Technology has helped The Globe adapt for 180 years, but also brings new threats to its doorstep

This is an excerpt from A Nation’s Paper: The Globe and Mail in the Life of Canada, a collection of history essays from Globe writers past and present, coming this fall from Signal/McClelland & Stewart.

George Brown, who founded The Globe in 1844, always wanted a national audience for his paper. He envisioned a country that would stretch beyond the united colonies of Upper and Lower Canada (present-day Ontario and Quebec) and Atlantic Canada to include the vast lands to their north and west. To spread this message, he turned to new technologies that were revolutionizing Victorian society.

About two months after publishing The Globe’s first edition using a hand press that printed 200 copies an hour, Brown travelled to New York. There, he bought a rotary press from famed inventor Richard March Hoe that could produce 1,250 copies an hour. The state-of-the-art press transformed The Globe’s reach, allowing the weekly to start publishing twice every week by 1846, and daily by 1853.

But he didn’t stop there. After the electric telegraph arrived in Toronto, Brown signed a deal with one of his rivals, the British Colonist, to share the cost of a telegraph service from New York. The new technology was a game changer. Before the telegraph, most news travelled at the speed of sail or horse and rider. Now, it could be transmitted almost instantly. Brown later secured access to a second line from Montreal.

Brown also took advantage of improved roads and the new railway to deliver the paper into the southwestern communities that had then represented the limit of colonial settlement in Upper Canada.

His obsession with technology made perfect sense. Canada, even before Confederation, was such a large land and so thinly populated that any newspaper seeking to be national in scope needed to grasp any invention that solved the problems of distance and time.

All of this was expensive, but the investments paid off. By Confederation, The Globe’s circulation had surpassed that of any other newspaper in British North America – reaching 15,000 people, as of 1868, more than half of whom were outside the paper’s home in Toronto.

Brown established a template that future publishers have followed: Exploit new technology to establish and expand The Globe’s reach across the nation and around the world. More than once, this formula saved the paper.

L.T. Kellie, a darkroom technician at The Globe and Mail, develops Canada’s first wire-transmitted photo on Dec. 8, 1936, for publication in the next day’s paper. Associated Press’s shot of Wallis Simpson in France was relayed via phone and radio around the world. The Globe and Mail

The Globe spent the 1930s and 1940s investing in many new technologies, such as faster printing presses, shown on their first run on Jan. 2, 1938; a customized plane dubbed ‘The Flying Newsroom’; and the Bell mobile phone service that this switchboard operator is running in 1947. The Globe and Mail

Globe editors work at the rewrite desk in 1957, where a four-faced clock constantly reminds them of approaching deadlines. Once finished, their copy would be fed into pneumatic tubes to get to the composing room and the printing plant. The Globe and Mail

New technology made newspapers better-looking and cheaper to produce through the 20th century, but savings in manual labour came at a cost for some. Automation was the main grievance in a Toronto printer’s strike in 1964, which brought these picketers to the Globe loading dock. John Gillies/The Globe and Mail

Over the years, The Globe has celebrated several technological feats. The newspaper brought readers the first photograph wired to Canada on Dec. 9, 1936. (The photo was of Wallis Simpson. King Edward VIII’s decision to abdicate the throne to marry her dominated the news for weeks.) The Globe was the first subscriber to Bell’s new mobile telephone service, introduced in 1947, decades before the arrival of cellphones. (We predicted, somewhat prematurely, that “the day is rapidly approaching when Mr. Motorist will pick up a telephone receiver in his car and tell his wife that he is caught in a traffic jam on Avenue Road and won’t be driving into his garage for another seven minutes.”)

But when Roy Megarry arrived as publisher in 1978, he didn’t like what he saw. The Globe was shipping its six national editions across the country by air or post, which was costly and inefficient. Editors had to manually lay out, proof and adjust pages with new stories for each edition – an old-school approach that Megarry found infuriating.

More significantly, The Globe’s circulation was flatlining at around 300,000. It faced stiff competition in its primary market of Toronto; 60 per cent of the paper’s readers in the city also read the Toronto Star, which had lower ad rates and a much higher daily circulation of 500,000. The new Toronto Sun, launched after the demise of the Toronto Telegram, was also attracting readers.

The Globe's building in 1979, five years after its former occupant, the Toronto Telegram, closed up shop.The Globe and Mail

Megarry believed he had the answer to all these problems. The Globe could increase its circulation and justify higher ad rates by escaping the limits of the Toronto market and becoming a truly national newspaper. And the way to do that, he bluntly told the paper’s owners, was to invest in computer technology to deliver the paper by satellite.

“The Globe could never become the Star in Toronto,” says John Stackhouse, former editor-in-chief of The Globe. “And so, with the satellite, suddenly we were able to sell in Canada’s other biggest cities.”

When the Thomson family acquired the paper in 1980, they embraced the idea. On Oct. 23, 1980, The Globe and Mail was delivered for the first time across the country through microwave signals flashed by a satellite high above the Pacific Ocean to printing plants from the farthest corner of the Maritimes to the edge of the West Coast – “one giant leap,” the newspaper declared on its front page.

The shift transformed the paper’s business model. Before the satellite, in 1978, The Globe’s daily circulation outside Ontario was about 12,000 customers. By 1992, it had reached 120,000.

“Thank you for saving The Globe,” owner Kenneth Thomson told Megarry at the publisher’s retirement dinner in 1992. The paper that year had reached a record-breaking $37-million in profit.

“The Globe will need saving again, and again,” Megarry predicted in reply. He was right.

At a Montreal plant in 1980, Globe publisher Roy Megarry, his La Presse counterpart Roger Lemelin and Globe editor-in-chief Richard Doyle look at negatives of the first front page sent from Toronto by satellite. The page, shown by Globe compositor Bob Kelly, had a story explaining how a helium-neon laser scanned each page into data that the receiving plants, also using lasers, would reconstitute on film. The Globe and Mail

In 1999, Edward Greenspon, then-executive editor, approached publisher Phillip Crawley about establishing a news website for The Globe and Mail. The timing was tough: The Globe was embroiled in a newspaper war with the National Post, and that battle required management’s full attention.

The Globe had a static website at the time, created by Globe Information Services (GIS), which displayed high-level data and insights. It launched earlier than other webpages and had been a hit with techies, but the resource was not useful for a broader audience.

“What if the web posed an equal threat to The Globe as the newspaper war?” Greenspon recalls pondering. “What if we were losing out by not getting into the game and launching an internet-based breaking news service?”

In February, 2000, Crawley gave the green light for a news site that depended on GIS and newsroom collaboration.

The next 100 days were a frenzy. Greenspon travelled to newsrooms across the U.S., attended conferences and investigated best practices. He received advice on how to staff the website, which articles to post right away and which to hold onto. He also learned about the dangers of letting stories be too long.

Some marketers wondered whether The Globe was too old and stuffy a brand for the internet. Maybe it should use a different name, as some other publications had done. Greenspon and Crawley paid no heed. The paper intended to use its brand to expand its reach through the web.

A Globe homepage from 2000 features news on Bill Clinton's exit from the U.S. presidency, the Kursk submarine disaster and the Burnt Church lobster-fishing dispute in New Brunswick.

Globeandmail.com launched on June 19, 2000. A team of 17 web journalists repackaged content from the newspaper and updated readers with fast-breaking news. When terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, readers were glued to the website for the latest updates. When the federal Liberals chose a new leader in December, 2006, a team of Globe writers filed incessantly to the web. When an earthquake shook Ottawa in June, 2010, with people fleeing and buildings swaying, The Globe had a photo and a story online before any other news source.

But there was pushback, much of it from the newsroom itself. Some Globe journalists saw the website as a threat. Reporters did not want to share their work, considering it to be cannibalizing their journalism. Digital journalists were dubbed “bloggers” or “renegades,” and those words were not compliments. Eventually, however, all but the worst Luddites accepted that the medium didn’t matter; what mattered was preserving the paper’s integrity. “Everyone simply had to get on board,” Greenspon says.

Edward Greenspon, shown with Woodbridge chairman Kenneth Thomson in 2005, led the charge to develop globeandmail.com.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail

While globeandmail.com took steps to establish itself as a news website, elsewhere, another group of Globe staff were building a new online business.

That group, led by digital pioneer Lib Gibson, eventually became Globe Interactive, with its own offices on King Street in Toronto. Over the course of seven years, the team launched a stream of successful products that gave The Globe a reputation for digital innovation and boosted the bottom line of the business.

GlobeFund, launched in October, 1997, enabled users to track, rank and filter mutual fund data, revolutionizing access. GlobeInvestor allowed users to track their stock movements multiple times a day, instead of waiting for the paper to deliver the previous day’s data.

Gibson and Crawley persuaded their bosses to shift Globe careers advertising online, through what became Workopolis in January, 1999. It was a bold move, given the founding partners were two long-time print rivals, The Globe and the Toronto Star. But it worked: Workopolis rapidly became Canada’s top jobs site, and La Presse soon joined. Within a few years, Workopolis was contributing half of The Globe’s profits. (In 2006, The Globe sold its 40-per-cent stake in Workopolis to its Torstar partner.) GlobeInvestorGold, a subscription site delivering real-time stock quotes without a 20-minute delay, opened up another revenue stream for The Globe.

Nevertheless, despite all of these innovations, a harsh new truth had emerged: While the internet offered many opportunities, it also posed a lethal threat to every newspaper, including The Globe.

Globe digital pioneer Lib Gibson, second from right, toasts the success of a new careers website in 1999. With her are Toronto Star publisher John Honderich, left; his vice-president of electronic media, Bruce Annan; and Globe publisher Phillip Crawley, right. Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail

Rahemin Nanji of Toronto hunts for jobs on Workopolis in 2001, two months after he was laid off from an e-commerce firm. Workopolis was a profitable venture for The Globe, which co-developed it with the rival Star before selling its share in 2006. Tibor Kolley/The Globe and Mail

From the very beginning of the internet, most news content was free – and readers assumed it would remain that way.

Publishers debated how to monetize the huge readership they were reaching on the web. Could advertising, which sustained the print edition, support the digital product? Was the answer to charge for a digital subscription and introduce online paywalls?

While owners dithered, walls caved in. Many city papers found that classified ads evaporated with the arrival of Craigslist in the early 2000s, though The Globe was less affected. Then, tech giant Google and the fast-rising social-media platform Facebook hollowed out much of the digital ad revenue that remained. Smartphones replaced desktops, laptops and tablets as the primary venue for reading news. How could you make money displaying news content on a phone?

Too often, newspaper owners in Canada and the U.S. responded with layoffs and cuts, leading to poorer-quality journalism and diminishing readership. Newspapers started closing down. The Guelph Mercury. The Halifax Daily News. The Cambridge Reporter. The Prince Rupert Daily News. Dozens of other weeklies and dailies.

To avoid such a fate, The Globe had to act fast. In 2010, the paper relaunched its print edition, with new state-of-the-art presses and glossy stock for some pages. In 2012, the newspaper announced the rollout of its digital subscription package, providing free online access to print subscribers and allowing online-only readers access to 10 free articles a month.

Staff watch designer Jason Chiu prepare the first edition of the new Globe on Sept. 30, 2010. That evening, editor-in-chief John Stackhouse gave a talk at the Royal Conservatory about the redesign and digital projects such as Behind the Veil, an in-depth look at Afghanistan that had just won an Emmy. Roger Hallett and Moe Doiron/The Globe and Mail

Chiu's front pages from early in the 2010 redesign made use of new German presses that could accurately print a wider array of colours, including on glossy pages that were the first of their kind in North America.

Then, in 2015, The Globe turned to artificial intelligence. A proprietary system named Sophi helped predict which content was most valuable to readers, in turn helping maximize digital subscription revenue.

Sophi became a vital tool in The Globe’s editorial process, allowing editors to determine, through extensive analytics, what kind of content audiences value and are willing to pay for. In August, 2023, The Globe sold Sophi to Mather Economics, a global subscription and revenue management company.

While Sophi has been important, it is only a tool. Major investigations remain part of the paper’s mandate, regardless of analytics, as they have since The Globe first detailed widespread abuse at the Kingston Penitentiary in the 1840s. Whether it is probing the struggle of thalidomide survivors as they age, the underreporting of sexual assaults by police, Chinese interference in Canadian elections, or government efforts to suppress information, the mandate of the paper remains to investigate and report.

Artificial intelligence is expected by many to change nearly every facet of society, with both investors and developers salivating at its potential. The perils of this new technology are equally plain: deepfake videos and photos of politicians, or even songs mimicking celebrities, are running rampant.

A set of four initial images created by the Midjourney text-to-image AI generator. — In 2023, The Globe created these images in Midjourney for a quiz to see whether readers could distinguish real photos from AI-generated ones.Midjourney

For journalism, AI stands as both a threat and an opportunity. Disinformation and misinformation are becoming more extensive and harder to detect, even as public trust in Canadian news declines – hovering around 40 per cent in Canada in 2024, according to a Reuters poll.

The Globe has developed guidelines to harness this technology while preventing errors and abuses. The new rules include close scrutiny of AI-generated research and data, a prohibition on AI-generated writing for publication and alerting readers to any AI-generated visuals.

Still, other challenges remain. Will digital subscriptions grow to the level needed to preserve the core functions of the newsroom and the bureaus across the country and around the world? Can supplementary revenue streams help the bottom line without distracting from the core mission of the organization? The Globe is a newspaper and site that also hosts luxury cruises, while renting out an event space at its Toronto headquarters for weddings and conferences.

For 180 years, this newspaper has used every tool at its disposal to explain what is happening and why it matters to readers across this vast land. We don’t plan to stop.

Temur Durrani, The Globe’s former technology reporter, is now a national reporter based in Winnipeg.