After half a century of ownership involving founder Dan McLeod, Georgia Straight newspaper and its website were sold in 2020 to Toronto based Media Central Corporation Inc. Media Central filed for an assignment in bankruptcy in 2022 and left journalists unpaid.
Ownership of the Straight moved to Overstory Media Group, a company with ambitious plans to reshape local news delivery. Soon after, it was laying off staff. The Guardian reported a story that revealed the company’s sophistication, or lack thereof:
As it tried to quickly expand across the country, Overstory faced growth challenges, including questions over recruitment efforts.
Gabrielle Drolet, a Montreal-based freelance writer, said she spoke with Mohamed two years ago, hoping for an internship at Overstory. Instead, he suggested she run a publication.
“I had never been in a newsroom before. I didn’t have much editing experience … I could not believe it was happening.”
Drolet turned down the offer.
Startup aimed to reshape media – and learned ‘news is hard’ the hard way
After 28 years as a key contributor at the Georgia Straight, Charlie Smith moved to Pancouver, a new arts and culture media outlet that aims to “shed light on how this history has shaped artistic creation in Vancouver.”
Charlie Smith occasionally writes at Substack and recently he asked if it was “time for Canada’s older political journalists to call it quits?“
Many in my generation need to give serious thought to stepping aside from covering politics. Collectively, they did a very poor job in the lead-up to the climate catastrophes unfolding all around us. Let’s see if the next generation can do better. I don’t think they can do any worse than the current crop of aging reporters and columnists in national and provincial press galleries when it comes to reporting on global heating...
Politics is a sordid business. It attracts more than its share of lowlifes. Charlatans tout carbon capture, utilization, and storage as a solution to global heating. This enables them to justify continued fracking of natural gas so that it can be liquefied and sent on ships to Asia. Meanwhile, The Climate Book, compiled by Greta Thunberg and released this year, speaks the truth about CCUS, as it’s often called. The world’s biggest plant in Iceland, she writes, will capture about three seconds’ worth of each year’s carbon emissions, according to climate scientist Peter Kalmus’s calculations...
I must confess that it’s hard to remain hopeful when the climate still merits so little media and political attention, even as communities are being burned to the ground…
The cost of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project has surpassed $30 billion. Its annual upstream and downstream emissions will exceed the yearly total for the entire province of British Columbia, according to a 2014 study for the City of Vancouver by resource economist Mark Jaccard. I’m old enough to remember when the pipeline promoters were claiming that this project would cost $5.5 billion. The federal government bailed out the Texas-based energy giant, Kinder Morgan, many years ago, which means taxpayers are on the hook for these costs. How many homes could have been built for the $30 billion being spent on this pipeline?
It’s not the first time Charlie has faulted fellow journalists. Years ago, he called the BC press gallery a club, both literally and figuratively. A club where some members took payments from BC organizations affected by their political reporting.
Here are members of the press gallery who’ve accepted speaking fees from business groups that lobby the provincial government regarding pieces of legislation.
I think the members of the press gallery should disclose these payments through an on-line registry, which would be available for the public to see.
Categories: Journalism
in-sights.ca 
This is largely true with the “forced retirement” of Raif Mair and a few others like him. There have also been reasonably successful attempts to crack through the cone of BS, thinking notably of The Narwhal, but a lot of what’s being peddled by younger scribes follows in the tradition of previous generations, not surprising when media ownership is considered. A lot of the population now is fully disengaged through conditioning to be either apathetic or openly hostile to anything that alters the sacred current order. And Norm, I would sincerely hope that you, as an elder statesman of responsible journalism, will continue to hammer away at the status quo, likely until your own “forced requirement”, hopefully in a reasonably distant future.
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Being an infrequent guest on the Rafe Mair program, both on Dead dog 98 and later CJOR, it was indicated to me by his producer (Mair signed a non disclosure contract to receive monies owed) that Mair was fired from ‘NW because he both had the goods on Campbell and he was delving into the financials of the proprietary SkyTrain light metro system, which patents were owned by Bombardier and SNC Lavalin, showing very questionable accounting going back to the Social Credit Era.
Being fired denied him expensive research staff and an end of asking questions where politicians felt should not be asked.
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Charlie Smith is one of the best, a true “Newsie”, reporting on what needed reporting and not “puff news” the passes for news in today’s fish-wrap.
Smith and the Georgia Straight were the only newspaper that reported in depth on BC Transit and Translink and the only reporter in Metro Vancouver who reported the real stories about the SkyTrain light metro system, which the mainstream media and mainstream reporters were told to hush up.
Example, the massive wheel replacement program on the Expo Line on the first two years of operation, due to wheel wearing out at a faster than alarming rate and new wheels being air-freighted in to keep the line running.
Smith called out the likes of Vague Palmer, BS Baldry and Vanilla Bill on their questionable reporting on questionable politicians.
Question in point:
TransLink and the BC government is spending well over $11 billion to extend the Expo and Millennium Lines a mere 21.7 km, yet the mainstream media and reported stay mute. This would be a scandal in any other country but in Canada and BC, it is business as usual and for our so called politcal reported; see no scandal, hear no scandal; speak no scandal.
That whirring sound I hear is the likes of Rafe Mair and Jack Webster spinning in their graves.
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What an article and topic Norm.
I don’t think many people connect the dots when in comes to public reporting. An important component to public broadcasting , from the perspective of a few, is that it should be as close to propaganda as they can get away with.
A lot of us have examples from our lives lived that bear out the phrase ; ” I want ,I get”.
Several examples come to mind but one illustrates how some humans think or don’t think. In the late 70s I was asked by the PWA president and directors to look at new aircraft that were larger than our then work-horse, the B 737-200.
After suitable examinations I recommended the new B 767 but with the caution that this aircraft was likely to be too large for efficient use in our route system. The president did not like me for that because it got in the way of his thinking bigger, so I was dismissed . One year after taking delivery all three were up for resale.
The B 767 represented a board of directors business success and a sort of trophy event for men primarily from the “oil patch”. I saw the same thinking when it came to owning a B 747. Swiss Air, Ward Air, CP Air, Pan-Am and others were all captured by “big” but could not earn enough with the B 747 to stay in business. Specifically, I asked Swiss Air and Pan Am what their annual revenue hours were and the answer was a shocking , less than 2,000, when a minimum of 4,000 hrs. were needed to just break even in the revenue world of 1970s.
Humans regularly show their capacity to be “captured” by BS and it is the understanding of this reality that big money knows and exploits, using public media as a tool for their purposes. Rafe knew this and was shunned because of it.
Erik
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