Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Halifax Loses News

My condolences to the city of Halifax. The Halifax Daily News shut down this week, rather suddenly, so suddenly in fact that many of the 92 employees who were let go apparently found out from other media outlets.

According to Kelly Toughill at JSource:
The Daily News has been the plucky underdog of Nova Scotia journalism since it was founded as a suburban weekly almost 30 years ago. It has gone through several owners and styles since then.

Editor Jack Romanelli brought a new dedication to public policy journalism when he took over as head almost two years ago. The paper probed difficult issues such as racism, patronage and city planning that were sometimes ignored by its larger rival, the Chronicle Herald.


King's Journalism Review has posted an online tribute to the News.

The worse news for Halifax is that they are getting a 'Metro' instead. Toronto already has one and it's not so much a 'newspaper' as a few rewritten wire stories used as packaging for alot of ads. Even for free they occasionally have to send university kids into the street to try to push them into people's hands. It exists almost purely to kill trees.

My advice to the suddenly unemployed journalists and photographers would be: Keep going. Register a domain (make sure it is viewable on Blackberries and cell phones), file for UI and keep doing what you do. Part of the reason for the decline of newspapers is the rise in online journalism. Although I cannot find the article at the moment even the editor of the New York Times has said that he doesn't know if there will be a print edition in 5 years and without the need to print your overhead goes way down. You obviously love journalism, you obviously want Halifax and though they may not buy papers, people still want news.

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