Fish wrap. Birdcage liner. No one is more willing than newspaper people to embrace the insults piled upon our product. Maybe it’s a defence mechanism. In a business where you’re slamming through reams of material every day, it’s inevitable that things will go wrong and, when they do, it will happen in front of the whole world. In such a business, you need a thick skin. Or maybe our willingness to repeat these slurs reflects a subconscious longing for our contribution to serve some lasting purpose – no matter how low and utilitarian.
If our craftiness is not collectible, at least it’s nice to see it enjoying a second life – even if only as a safe place for the new puppy to do its business.
Such was the tone of the triumphant story that Vancouver Sun editorial writer Nat Cole (no relation) brought to the office one day in the early 1990s. Nat came into the morning editorial meeting, tickled, because he’d stopped for take-out from his local fish ‘n’ chip shop the previous evening and found that his dinner was wrapped in his own editorial. It was, he said, perfect same-day service. He cast about the place looking to see if there was someone he recognized, to establish whether the package was, itself, an editorial comment – a greasy smear of his opinion piece. But the editorial was unsigned, so no one had a clue of Nat’s role. It was just the fates, offering up equal parts insult and honour.
But maybe our fish-wrap obsession has nothing to do with a hankering for lasting impact. Maybe the impermanence of news (and, now woefully, of newspapers) was the source of the charm all along. There has always been something liberating about the life of an ink-stained wretch. Whether your day’s labour resulted in the best and most fabulous scoop of your career, or the worst and most humiliating mistake – in 24 hours or less, it was fish wrap, and you began the next day with a blank page and a clean slate. In that light, you might be forgiven for suspecting that all we black-humoured newspaper cynics were really closeted optimists, addicted to our daily dose of hope.
That’s a better explanation for a second story about fish wrap. This one also unfolded at the Vancouver Sun, in early 1995, around the time that Conrad Black was consolidating his ownership of what had been the Southam newspaper chain. I was no fan of the pompous Lord Black of Crossharbour, but it was hard to think that his influence could be worse than what we were enduring already. When I landed my first newspaper job at the Ottawa Citizen in 1977, Southam was a staid but respectable family firm, evincing a corporate policy amounting to noblesse oblige. But the chain soon fell into the hands of a bunch of accountants who didn’t understand the newspaper business and who counted the bottom line as more important than the black line.
When the last pre-Black Southam CEO, Bill Ardell, visited the Vancouver Sun in 1994, he wandered, perhaps accidentally, into the morning editorial meeting, so we tried to include him in the discussion on a string of stories about which he seemed blissfully unaware. Finally, one of the writers said: “Did you even read the paper today?” And when Ardell paused, deer in the headlights-style, she added: “Like, other than the ROB.” He admitted that he had not.
So, when Black came along (and before he began looting older papers in the chain to underwrite the National Post), it seemed a nice change. There was more money for newsrooms and more interest in the product. Sure, Black and his network interfered more obviously in editorial policy, but at least they knew there was an editorial policy. To mark the change, when Black made his first visit as proprietor, photographer Glen Baglo went out and bought a big salmon, wrapped it in a copy of that day’s Sun and offered it as a prop. Black, hugely to his credit, clasped both salmon and paper to his breast and stood for the photo. I was cheered by the resulting image; it was fun to think that the new owner got it. It was promising to think he might even have a sense of humour. Baglo says: no. Black took the packaged salmon, stood still for exactly three frames and then cast off the paper and the salmon like yesterday’s news.
Still, the shot was glorious, and Baglo left it on the photo desk with a note saying: “Don’t mention the fish in the cutline.” He wanted readers to discover it on their own terms. The editors ignored the note and mentioned the salmon in the hed, the kicker and the cutline, each of which said, pleadingly, that the future of newspapers was not fish wrap.
Too bad. Fish wrap was good. In fact, fish wrap was the best.
RICHARD LITTLEMORE has given up sports cars, strong drink and, hardest of all, newspapering, but continues to pay his exorbitant Vancouver mortgage by ghostwriting everything from speeches to books, and, periodically and mostly for fun – scratching out the odd bit of journalism.