A Good Day's Work

by John Demont

  In time Jim was bitten by the newsman’s fatal bug: the desire to own his own paper. “The early years in Montague were nip and tuck,” he recalled. He worked seven days a week, selling ads and writing every word of copy that appeared in the paper. Shirley did virtually everything else. The paper was typeset in the back of their house. Then Jim would hop in his beater, take some of the papers to some stores, supermarkets and service stations and deliver the rest, door to door, by hand.

  The Eastern Graphic survived two fires. Even worse were the ads cancelled by angry businesses and governments displeased with stories that appeared in the paper. “The people in power,” he told me, “just weren’t used to seeing themselves criticized in print.” This was a new kind of journalism on an island where people seldom questioned authority. Until losing a court case, Jim printed in the paper the salaries of every provincial civil servant in the province. (They still run the federal salaries.) When a deal was struck to build the Confederation Bridge between Prince Edward Island and the mainland, he read every page in the agreement—a pile of documents several feet high—and harvested dozens of juicy stories about the deal. No one was immune: when Jim was convicted of drunk driving on the mainland, he didn’t slink back into town; he ran the story under a banner headline on the front page of the Eastern Graphic.

  He was larger than life, that’s for sure. This craggy original with his love of peaty whiskey, the MacNeill kilt and a round of golf with one of his thirty or so pipes clamped between his teeth. This self-taught intellect so fond of quixotic quests—like trying to walk the coast of Prince Edward Island via pick-up-where-you-left-off spurts of a few hours or a few days. This lover of the underdog, so fond of bringing down-on-their-luck strangers home for dinner or standing them a round in the pub.

  Sitting still was not a strength, his friend Denis Ryan told me. Ryan was a member of Sullivan’s Gypsies, a precursor to Ryan’s Fancy, the well-known Irish music group, when he first met MacNeill in 1970. During the sound check a guy nursing an Alpine at the Charlottetown bar walked over and asked where they were from. They hit it off. Libations were had. One of the band members had to be put to bed even before the concert began. Eventually Shirley called looking for Jim. At 11 p.m. he was found: he was on foot, halfway through the thirty-kilometre trek back to Montague.

  Ryan moved to Montague in 1977 and ended up living there for three years. “On Tuesday night, after their deadline, I’d get the call around ten or eleven—‘Are you up?’ ” Ryan, who now lives in Halifax, recalls. “I was in Lower Montague, which is four miles away. He’d pull into the driveway, and many’s the time we’d stay up until daybreak, drinking our bottle of Scotch or just talking.”

  At the pub, or at a kitchen party, Jim listened as much as he talked. If he heard something that interested him—and everything really did—then he would jot it down on the index cards he always carried with him or in the several notebooks that were always going at once. Rick Maclean, who edited weeklies in New Brunswick before turning to academia, used to run into him at community newspaper journalism conventions. Organizers would labour to set up the best seminars and sessions they could. Maclean would just head to the bar and learn what real journalists do from Jim.

  “You find out more talking to five fishermen than the minister of fisheries,” James Joseph MacNeill used to say. Another one of his journalistic maxims: “Always have one fewer chair in the newsroom than you have reporters; it forces them to get out and meet people.” Jim had other rules: “Talk to fifty people a day, not full-blown conversations, but a what’s-going-on-chat. Get to know the secretaries in the government because they’re the ones who really know what’s going on.” But these things too: “Engage the mind. Most of all, be the voice of those who are left behind.”

  “I’VE never tried to imitate him,” Paul explained. “It would be foolish to even try. You can’t try and imitate someone like that, because it just comes out false. At the end of the day we’re just trying to live up to the spirit of what he created and to put out the best paper we can.” Through half-closed blinds, the small office offers a view of Montague’s waterfront. My eyes, though, are drawn to the wall and the yellowed front page from the 1963 first edition of the Eastern Graphic, then reputedly Canada’s smallest newspaper. It carried what amounted to the paper’s credo: “A weekly newspaper,” said John P. Lewis, publisher of the weekly Franklin, New Hampshire, Journal-Transcript, must serve as a “unifying force to develop a sense of community. It needs to be a mirror that will throw extra light on the obscure and into the dark corners.”

  In walks a woman, petite with short strawberry blond hair. Heather Moore, the managing editor, has been running the newsroom almost as long as Paul has been alive. “Not a lot of fluff on her,” he says of Heather. “She’s ‘get to the message, make it quick and get out of my way.’ ” One day, a few weeks before I arrived, Paul looked at his paper’s website and noticed a small item about a house fire in Montague. The story, by the Graphic’s standards, was a little thin on detail. Paul sent off a snarky email to staff:

  Not sure who put the breaking news up. I appreciate the effort. However, simply saying that a house was extensively damaged by fire is not good enough for publication. Where is the house? Are there injuries? When was the fire? When will we update with pictures and content? What we don’t know is as important as what we know. We need to get the basic information right. Until then can someone please take the breaking news sign down. I couldn’t figure out how.

  Thanks, Paul

  What he did not know was this: the log home in question was owned by his managing editor. Not only that, Moore, who is from nearby Murray River, had built the entire thing by hand. Nevertheless—and here is the astounding part—she still sat down as the flames licked at her possessions and hammered out a piece, on deadline, for her newspaper’s website.

  “I felt like shit afterward,” Paul said, face pulled into a self-conscious grimace.

  As well he should. This is no punch-in-at-nine-and-out-at-five place. When his father died, Paul met with the shocked staff a day or so later and assured them that the Graphic wasn’t going anywhere. Their jobs were safe. They would figure everything out together, as best they could, as they went along.

  Out in the newsroom sits a young guy with a ball hat on his head and ambition in his eye, hunched over a desktop near the back; one of those newshounds who won’t be around long before moving on to some bigger marketplace.

  Otherwise, the staff is made up of veterans, living by the adage that there is no age, only experience. Moore has been there for thirty-eight years. Sharon Riley, the stylish account executive, has been on the job twenty-five years. (When Paul’s daughters were still young—his wife, Jeannie, died after coming down with septicema in 2003—Riley took Erin and Katie for the night so that he could stay in Charlottetown and host his CBC Radio call-in show.) Mary MacCormack, over in production, has punched the clock for the MacNeills for twenty years.

  “Hughie been in yet?” Paul asks, dropping the H as some islanders do, so that the first name sounds like it starts with U.

  “He’s in after lunch,” says Moore.

  Paul makes a mental note to try to be around. Chunky, toque-wearing Hughie Graham, who has been associated with the paper, in one way or another, since its inception in 1963, is the paper’s legman—the guy who knows everyone and everything in the district of King’s County and is happy to pass on whatever he learns.

  Paul’s day, though, possesses a jittery rhythm; there’s no telling precisely where he’ll be when. As publisher, he mulls over the big-picture questions about corporate direction and might have to duck into an ad meeting to placate an angry advertiser. But he also directs the editorial policy of the Eastern Graphic and the three other publications in the Island Press stable. Normally he only gets involved in actually shaping the reporting or writing of big, or potentially litigious, stories. Yet Paul doesn’t hesitate to show up at a news lineup meeting to share some scuttlebutt
or to provide a little direction on whom to call in the Prince Edward Island government. Occasionally he’ll tweak a headline. Sometimes he’ll suggest a change to a lead on a front-page story.

  The newspaper owner is a big dog in a small town. Today, per usual, Paul has lots of other stuff to do: find an emcee for the opening of the new wellness centre; round up a guest for his CBC open-line radio show. The phone rings. “Jesus, what about the rules he broke,” he says, voice rising. “Yeah … Right … Of course … Yeah, honest to God … Who is the real guy who supported you on that … You’re killing me … Oh Jesus Christ … Yeah … he still shouldn’t have been appointed.”

  There’s no way of knowing who is on the other end or why. Paul’s job, at its essence, is to know things other people do not. So, in a voice honed from hundreds of hours on the radio, he talks to people; he reads documents, reports and press releases; he thinks and draws some conclusions. Many of them end up in his newspaper. “My columns generally connect the dots,” he says. “You can’t look at one government action in isolation of another. I spend my whole week reading and talking to people so that when I finally get down to writing I’ve already got a very good handle on the subject. The process is not tortured. It seems to flow naturally.”

  Having great material is 90 percent of journalistic success. Once, I would have wondered what there was to write about on this island of potato farmers and lobster fishermen. This province so small that its whole population would fit into a U2 concert and so reserved that Prohibition continued there until 1948. This island of weathered barns, white, tapered church steeples, sun-washed beaches and red soil. This place where within recent memory both the premier and finance minister at one point lived at home with their respective mothers. This land whose most famous citizen is a spunky orphan with freckles, sparkling green eyes and a mass of red hair, who never actually existed.

  Then, one winter I found myself in Montague, at the southeastern end of the province. It’s a long story. But it ends with me and a couple of strangers in a kitchen in a farmhouse in the woods. One of them poured a clear liquid into a mason jar. I took a small sip of shine. Though no mirror was available, I suspect that smoke shot out of my ears. At that moment I began to see things here differently. When you look closely, signs of an unruly spirit abound in this place where, in the 1860s, farmers launched an armed insurrection against the absentee British landlords who owned the island and the last rum-running vessel eluded the law until 1938. Even the population mix, though virtually every face is white, is not as bland as you might think: a smattering of old hippies and back- to the-landers to give life some spice, enough descendants of Scottish and Irish immigrants to provide a Celtic rebelliousness.

  As Paul talks on the phone, I leaf through a pile of old Eastern Graphics. The newspaper is a twenty-page broadsheet printed on thin paper. Colour on the front and back pages. Six columns. Immodest headlines—as big as fifty-five or sixty point for a real screamer—usually in Helvetica Black Condensed typeface. A huge hole for news. Newspapers make money two ways: by selling newspapers and selling advertisements. Most papers operate on a strict ad-to-copy ratio. The more ads they sell, the more stories they can run around the advertisements. About half of each edition of the Eastern Graphic is dedicated to editorial copy and photographs, compared with just 30 percent for most papers, which prefer that the lion’s share of their publication be filled with income-spinning ads.

  More surprising, to me, is what isn’t on the page. No somnolence-inducing recitation of last night’s town council meeting, as appears in many weeklies. No word-for-word reprinting of the latest missive from the local member of the legislative assembly trumpeting their government’s “firm, unwavering commitment” to “the good people of X County.” I recall Paul’s response when I asked him about the Eastern Graphic’s approach to news: “It all goes back to the formula Dad created. He didn’t want to follow the agenda of others, so he created his own. There are a ton of stories out there. We’ll do the tough stuff and rattle chains, but people also know they can walk in the front door during fishing season and we’ll take a picture of the big trout the grandkid just caught. There is no such thing as small story in a community newspaper. A warped vegetable is as important to us as a homicide.”

  And so, on the front page of the Eastern Graphic you might read a story about a sweetheart deal that allowed a school board member to run a private kindergarten inside a public school that was supposed to be closed and shuttered. You might see a piece about a Liberal riding association president being appointed by a Liberal government to the board of the provincial liquor commission despite—the Eastern Graphic discovered—having defrauded a previous government. There could be a piece about how an American artist received thousands of dollars in taxpayer money to sculpt a statue of Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, for display in Charlottetown, the birthplace of Confederation. Or one about how the province’s provincial nominee program—meant to fast-track immigrants with skills for relocating to the immigrant-poor island—was fraught with all sorts of abuses.

  This being Prince Edward Island, the front page is invariably full of politics. One of the best-known yarns about the Eastern Graphic harkens back a couple of decades to when the CBC aired a piece about the president of the Island’s Liberal Party using his connections to get a government job for a woman who once worked at his law firm. The back room boy and his wife were at a reception when the story aired. He hopped in his car and drove down to the CBC studio, where he got in an animated conversation with a radio producer. One thing led to another. A punch was thrown. The police were called. The Grit pleaded guilty to assault.

  Now, it’s safe to say that a lobsterman from Souris in a similar fracas would have likely received a fine, probation and a black mark on his criminal record. Which is why Paul’s dad grew so incensed when the judge who heard the case granted an unprecedented absolute discharge on the assault conviction. For the next year the right-hand corner of the Eastern Graphic’s front page dutifully carried an “assault case box score”—a running tally on the number of times that absolute discharges for assault convictions were granted on the island. Twelve months later the party president’s was still the only one granted by a Prince Edward Island judge; every time islanders picked up the paper they were again reminded of the preferential treatment a big-shot lawyer with the right political connections receives in their province.

  Glance at a few front pages and you can see how the Eastern Graphic ruffles feathers. Why ads are pulled in protest and phone calls are made by people used to getting their way. A few years back one of the highest-ranking deputy ministers in the provincial government cranked one too many at a Charlottetown restaurant. A newly elected female MLA was also there. What ensued was later described as “inappropriate advances” of “a sexual nature.” Lots of people witnessed the incident. Paul, however, was the only journalist who started making phone calls.

  Then one day his own phone rang: the premier’s chief of staff and communications director wanted to make the thirty-minute drive from Charlottetown for a little chat. When they arrived, they talked about the deputy minister’s drinking problem, and stressed the sensitivity of the situation. “I think they really wanted to look me in the eyes and see if I had the balls to publish the story,” Paul recalls. When the next edition of the Eastern Graphic came out, it carried a front-page exclusive under the publisher’s byline and began:

  The Ghiz government’s most powerful deputy minister has taken an indefinite leave of absence after a female MLA complained he made inappropriate advances toward her.

  Stories like that—a lone reporter unaffiliated with any media conglomerate staring down the powerful—make the rest of us journalists raise our glasses in moist-eyed admiration. When I asked around, I discovered such stories also give the Eastern Graphic the kind of at-home clout that’s exceedingly hard to come by in a bigger place. The paper, according to Rick Maclean, who teaches journalism at Charlottetown
’s Holland College, challenges other island newsrooms to hold themselves to a higher standard. Pat Binns—the island’s former premier and until late 2010 Canada’s ambassador to Ireland—declared via email that the Eastern Graphic has always served “week in and week out as the province’s Official Opposition.”

  Yet the paper isn’t all “gotcha” reporting and stinging harangues on the editorial page. Flip to the Letters to the Editor and you’ll learn what pisses people off—the removal of one of the wickets from in front of the Montague post office, unfinished street paving in Souris, the bugs in the community of Brudenell. Inside you might scan a piece about the guy who got into an argument with a woman, then, as she was driving away, kicked her bumper, causing $824.58 in damage. You might read about the facelift coming for St. Margaret’s Cemetery, the ladybug infestation at Panmure Island beach and the winner of the province’s Communities in Bloom contest. You’d read missives signed by folks named “Bunky,” “Big Top,” “The Grey Avenger” and “Fed Up to Here.” (The Eastern Graphic, unlike most other papers, is willing to print pseudonyms just as long as they’ve verified who the writer is.)

  In the pages of the Eastern Graphic you get a good sense of what people do with their free time: attend the Rollo Bay fiddle festival, visit the gathering of Clow Millar–Miller descendants at Murray Harbour north, play duplicate bridge in Souris, attend the 145th annual Highland games and Scottish festival in Lord Selkirk Provincial Park. Turn some more pages and you see pictures of the competitors for Miss Northumberland 2009 and a Taiwanese cyclist who recently biked through the community. You glimpse beaming kid soccer players and potatoes that look like the baby Jesus. You see the thoughtful faces of people on the street—“What do you think of the name change from CDP [Charlottetown Driving Park] to Red Shores Racetrack and Casino?”—and ancient black-and-white shots of sawmill workers, emblazoned with the query Who Are We?