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.
An idyllic setting in the eastern Ontario town of Almonte includes a bridge over tumbling falls on the Mississippi River, and benches beside the Trans Canada Trail that runs along its banks. One of them is dedicated to Val Sears, who died in Almonte in 2016. The plaque reads “The Most Powerful Words in the English Language … ‘Let Me Tell You A Story.’”
Val Sears was one of the best storytellers this country has ever known. He was also at the very centre of one of two great newspaper wars that shaped the landscape of Canadian media.
The Globe and Mail stood on the sidelines of one of those wars, but was at the very heart of the other.
Nurses at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children read the news on Nov. 27, 1948, about Globe publisher George McCullagh's acquisition of The Telegram newspaper.The Globe and Mail
The notion of the newspaper war dates from the late 19th century, when Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the New York World, and William Randolph Hearst, owner of the New York Journal, went at it tooth and nail over the Spanish-American War, prohibition and presidential politics.
In the 1950s, Toronto experienced its own great newspaper war, when The Telegram and Daily Star each sought to triumph over the other. It was a period that Sears, who spent three decades as a writer and editor at the Star, captured magnificently in his 1988 book, Hello Sweetheart … Get Me Rewrite: Remembering the Great Newspaper Wars.
Though he had once claimed, “the Telegram was one paper that came with the garbage already wrapped in it,” he later said that was not so. “It wasn’t garbage,” he wrote. “It was the fragrant leavings of contemporary history. It was the refuse of a battle between the Star and the Tely that consumed 10 years of our lives, some of our loves, all of our skill. And oh what a lovely war.”
The mercurial newspaper baron George McCullagh – who in 1936 acquired and merged The Globe with the Mail and Empire, creating today’s Globe and Mail – launched the war when he acquired The Toronto Telegram in 1948 for the express purpose of taking on “Holy Joe” Atkinson’s Toronto Star, which conspicuously crusaded for social justice. The two men despised each other.
“The outstanding thing that brought me into this evening-newspaper field was to knock off the Star,” McCullagh told Tely employees the day after he bought the paper. (After Atkinson died in 1948, the Star was helmed by president Harry Hindmarsh, whom McCullagh also despised, and then publisher Beland Honderich, whom Sears called “a tough, unforgiving man.”)
McCullagh, who fought mental illness his whole adult life, was found dead in a pond near his home in 1952, having most likely died by suicide. His role as publisher of The Telegram was filled by a young John Bassett from the Sherbrooke Record, a newspaperman Sears described as “a big, powerful, wide-striding, high-rolling man, with piercing blue eyes that could make nuns and virgins wistful.”
Globe and Mail city editor Doug MacFarlane became The Telegram’s editor, “inspiring in reporters an equal mixture of fear and worship,” recalled Sears. MacFarlane’s counterpart at the Star was soft-spoken Borden Spears, who would later tell a biographer, “I knew at the time what we were doing wasn’t respectable. But it was so much goddam fun.”
Doug MacFarlane, right, helps out with radio play-by-play of the King's Plate in 1948 with fellow journalists from The Globe and CFRB.John Boyd/The Globe and Mail
During this period, the fight escalated between the Star (circulation approximately 400,000) and the Tely (approximately 200,000).
The Telegram mastered the art of the sensationalist headline: “Radioactive human roams Toronto streets.” “Boyd, killer pals on loose – police ‘shoot on sight.’ ” It created entertainment pages and an “action line” column to advocate for readers who had run-ins with businesses.
The Star expanded its classified ads to great success. The Tely pushed to get the first woman to the North Pole.
The two papers were profoundly different from The Globe and Mail, which stayed largely above the fray, focusing on expanding its business and national coverage.
“Unlike writers on the other papers,” wrote Michael Enright in Canadian Newspapers: The Inside Story, “Globe reporters shunned the personal approach to stories. A cardinal sin was the use of the personal pronoun in a story. The Star and the Tely thrived on the first person, I-was-there approach, thinking it brought the reader closer to the writer and the newspaper.”
The Star and Tely fought over coverage of the notorious Boyd Gang’s string of bank robberies and prison escapes. When 17-year-old Marion McDowell went missing from Lovers’ Lane, the Tely brought over “Fabian of the Yard.” With a young Sears assigned to accompany him, Robert Fabian, who had once headed up Scotland Yard’s murder squad, drifted about the city and its bars, finding nothing.
The Globe reports on Sept. 10, 1954, after Marilyn Bell completed her swim across Lake Ontario.
The best tale of the wars concerned a young swimmer named Marilyn Bell, who was the most famous Canadian of her time. Only 16 years old, she was determined to swim across Lake Ontario, a distance of 52 kilometres. As a 1954 promotion, the Canadian National Exhibition had decided to sponsor English Channel swimmer Florence Chadwick in a solo crossing, but Bell wanted to race Chadwick. They set out on Sept. 8. At midnight, Bell passed Chadwick, who by dawn was vomiting and had to be pulled from the water.
Bell was instantly the biggest story in the country – and the Star had it, having signed a contract for exclusive access that included a Star reporter in the boat accompanying her. Bassett had turned down a chance to sponsor her for $5,000 and was now deeply regretting it. The swim was a sensation. About 150,000 people had gathered at Sunnyside Beach to await her arrival.
MacFarlane came up with a plan to dress reporter Dorothy Howarth as a nurse and have her sneak into an ambulance to interview the swimmer. The Star thwarted the scheme, whisking Bell off to a suite in the Royal York Hotel.
No matter. The Tely decided to tell her story anyway. Howarth wrote the account as though she were Bell herself. The front-page piece appeared over Bell’s faked signature: “Marilyn’s story – I felt I was swimming forever.” It was compelling stuff: “… the eels kept coming around me,” Howarth (as Bell) wrote. “I could feel them. One of them fastened on my leg. I could feel its sucking mouth. It slowed me a little and finally I kicked it off …”
Years later, Bell would tell MacFarlane that, “I liked my story better in the Tely than my story in the Star.”
But the Star’s emphasis on growing revenue through classified ads proved more successful than the Tely’s attention-grabbing headlines. In 1971, Bassett folded the paper. In perhaps the greatest of all Canadian newspaper wars, the Star was the clear winner.
Conrad Black autographs copies of the National Post for staff on Oct. 27, 1998, the day of the newspaper's first edition.Andy Clark/Reuters
The Post's arrival started a journalism arms race between national and local news outlets across Canada.Tom Hanson/The Canadian Press
The Globe and Mail could not remain aloof during a later great Canadian newspaper war, because it was the target.
By the late 1990s, rising media mogul Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. had taken over both the Southam chain, which included many of the major dailies across the country. Unable to purchase The Globe and Mail from the Thomson family, Black determined that his company would create its own national newspaper that would both compete with The Globe and dominate the national-news dialogue.
The idea was to build a general daily called the National Post around the existing Financial Post, which Black also owned. The Post would offer a conservative alternative to The Globe, which Black and others perceived to be too aligned with the liberal establishment. It would push to unite the right – at that point fractured between the old Progressive Conservative Party and the Reform movement that had risen in the West – and it would be distributed across the country through the facilities of the various Hollinger dailies.
Though Black considered it a favourable time for such an undertaking, others had misgivings. As former Globe and Mail editor-in-chief John Stackhouse wrote in his 2015 book, Mass Disruption: Thirty Years on the Front Lines of a Media Revolution, newspaper advertising peaked in the United States in 1999 at US$65.8-billion annually. Fifteen years later, that number had plunged by more than half, as emerging internet giants such as Google and Facebook captured the market.
Undeterred, Black acquired a brilliant young Canadian magazine editor, Ken Whyte, who set about assembling an all-star cast of writers and columnists, cherry-picking freely from the best of the regional papers. He hired Toronto’s Christie Blatchford as the paper’s general columnist, Edmonton’s Cam Cole as its sports columnist and dozens of others, myself included, to cover everything from Parliament Hill to personal grooming.
It was a grand time to be a Canadian journalist. Those who initially balked at accepting Whyte’s invitation were offered tens of thousands of dollars in raises as well as a leased car to change sides.
Whyte brought in a brash and nervy young Brit, Martin Newland, from Black’s The Daily Telegraph to be his managing editor. Another recruit from the Telegraph, David Walmsley, would become The Globe’s editor-in-chief 15 years later.
The Post's senior leaders included publisher Don Babick and editor-in-chief Ken Whyte, top, and managing editor Martin Newland, bottom.Phill Snel; Daryl Visscher
The first edition of the National Post appeared on Oct. 27, 1998. The paper looked slick and smart. Alberta premier Ralph Klein pushed to “unite the right” in the lead news item. The paper was well designed and immensely readable.
A newspaper war was on.
The Post was bright and sharp and sexy. “Like Coke versus Pepsi, or McDonald’s versus Burger King, the Post frequently drew The Globe into its wake, at least for a time,” Stackhouse wrote. “Where Christie Blatchford went, [The Globe’s] Jan Wong might follow. The Post hired Rebecca Eckler to be its flirtatious female columnist. The Globe countered with Leah McLaren.”
Cost was not a factor in the early years at the Post. Most staff travelled business class. Black and his wife, columnist Barbara Amiel, celebrated the paper’s first anniversary with a huge gala held at the Royal Ontario Museum. They told staff that they could have an extra week off in summer to do anything they wished, so long as they wrote about it. (I took my son Gordon on a fly-fishing adventure.) When the Concorde took its final flight in 2003, the Post sent Blatchford to London to buy a multithousand-dollar ticket and write about the experience.
“It was really no-expense-spared from the beginning,” said Michael Cooke, an experienced editor Black brought in from the Vancouver Province to work on the early prototypes.
The Post was unabashedly pro-America and was so anti-Liberal that prime minister Jean Chrétien’s wife, Aline, banned it from 24 Sussex Dr. Ottawa Citizen reporter Chris Cobb documented those early years in Ego and Ink: The Inside Story of Canada’s National Newspaper War, published in 2004. The new paper, Black told Cobb, “gelignited the fetid little media log-rolling and back-scratching society in Toronto.” Once readers looked up “gelignite,” they agreed that the Post had “exploded,” not just in Toronto, but across the country.
The Post had its detractors. Ottawa-based satirical magazine Frank called it the “Daily Tubby,” a shot at Black’s girth. Toronto Star executive editor James Travers described the content of the new paper as “tits and analysis.” But it worked, at least for a while. As Cobb wrote, “the National Post knocked the 154-year-old Globe and Mail off kilter with staggering speed and apparent ease.”
Cobb wrote that in the Post’s “hottest year,” 2000, the new paper generated $130-million in revenue, compared with The Globe’s $250-million. However, the Post was spending so much money and giving away so many free copies that $190-million went out the door, an ominous sign.
Woodbridge chairman Kenneth Thomson, Globe and Mail publisher Phillip Crawley and Bell GlobeMedia CEO Ivan Fecan walk through the Globe newsroom in 2005.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
Fighting back, The Globe’s owners had brought in Phillip Crawley as publisher. A Newcastle native who had worked everywhere from Fleet Street to New Zealand, Crawley was tough, creative and fearless. On the eve of the Post’s launch, Stackhouse later wrote, “Crawley held his first town hall with Globe staff, explaining the newspaper’s finances and market position and warning that any breaches of confidence would be met with the offending party swinging from the rafters.”
Crawley also believed that The Globe had grown stodgy and stuck in its ways, a self-inflicted victim of largely unchallenged success. He hired Richard Addis, a Fleet Street editor who was, as Stackhouse put it, “unapologetic about his ignorance of Canada,” as editor-in-chief. (At one point, Addis asked senior editor Edward Greenspon, “Who is Wayne Gretzky, and why would we put him on the front page?”)
The paper brought in colour in a break with its bland black-and-white tradition. Crawley brought back a proper sports section, something that had withered on the vine since the glory days of Scott Young and Dick Beddoes. Addis had the paper redesigned by London’s David Hillman, who had a soaring reputation following his overhaul of The Guardian.
Richard Addis, a Briton, was The Globe's editor-in-chief during the newspaper war.Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail
In the late summer of 2001, CanWest, owned by the Asper family of Winnipeg, took full ownership of the National Post and the rest of Black’s Canadian dailies. Mere weeks later, on Sept. 17, more than 130 staffers were laid off. The paper shut down its sports and lifestyles departments, leaving only columnists to give a sense of coverage.
Morale plummeted. The layoffs, a week after the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, were a body blow. Reaction to the changes from advertisers was so negative that the Aspers soon reinstated dropped departments such as sports and arts and lifestyle. Nonetheless, many of the paper’s most prominent journalists began to leave, some of them moving to The Globe, myself included. By spring 2003, the Post was on its way to a $23-million loss. Circulation had fallen from a high of 327,108 to 243,000. Deliveries to much of Atlantic Canada were suspended. Whyte was told he was being “transitioned” out.
CanWest CEO Leonard Asper and PostMedia CEO Paul Godfrey presided over the Post through financially tumultuous years after the newspaper wars of the 1990s.Sean Kilpatrick/CP; Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
In 2010, Postmedia, a newly formed group headed by National Post CEO Paul Godfrey, assumed ownership of the Post and the other Asper papers, two-thirds of the sale paid for by a New Jersey hedge fund. With the Post reeling, The Globe began to rise perceptibly above the fray. Addis had been replaced by Greenspon, who recruited several new columnists. The paper modernized its presses, though its more lasting innovation was to transition to a revenue model based largely on digital subscriptions.
By the middle of the last decade, the Post-Globe newspaper war was essentially over. It had been fun for those reporters involved, though things never got as wild as the Star-Tely battle of the 1950s. For the owners at Postmedia, as losses mounted, it was no fun at all.
“The biggest factor in the decline of the newspaper industry in the last 25 years, not only in Canada, has been ownership instability,” Crawley said in the spring of 2023. “Businesses that were once in good hands, like the Southam and Sifton families, were replaced by owners who lost the plot and destroyed value for readers and shareholders alike. The Globe and Mail remained successful because the Thomson family stuck to its principles.”
Chris Cobb, looking back in 2023, finds it “a sad irony that the introduction of a new daily newspaper in 1998 caused a domino effect that has contributed to the death and decimation of so many others – and with it, an uncertain future for the role of all levels of professional journalism across this wealthy G7 democracy.
“Unintended consequences. Every war has them.”
Roy MacGregor is an author and former columnist and feature writer at The Globe and Mail.
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Editor’s note: A previous version of this essay incorrectly stated that newspaper baron George McCullagh acquired The Toronto Telegram in 1946, and that the Hollinger Inc. acquisition of Southam's papers included the Sun tabloids. McCullagh acquired the Telegram in 1948, and The Sun tabloids were not included in the Hollinger deal. This version has been updated.