We’re about to have our first real interviews for this project, after several months of doing research, applying for arts council grants, building websites and investigating recording equipment.
The topic is the Crier of Port Hope, a not-for-profit paper set up by a group of folks upset about the quality of the Port Hope Evening Guide, a then-Southam owned daily in Port Hope, which is just far enough east to not qualify as a suburb of Toronto.
The Crier is actually how this Working Title project originated. Most journalists in this part of Ontario know its story, at least vaguely, at least in part because of the involvement of writer Farley Mowat. I was fascinated by the image of these civic-minded folks, sitting in a pub one day complaining about the paper, then resolving to each put in $100 and see what happens. (They published, once a month, for more than a year.)
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized my interest focused on a grassroots rebuilding of journalism — and so the idea for this book was born.
We’ve decided the chapter about not-for-profit papers should be the sample chapter we shop around to publishers, which is why we’re beginning with Port Hope.
This Friday sees us at Ryerson University in Toronto, talking to journalism professor John Miller about the Crier. Saturday we head to Port Hope itself, initially to the archives, where apparently every scrap of information about the Crier is housed. After that we’re hoping to gather some of the folks involved at a local pub to hear from them directly. Then next week, we’ve got a phone interview lined up with one of the Crier reporters, a retired professor living in Ottawa.
We’ll be recording all the interviews with an eye to creating a radio doc as well; watch for some of the audio files to be posted here.