Our history:
Columnist Stephen Hume refl ects on 100 years of publishing — and how the content we produce, while packaged and delivered in diff erent ways, still drives conversation over the water coolers.
As a kid growing up surrounded by farm fields more than 60 years ago, one of my chores involved bringing in the milk.
The milkman delivered it in battered cream- coloured metal canisters. They looked like the ones harried dads try to knock over at the fair to win a purple monkey. On a frosty morning — memory tells me there were more of them ( and they were frostier) back then, but memory has a way of playing tricks — the milk would freeze, pushing up like a little hat.
This top was cream because the milk wasn’t separated or homogenized. It was tempting for a small boy to lick off the iced cream. I tried it once, got a resounding smack from my mother for being greedy and thereafter deferred the pleasure.
The milk went into the ice box. The ice came in a block. It was delivered by a man with a horse- drawn wagon. Fresh vegetables didn’t come from the supermarket. They were delivered by a man with an opensided Model- T truck.
Later, the milkman began delivering in glass bottles, all the rage and much easier to sterilize at the dairy. Another new thing: the cream had vanished. Now the milk was homogenized. It would soon spin through a range of permutations: two- per- cent milk, one- per- cent milk, fat- free milk, half cream and half milk, 18- per- cent cream, 32- percent cream, chocolate, organic, organic eggnog, even an oxymoronic fat- free eggnog.
The milkman eventually stopped delivering, less overhead for the dairy. We delivered our own milk from the grocery store — still in bottles at first, then in cardboard cartons. Then in plastic jugs, followed by polyethylene sacks, followed by waxed cardboard boxes, followed by tetra- packs. Quarts gave way to litres.
Today my milk — from an organic farm — is delivered in bottles once again and, 60 years on, my morning chore is once again to get up early, retrieve the milk and put it in the automated, intelligent descendant of the ice box, the refrigerator.
Despite all these changes in delivery and packaging, the milk is still milk.
I’ve used this parable before, but as the newspaper for which I write celebrates its first century — a debatable date, mind you, since through its takeovers, amalgamations and ownership permutations The Vancouver Sun can claim a pedigree through The News-Advertiser, which reaches back to 1886 — the parallel is worth making again.
The design, typefaces, layout and delivery systems of The Vancouver Sun have changed as often as the milk packaging. From black and white engravings to full colour to stunning digital galleries; from men with ink- stained aprons and mallets dogging down sticks of handset type to high- speed offset presses to inkless, paperless online editions delivered to smartphones while subscribers wait for their coffee.
Whether we’re celebrating a 100th birthday or a 126th, there’s one thing that’s been constant. Milk is still milk and news is still news regardless of the delivery vehicle or, as we say in these digital days, the platform. And just as there’s still a market for milk, there’s still a market hungry for news. We’re a long way from 1912, but in the most important aspect — the content — we’re still the same.
The enduring value of this newspaper, and of other newspapers as we go through our Gutenberg moment in digital media, is not the form, it’s the content. It’s the depth and shape of news that gives readers a sense of the continuing texture, atmosphere and meaning of life in their community and, of course, in the broader world in which Vancouver is now seamlessly embedded.
Newspapers like this one matter not just because they record events and provide useful information, but because they enable a public conversation about those events and what they signify.
One problem with the new medium is that it consists of so many small market segments serving so many voices on so many self- absorbed subjects that it’s been described as simultaneously broadening and shallowing the discourse. The blogosphere: a galaxy wide and a molecule deep, somebody once observed.
The Vancouver Sun, The Province, National Post, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen and Prince George Citizen all matter because they deploy trained reporters to cover the news, reporters who serve as interpreters and intermediaries, and who produce a diverse, multi- faceted perspective. And yes, editors are gatekeepers.
The media mediates. Newspapers like these can and do assign reporters to the same news beat for years, for decades, sometimes for entire careers, creating a pool of collective, intergenerational knowledge about the history of current events and what drives them.
Few bloggers have the time or the intimate access to sources earned only through years of contact to deal comprehensively with a really big, complex or dangerous story — like Vancouver’s missing women, bloody gang wars or political corruption.
One of the most important things newspapers do is the very thing that they are often vilified for doing by new media pundits whose agendas haven’t been served. Newspapers’ distinctive editorial judgments — like them or not — bring a sense of order to the chaotic unfolding of events in communities.
They make possible a coherent public conversation about the meaning of the world.
And in essence, that’s all a newspaper is, a community having a collective public conversation with and about itself, sometimes an argument, sometimes a commiseration, but always the discourse that is community life.
The news, a long- dead city editor told me not long after The Vancouver Sun’s 50th birthday, is what the public is talking about in the beer parlour. Good reporters find out not only what readers are talking about tonight, but what they’re going to be talking about tomorrow night.
Good editors make sure they know what it is they should be talking about.
Preparing to write this column, I looked at the first edition of The Vancouver Sun. Nothing much has changed. The stories of Feb. 12, 1912, might have popped up on Feb. 12, 2012, and would doubtless have received the same play in the newspaper.
The big story was about a protest downtown on Powell Street that turned ugly when police decided to disperse a crowd of up to 8,000 “free- speech advocates” who had gathered in defiance of a new bylaw banning such political gatherings — particularly if they happened to involve socialists.
This one had been organized by the Industrial Workers of the World and the cops moved in when “a speaker who appeared to be Russian sought to address the crowd.” He left peaceably enough when instructed to do so, but when people on the sidewalks didn’t depart fast enough, out came the billy clubs — and so did James Hawthornthwaite, the MLA from Nanaimo, who then delivered a “fiery address.” The Vancouver Sun responded, a tad waspishly, “Things to which the Socialists seem to object: Capital, Wage scales, Monarchies, Democracies, the Bourgeois class ( not defined but apparently to be despised), The law, The flag, The police, Jail, the Mayor, Attorney- General Bowser, The church, the press, Life in general.”
We’ve had a few of these ruckuses over the years and The Vancouver Sun has covered them all.
And you thought Occupy Vancouver was something new.
Inside the paper, under the headline “Whiskey made him warlike,” was a humorous story about a drunk named Campbell, apprehended by Patrolman Shields at the corner of Cordova and Seymour while “listing to starboard but with all canvas spread.”
Campbell took exception to being taken in hand, reportedly. An altercation ensued. Campbell was arrested and charged.
Citizen Campbell’s explanation for the circumstance was as follows: “It was like this, I had taken two drinks of whiskey and was walking along peaceably when someone delivered a kick that would have done justice to a rugby champion.
“Ordinarily I am of peaceable disposition, but there are limits. I might have said something about ‘ getting’ somebody but not my friend, the officer.”
“Well, let us understand this thing,” said his worship with a twinkle in his eye.
“That kick knocked the whiskey from its proper place into your head and disconcerted you?”
“Exactly!” quoth the prisoner.
“Well, you get home early after this,” cautioned Judge South, “and be careful the kind of kick you find in your whiskey. You may go.”
Other stories included: the suspected loss with all hands — including Vancouver’s former police chief John Mclaren — of a sailing schooner owned by Henry Edenshaw, “the wellknown Indian storekeeper at Masset,” while investigating an oil boom; a political rumpus over the city budget, which had earmarked $ 1 million to acquire land for parks and to develop a new fire hall; a professional soccer match — Victoria beat Nanaimo 3- 2; and so on.
Politics, protests, police officers accused of excessive zeal, municipal finance running amok, the latest sports, a dramatic tragedy, gossipy human comedy, erudite editorials and opinionated commentary — all the news from a hundred years ago that was, is and will be the currency of the daily newspaper’s content in The Vancouver Sun’s next century, whatever form it might take.