Colby Cosh wasn’t one of the “founders” of the National Post, but his byline showed up early in the newspaper’s history. Here is his contribution to the “how the hell have we survived the last 20 years?” issue of the paper:
On the 20th birthday of the National Post, we have assembled alumni and associates to celebrate the mistake that was its creation. In saying so, I speak of it strictly as a commercial proposition. The Post was created in a spirit of newspaper warfare — overbuilt for an imagined future that evaporated almost immediately. All newspapers, for most of the last 20 years, have seen their attention oriented to exterior non-newspaper predators. We are huddled amongst notional rivals in a tremulous infantry square, facing outward.
If you sent a time-travelling accountant back from 2018 to advise the founders of the Post on their new project, his advice could not possibly be “Yep, you guys have the right idea, do it exactly that way.” The advice might even be the one word “Don’t.” The financial story he would have to tell from the future is one of nearly continuous pain and frustration.
But, like many megaprojects gone awry, the Post has been glorious and useful, too. No intelligent reader can stand to imagine the last 20 years without the Post’s distinctive colour in the Canadian media palette. Rival outlets have recruited too many Posties to deny the value of its existence. Persons who will never set eyes on these words or touch a copy of the Post have benefited from its existence in a hundred ways. It’s a story of survival rather than triumph — of a creature born at the wrong moment, defying fate and having a worthwhile life despite everything.
When I was asked to write a column about the paper’s anniversary, I spent the next few days feeling subtly annoyed, without being sure why. Eventually I put my finger on it. I sensed that this anniversary would involve a certain quantity of National Post Day Oners telling fun stories of exotic news heroism from the early, lavishly funded months (weeks?) of the paper.
Some of us can only feel nausea at the sound of these anecdotes, having missed the grand, ultra-adventurous part of the war. I myself am a failed Day Oner. If I had managed to impress Terence Corcoran in our pre-launch job interview, I might not have retreated to Edmonton, where the cost of living is low and the competition for freelance work is less savage. It was probably fortunate that I failed the audition (as opposed to failing at the job), but failing it did leave me outside the band of Day One foxhole brethren.
Andrew Coyne (for once, not riding his electoral reform hobby horse):
With a lineup that included every prominent conservative columnist — a couple less reliably so — plus a desk full of nervy British editors who had been in a newspaper war all their lives, the Post flouted every convention of how a quality newspaper should act or look, broke every rule, and generally took hell to the Globe and Mail. I imagine pop-eyed Globe editors, sputtering incredulously: “What? They did what? They, they can’t do that — can they?”
I think we could have made a fair claim to being the best newspaper — certainly the best written — in the world. Every single day the paper was bursting with lively, mischievous pieces in a style that crossed the Daily Telegraph with the New York Observer (when that paper was still in print and still interesting). It had, someone said, the brains of a broadsheet and the loins of a tabloid, and though it took a staunchly, even rabidly conservative editorial line, it remained a guilty pleasure for many on the left. It was simply too much fun not to read.
It couldn’t last, of course, as we were informed more or less from the first day. And yet, improbably, it has. Our industry has declined into not-so-genteel poverty since then — in retrospect, the idea of launching a nationally distributed, ink-on-newsprint newspaper just as the internet was about to consume us all has an almost suicidal gallantry about it — but the Post carries on, if not surrounded by quite the same richesse then with the same culture: that bullish irreverence, that smile of amusement, that jaunty informality, relaxed and subversive at once.
The Post in a nutshell, for me, came on a Friday night in 2013 as I arrived at a friend’s cottage two-and-a-half hours north of Toronto. Looking at my phone, I found a wee joke I had made at Calgary’s expense had been widely misinterpreted as a sincere characterization of Edmontonians as “twitchy eyed, machete-wielding savages.” Half of Edmonton was calling for my head on a pike. The city’s mayor (!) was on the warpath against Postmedia. My phone rang. It was Steve Meurice, then the Post’s editor-in-chief. If I had worked for any other paper I’d have voided my bowels.
He was as baffled and amused as I was, and wished me a good weekend. He ordered me a “Twitchy-eyed, machete-wielding savages” t-shirt, which awaited me on my chair in Don Mills when I returned.
