A Good Day's Work (17 page)

I
T'S
the bleak January of 2010, and in the town of Montague, Prince Edward Island, a middle-aged man wrapped in a blue sweater and sipping a medium Tim Hortons black coffee folds his long body into an office chair. Paul MacNeill's fingers dart across the keys of his MacBook Pro. After a burst of frenzied typing he pauses, thin wrists resting on his cluttered desk, broad Hebridean head angled toward the screen. He has things on his mind.

A day earlier the premier of this tiny province shuffled his Lilliputian cabinet, dumping the washouts, shifting the underperformers and axing a whole government department. Somehow the rest of Canada went on with life. In Prince Edward Island, though, the very ground tilted. The smallest
province in Canada is also the most political. One anecdote, to me, illustrates this fact: in 2003, Hurricane Juan, a category 2 hurricane, swept through Prince Edward Island, leaving two-thirds of its households without power. The next day 83 percent of the province's eligible voters still managed to cast a ballot in the provincial election. Many of them did so by candlelight.

So yes, you could say that elections are serious business in a province when a couple of dozen votes here or there can swing an entire election. Politics does matter on an island where to the victors customarily go the good jobs, nice sinecures and other assorted spoils. And so—as he has done 670 or so times since 1997—the publisher of the weekly
Eastern Graphic
lifts his hands from his desk and types the introduction to his column:

These are not the words of comfort. These are not the words of a man whose goal is to get along. Who knows what's good for him. Who knows how his proverbial bread is buttered. If a census taker showed up at the door of his comfortable aubergine bungalow in 2010, then Paul might describe himself as a widowed father of two preteens, a small-town businessman who wants to keep the girls in braces and ensure that the twenty people who work for him have bread on the table and a roof over their head. Technically that would be true. That just wasn't why I was here.

Winter on Prince Edward Island: I had been better organized in my day. Time just seemed to be of the essence. Magazines and newspapers were dying. Newsrooms merged, slimmed down, sometimes just vanished. Everywhere, on-the-ground reporting—the minutiae and intangible essence of a place and its people—was disappearing. “The news” was being replaced by the continuous loop of the Net, the mediocrity of the blogosphere and the conflicted windbags from the left and right that I heard on satellite radio as I drove over the Confederation Bridge from the New Brunswick mainland. “Real journalism” was something old-timers jawed about sitting by themselves over their soup in the seniors residence.

I know, I know: name an industry that isn't facing some life-or-death challenge in this digital age. Except this is my business. Work that seemed both worthy and assured when I
graduated middle of the pack from journalism school at the University of King's College in 1981. Halifax back then was a vital enough news town to support two dailies and ensure that an aspirant kid reporter could land three decent job offers without leaving the city limits. Now there's only a single paper, the one where I work, which is one of the last two independent dailies in the entire country. Every journalism outlet I know of is scrambling, trying this and that, desperate to make sense of it all. In time a new order will undoubtedly take shape. Maybe Wikipedia and citizen journalism will write the first draft of history and become the caretaker of our collective memory. For now, this cannot be a good thing for any democracy. During the summer of 2009 I wrote some speeches for the man who would became premier of Nova Scotia. One morning I was putting the last-minute touches on a statement to be made at campaign headquarters. A couple of decades earlier—when I started covering provincial elections in this province—a campaign press conference would have been attended by some forty journalists who pored over every word the campaigner had to say. This time I hit send and peeked outside my door. Precisely one newspaper correspondent, a single TV reporter and a writer for an online outlet stood there. Après Google, it seemed, the void.

The demise of journalism hasn't been as stark in Prince Edward Island, where the entire press corps—some private radio stations, the CBC and two dailies, including the
Guardian
in Charlottetown, which boasts that it “covers the island like the dew”—isn't much changed over time. One day in 2010 I ran a thumb down the list of Atlantic Journalism Award winners. Of the roughly nine hundred different winners since
the awards began in 1981, by my count around fifty came from Prince Edward Island. Paul MacNeill is on the list. He's won awards as the best community newspaper columnist in the country. He's also the most honoured editor in the fifty-seven-year history of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, from whom he's won a raft of awards for his opinion writing over competitors in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

His dad, Jim, the founder of the
Eastern Graphic
, was also feted by the same organization, and is the only person to win both the Golden Quill for editorial writing and the Eugene Cervi Award for lifetime achievement in the same year. A little research also reveals this interesting fact: in 1987 the Michener Award for excellence in public service journalism in Canada, one of the industry's highest honours, went to CBC News and Southam News, which between them would have had a couple of million viewers and readers. The runner-up was the Montague
Eastern Graphic
, with a total readership of 5,989.

As an on-again, off-again reader for a couple of decades, I wasn't remotely surprised. I have always loved newspapers. But I adore community papers, most of them weeklies, which I devour wherever I travel. Who seriously can resist picking up a copy of the
Mile Zero News
or the
Oktotoks Western Wheel
, both from Alberta, the
Squamish Chief
or the
Gabriola Sounder
—published in British Columbia—Saskatchewan's
Watrous Manitou, World-Spectator
and
Prairie Post
, the
Bugle Observer
(Woodstock, New Brunswick) or the
Packet
(Clarenville, Newfoundland) or the
Northern Pen
(St. Anthony, Newfoundland). My home province not only has such inspirational-sounding publications as the
Light, Vanguard, Queen's
County Advance
and
Progress Enterprise
, but also a community paper called the
Casket
, along with the
Inverness Oran
—part of which, wonderfully, is written in Scottish Gaelic.

Reporters from the
Globe and Mail
and the CBC seldom go to off-the-beaten-track places like Saguenay, Estevan, Petrolia, Kamsack or Hay River unless a mine caves in, a fishing boat goes down or a vacationing cabinet minister strangles his mistress. Sure, these locales might warrant a dateline when politicians hit the campaign trail during elections. Sometimes stories magically appear when the weather turns nice and reporters from bigger places can expense their fly-fishing trip by filing a “colour” piece that fits some editor in Toronto's preconceptions about the quaint rural life. But let me let you in on a little secret: there's only one place to find out the truth about existence in those rural areas where most of us once lived: in the pages of a weekly paper like the
Eastern Graphic
.

Potato farmers, hardware store clerks and gas station owners spread the
Eastern Graphic
out on the counter and read it front to back. Seniors—pensions dwindling, options narrowing—push back the dishes and, with a snap, unfurl it at the dinner table. Bureaucrats in cramped Charlottetown offices lay down the paper with a sigh, knowing that the phone will soon ring and on the other end will be a politician all lathered up over something Paul has written.

To them a real newspaper printed with real ink by people who really care still matters. Paul—with his independent streak and his insistence on telling their one-of-a-kind stories—gives their ordinary lives meaning. In this Internet-dependent day and age, it is easy to forget that a Google search is not necessarily knowledge. That someone somewhere must
draw straight from the source. And that the powers that be must always be held accountable. My question is, a century from now, who will the historians consult? Where will a person turn to learn what these towns, which once made up most of this country, were like? A blog? A tweet? A podcast? Or will they stand in the bowels of a library somewhere, wet an index finger on the tip of a tongue and begin to turn the pages of a paper like the
Eastern Graphic
? That's why I was here.

BY 8:30 a.m. Paul MacNeill has been up for three hours. He's packed Erin, twelve, and Katie, nine, off to school. He's been to the gym. Now he's back home. He logs on, checks and sends some emails and peruses his usual websites. Then he throws on his dark Harry Rosen overcoat and yellow, grey and white scarf, locks up the house and gets into his new-looking Ford Explorer, black with a sunroof top. Paul is about six feet two, although the “MacNeill hunch” makes him look shorter, and lean enough, with surprisingly small hands. At forty-three he's got dark hair that's gone grey on the sides, alert eyes and a neatly trimmed goatee. With the height, the hair and the duds he exudes the kind of regal presence that wouldn't look out of place in a Starbucks lineup in any metropolitan centre. Except this is Montague—population 1,800—which means that he wheels into the Main Street Tim Hortons for his morning blast of caffeine.

Paul grew up a few blocks from here in the century-old house where his dad, Jim, and mom, Shirley, first began putting out the
Eastern Graphic
. People always said, “He's Jim's
son—he'll work for the paper.” Yet there was never pressure to join the family business. Growing up around ideas and in an environment that engaged the mind just rubbed off. After high school Paul enrolled in the journalism program at a local community college. His first job, working for his dad, was startlingly short-lived. “I'm not really sure of the specific issue,” he recalls. “I'm guessing it had something to do with a younger son being a goof and a father calling him on it. Long story short is we ended up in the dark room yelling at each other. Whether he got ‘You're fired' out before I said ‘I quit' is a matter of historical debate. Suffice to say there was just cause.”

Paul headed to the mainland, where he landed a job at a feisty weekly on the edge of Cape Breton Island, until the lure of better pay and bigger stories drew him to the Truro, Nova Scotia, bureau of Halifax's
Chronicle Herald
, the biggest daily in Atlantic Canada. His big break was one of those fluky things that tend to energize journalism careers. The
Herald
's assignment desk was short of hands on May 9, 1992, when a fireball shot through the Westray coal mine, trapping twenty-six men underground. Paul grabbed a notebook, jumped in his Honda Accord and headed east. I met him for the first time at the disaster site—a tall, focused guy who seemed to know he finally had a story to ride. He didn't get home from Pictou County, Nova Scotia, until nine days later. But his coverage of the Westray disaster and its aftermath earned him a National Newspaper Award nomination.