Daily News demise like a death in the family
Posted by lesmuise on February 15, 2008
By PETER DUFFY
Thu. Feb 14 - 5:26 AM
In its heyday, the Halifax Daily News was feisty and full of spunk, and made other Nova Scotia media outlets sit up and take notice. (Eric Wynne / Staff)
THE ANNOUNCEMENT hit like a bomb.
The Daily News has folded!
We were stunned. Had we heard correctly? Unfortunately, we had.
Monday morning, our competitor down the street, the tabloid we’d known affectionately as the Daily Snooze, went under. 
Just like that. Hardly a ripple. Gone, taking with it a history reaching back more than 30 years.
It happened so fast. The owners didn’t even allow the poor thing a chance to print its own obituary.
It was a shock and yet, not really. Here at The Chronicle Herald, we’d had an inkling its days were numbered for some time and so, I’d be willing to bet, did most of the men and women who worked there. At the very least, they must have been toiling with one eye over their shoulder.
Three different corporate owners in slightly more than a decade will do that to you.
The hard reality was the tabloid’s audience never came close to matching ours, no matter what imaginative new ideas it came up with to attract readers. But the curious thing was, it always seemed more.
Our stubborn competitor seemed to be everywhere. It was hard to go anywhere without seeing copies lying on tables, on counters, in coffee shops, fast-food joints and service stations.
Whenever I came across one, I’d grab it and read it, and therein lay the problem. Too many of us were in the habit of reading someone else’s copy; not enough of us were buying our own.
Not that our own circulation had been growing dramatically; it hadn’t. But it wasn’t draining away, either. Whatever we were doing, it seemed to be working because we were holding our own, bucking a national downward trend.
These are tough times for newspapers everywhere. Not only are advertising dollars in short supply but the pack of media outlets competing for them is larger and hungrier than ever before. Circulations are stagnant, fragmented or shrinking and, most worrisome of all, more and more readers, especially younger ones, are getting their daily fix from new media like the Internet.
Like The Herald, the Daily News was trying to find its bearings in cyberspace and, by all accounts, it wasn’t doing too badly. It boasted Canada’s first online edition and, when the end came, its readership was larger than for the newspaper itself. The problem was all those eyeballs weren’t translating into sufficient revenues to keep everything afloat.
Personally, I think the paper lost its way. Its various owners ignored its history; they were careless with the precocious spark that had been passed down by its predecessor, the feisty Bedford-Sackville Daily News.
Now there was my kind of newspaper! It was loud, boisterous and fearless from the start. It went after the kinds of stories that shook walls and rattled windows around metro. It championed the little guy and challenged authority with all guns blazing.
When I arrived in Halifax in 1980, I was so impressed with its spunk that I applied for a job. It was the first place I tried. (Co-founder David Bentley gave me an interview but never did get back to me. To this day, I still don’t know why.)
Now, to be fair, The Herald wasn’t ignoring all the juicy news flying around back then, but it moved at its own pace and reported in a much more restrained fashion. It was the paper of record, trying to be all things to all people across the province. It was an institution and, like all institutions, it needed time to evaluate this new day dawning and make the changes.
And change it did. In my time here, the roles of the two papers have almost reversed. The Herald has become the conscience of the community, the chronicler of injustice, the anticipator and exposer of official skulduggery.
And more. We’ve overcome our shyness and learned to make a joyful din about Nova Scotia, its people and their accomplishments. Heck, we’ve even developed a sense of humour!
Frankly, I believe much of the credit goes to the example set by the Daily News, when it was young, exciting and trailblazing.
The thing was, as we were emerging from our shell, the tabloid was becoming more subdued. Sure, it still went after the stories but its heart didn’t seem to be in it any longer. It was like the fire was going out.
Instead of yelling, it began to whisper. Scoop-wise, the paper had long since ceased to be our competition. That role had been assumed by Steve Murphy and the crew at CTV.
Which isn’t to say the Daily News didn’t continue to have an impact on us; it did. It showed us the way with its Sunday edition; it consistently put together excellent sports and entertainment packages; and its use of graphics and colour were in a class by themselves, until we invested in the technology to put on an impressive showing of our own.
Here in The Herald newsroom, Monday’s announcement felt like a death in the family. There was no cheering, no high-fiving. Instead, our mood was muted, reflecting the anguish we felt for the 90-plus staffers involved, many of whom we knew.
Those poor people, we murmured.
And as we mourned, we felt a sudden chill.
We shivered for the Daily News. We shivered for newspapers. And we shivered for ourselves.
Peter Duffy appears Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
March 13, 2008 at 12:21 pm
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