well-designed and wellwritten threat — not “restricted by the same Marquess of Queensbury rules we’ve been accustomed to playing by,” journalist Chris Cobb relays in “Ego and Ink,” his book about the newspaper wars.
James Travers, who was the Star’s editor at the time, told Cobb the “Star way” had long been considered the only way, and the Post was a “wake-up call.” The Star beefed up training, local coverage, photojournalism and design, and experimented with non-traditional storytelling. “We had to really fight like mad for two or three years and we did,” Honderich recalls.
In the early 2000s, the Star created a dedicated team for investigations, digging into many systemic issues, including longterm-care homes and, more recently, precarious work.
Race and Crime was a groundbreaking 2002 series by Jim Rankin and other Star journalists that used Toronto crime data to show that Black people arrested in the city were treated more harshly than white people. The Star kept fighting for updated data, which led to Known to Police, Rankin and Patty Winsa’s 2012 investigation into carding practices. It showed that Black people were more likely than white people to be stopped and carded in Toronto, especially in predominantly white areas.
The series punctured “the myth of Canadian racial innocence,” and “stimulated the rise to public prominence of some important anti-racist voices in this city” writes Chris Williams, a member of the Toronto Police
Accountability Coalition. Williams also believes that the series, along with grassroots activism, “reduced some of the gratuitous criminalization and brutality and harassment that flowed from the practice of carding.”
“To be Black is to be frequently disbelieved,” he writes. “So not only did the series validate the views of people often dismissed as players of the ‘race card,’ it also challenged mainstream perspectives regarding how the police function on a day-to-day basis. The importance of that shift in public discourse was very significant.”
Williams said the perception that journalists are “stenographers to power” is a fair characterization of many, but “the Star has a consistent track record of challenging power while conveying information and insights which bolster the ability of everyday citizens to counteract myriad injustices,” he writes. “I can say, with no hesitation, that my ability to unmask power has been aided by the Star on multiple occasions over the years.”
Another defining moment in the modern era was the Rob Ford saga, when Robyn Doolittle, Kevin Donovan and other Star journalists reported on the then mayor’s various scandals, substance abuse issues and the existence of a video that showed him smoking crack cocaine. Ford denied it for months and said the video did not exist. The Star came under intense pressure and scrutiny. “There was a big campaign for people to cancel their subscriptions,” Waddell says — and people did, “thinking that the Star was in a vendetta against Ford.”
“It turned out that of course everything they reported was right.”
By now, the Star was firmly in the digital era, and ad revenues were falling sharply. Rounds of voluntary departures and layoffs were common. Some efforts to adapt failed, like the tabletbased Star Touch. While news of the sale this week was shocking, “we’ve been waiting for a seismic kind of thing to happen in the industry,” Clancy says.
“An era has ended, and one that over time will be recognized as a tremendous era in the Toronto Star’s history,” he adds. “It has been a great paper and I think that if it can be put on a good business footing again, there are still a lot of good journalists at the Star.”
Earlier this week, Honderich, now the chair of Torstar’s board of directors, called it an “extremely tough decision” but one that felt necessary. “The values of the paper is something the new owners have committed to … and that’s been incredibly important,” he says.
Honderich never planned to be here. He was once “ferociously determined” to avoid the family business. He studied economics and law, and imagined an exciting criminal law career like fictional lawyer Perry Mason. But after law school, he couldn’t ignore the lure of the newsroom. He got a job at the Ottawa Citizen, and moved to the Star to cover Parliament Hill in 1976.
“I said I’d never work at the Star because of my father (Beland) … When I started, I was on probation, and as far as I was concerned so was the Star.”
He didn’t look back. In his four decades at the Star, he witnessed history as a reporter, wrote editorials, doled out assignments as a deputy editor. He became editor, publisher and chairman of the board. Now the adventure is ending, and he hopes this era is remembered for continuing the legacy of standing up for people who aren’t heard, for making a difference.
“The Toronto Star is the great progressive newspaper of Toronto, Ontario and Canada,” he says. “And I would like to think that I built on the legacy.”