The Moose Jaw Times-Herald will roll off the press in Wainwright, Alta. sometime late Tuesday night and roll in on a truck in the morning.
With its delivery in the morning and the afternoon, the last copies of the 128-year old institution will go for sale and be snugly placed into mailboxes.
How much has changed in the last few years?
Only a couple of weeks after I’d joined the Moose Jaw Times-Herald as a general news reporter back in November, 2000, I had the opportunity to go to their Christmas party.
At the Sportsman’s Centre we had over 100 people attend, 70-odd employees and superannuated staff plus their spouses and partners, and with a live DJ, there were karaoke numbers, silly scavenger-hunt type games and the awarding of the Christmas bonuses. I looked, not expecting much and I wasn’t disappointed. It was about $75. Back in those days that was about two trips to a bar.
Others had gotten closer to a week’s salary and wistfully remembered a few years back when it had been two weeks salary. The beaming publisher asked if we were all having a good time.
Not only did we have a newsroom of nine editors and reporters for our 8,000-plus subscription base but we had the requisite staff for classifieds, accounting, sales, pre-press, distribution and a press plant. It was the way things worked in the cities, so I thought.
The owners at the time, CanWest, sold us to Quebec-based Transcontinental Media. Their first mandate was to make us leaner. Within a couple of weeks of the transfer taking place, the company’s hired hitman named Lance came to town. While there, a few employees received their walking papers. This would happen a couple of more times over the next couple of years. We called it getting ‘Lanced’, and none of us wanted to see him coming to our city.
As the years went on, this leaner Times-Herald paper bled staff, subscribers and advertising revenue. The printing press staff were canned a few weeks before Christmas one year and the printing moved to Saskatoon. At their final Christmas karaoke party, a few of them belted out ‘Take This Job and Shove It.’
Career-wise I moved into the sports department with two other men who I consider close friends to this day. Transcontinental bought a handful of weeklies and started centralizing production in Moose Jaw. Papers all over the company got smaller. Lean was the way to go.
This was the first time I’d had misgivings about the company I’d worked for. Sure, they were cheap, I felt, but didn’t they notice the plummeting subscription numbers? People weren’t happy with what they were getting.
As the years wore on, Transcontinental dropped its Saskatchewan papers to Star News. Their publisher couldn’t make it work in Moose Jaw and in less than two years, with nothing left to sell, the Times-Herald has now ceased publishing.
No more Christmas karaoke parties, no more bonuses, no more getting Lanced. In a business where the content that’s put out every day or week is the final word in a lot of the history that will be written, I’ve not been able to help but think of the people I’ve met while being there. I treasure the memories with these co-workers much more than any story in which I had a byline.
Here’s to you, Moose Jaw Times-Herald.
Saskatchewan will miss you.
