Your Vancouver Sun is here to stay

The first words to appear in the editorial columns of The Vancouver Sun, the space the newspaper reserves for its own expression of opinion upon public events, disclosed that its sympathies were Liberal but that the owners’ goal was a publication that would reflect credit upon its publishers, the city and the province.

Their optimism reflected Vancouver’s, for 1912 was an extraordinary year. The city’s population, a scant 27,000 at the turn of the century, had swollen to more than 100,000 on a tsunami of immigrants. The growth had sparked a real estate boom, peaking just as presses began to roll. City lots had typically sold for under $ 200 a decade earlier, now a lot at the corner of Granville and Robson was priced at $ 250,000. Conservative Premier Richard Mcbride was stoking the boiler for his vision of a railway to Prince George and the Pacific Great Eastern Railway was incorporated, already controversial and accompanied by a whiff of scandal that would still be there 100 years later.

In 1912, Vancouver got its first professional hockey when the Millionaires blew out the New Westminster Royals 8- 3 at the Patrick brothers’ Denman Arena. And the Vancouver police department became the first in Canada to hire female officers, the second police force in the country to unionize — and lost its first officer in the line of duty when Const. Lewis Byers was shot and killed, his murderer later dying himself in a gun battle with police on the waterfront. The University of British Columbia held its first convocation. The province got its first pulp mill at Powell River and appointed H. R. Macmillan chief forester, two harbingers of changes that would transform the economic landscape. Conservative Premier Mcbride would call an election and crush his Liberal opposition. The unsinkable Titanic would sink, carrying to the bottom Charles Melville Hays, founder of Prince Rupert and president of Grand Trunk Pacific Railway.

It was an exhilarating time to launch a newspaper.

“We do not propose here to give many promises,” that first Vancouver Sun editorial said. “We know that we will be judged by our performances quite regardless of any promises which might be made here. What we do want is that our readers should feel that THE SUN is their paper and has an individual meaning to every citizen of British Columbia.”

A century later — and what a century it has been! — this newspaper is still the leading publication in Vancouver, in B. C. and Western Canada. We know from the vigorous and voluminous correspondence from our readers that readers do feel The Vancouver Sun is their newspaper and that it does have meaning to them.

Readers take it upon themselves to provide editorial criticism for what they perceive to be our occasional shortcomings and errors of judgment, those inevitable defects of daily journalism that the original editorial warned would occur. They also laud coverage of what interests them and draw attention to coverage they feel lacking. In short, they represent the fulfilment of the founding editors’ best hopes.

The first edition of The Vancouver Sun promised a newspaper that would be reliable, would be the latest and best informed, and would offer “Real News” that was brightly written. How well have we measured up?

One indicator is the frequency with which readers temper their criticism of editorial judgments with praise for the wisdom and perceptiveness displayed by our stable of remarkable writers and reporters.

Since the inception of the National Newspaper Awards more than half a century ago, the forum in which the efforts of Canada’s best journalists are reviewed by their peers, 83 of The Vancouver Sun’s reporters, columnists, design editors, feature writers, photographers, cartoonists and editorial writers have been finalists, as has the newspaper as a whole. Forty- three times in virtually every category in this annual competition these exemplary journalists have been chosen as the best in the country.

Regionally our writers, photographers, editors and digital specialists have equally high achievements in serving the newspaper’s readers a smorgasbord of news, information, analysis and opinions about the city and the province in which they live. Over the past decade, they have produced more than 500 pages of special reports investigating everything from the environmental state of the Strait of Georgia to the internal ecology of the Hells Angels. We have investigated the RCMP right into the highest levels of its headquarters, winning a Roland Michener Award for meritorious public service journalism for doing so in 1977. Long before government, we conducted our own inquiry into the women missing from Vancouver’s mean streets. Child poverty, the shrinking middle class, climate change, political corruption, fish farming, B. C.’ s best golf courses, energy policy, organized crime, terrorism, the fall of governments and the rise of new ones, hockey riots, human tragedies and triumphs of the spirit, where we’ve come from and where we’re going — The Vancouver Sun’s astonishing array of award- winning journalistic talent has chronicled this city’s rise from a muddy resource camp to the glittering metropolis we inhabit today.

In 1987, the Jack Webster Foundation began presenting annual awards to British Columbia’s own journalists for exemplary work. Since then, more than 200 Vancouver Sun writers, editors and photographers have been finalists for these highly competitive prizes. More than 80 of them have been chosen the best professional journalists in their category for that year. Since the newspaper’s earliest days, Vancouver Sun journalists have produced a whole library of books about their city, their province, their country and the events that shaped them all.

A newspaper is more than the journalists who provide its most recognizable face, of course. It is also those who bring readers useful and important news from advertisers about products and services, those who assemble and print the newspaper on sophisticated presses, and those who administer its financial and business operations. It’s people answering phones, working in the mail room, managing computer systems and human resources. It’s those who deliver it to the market, whether in physical form or in the new online formats of the digital revolution that brings your daily news to devices ranging from tablets to smartphones.

All these individuals make it possible for the journalists to do the outstanding jobs they do in fulfilling that promise made in our first edition that the readers would be the ultimate judge of our performance.

“THE MORNING SUN is here and we believe, to stay,” said our first edition’s first editorial. And here we are, a century later, affirming once again the principles that have served us so well. As we have served our readers, their city and their province over the intervening decades, the Great Depression, two world wars, social upheavals, vast demographic changes and the coming and going of 26 provincial governments — some with our blessings and some with “good riddance.”

A new century unfolds. For good and ill, joy and sorrow, it promises to be no less exciting than the last.

So what better way to mark our centennial than to reaffirm the promise of that first editorial? Whatever changes the next 100 years will bring, your Sun is here to stay.

And, as our founders promised, so long ago: It will be our constant endeavour to produce content in the highest sense, that will reflect credit upon those who create it and upon the city and the province in which it is created.