The death of the Carleton FreePress part 1
On an unusually warm and sunny morning in late October of last year, I drove into the Carleton Civic Center parking lot. I could feel the frown settle on my face.
I received an email earlier that morning from my boss, Bob Rupert, the editor of the Carleton FreePress. He asked to meet at the parking lot and not to tell anyone else about it. I couldn’t do any work, I was too preoccupied with what seemed like the beginning of the end.
Jody Coughlin drove up and parked beside me. She started at the paper a month or so before I was hired as a full time staffer.
“What’s with the cloak and dagger?” I asked her.
She shrugged. She knew something was rotten in Woodstock and it had something to do with our jobs. She wasn’t smiling, and Jody was almost always smiling.
I expected the worst and I got it.
Bob Rupert and our court reporter Anthony Cooper came in a burgundy sports utility vehicle. Rupert, an old school newspaper man from Ottawa who had come to Woodstock to support the fledgling new paper, got out of the car with his shoulders slumped. He was dressed neatly in a sports coat and light blue sweater-vest. He shielded his eyes from the sun and confirmed our suspicions.
“Guys, we’re in trouble.”
***
On September 19, 2007 Ken Langdon resigned as publisher of the Bugle-Observer newspaper in Woodstock, New Brunswick. The Bugle-Observer, like most other newspapers in New Brunswick, is operated Brunswick News Incorporated, which is owned by the Irving corporation.
Every daily newspaper and most weeklies or community papers in the province are all owned by the same company. Irving denies a monopoly exists and the provincial court has agreed.
The following day Langdon emailed an advertisement to the production staff of the paper looking for sales representatives, graphic artists, editors and reporters for an independent newspaper he planned to open as competition.
The controversy that followed received press in the New York Times, the Globe and Mail and other national and international publications. An injunction filed by Brunswick News was granted and the newspaper’s debut was delayed.
“When Ken left the Bugle he planned on taking everyone with him. That was how he was going to succeed. He was going to leave the Bugle a shell,” FreePress reporter Anthony Cooper said. “He took the best salespeople and graphic designers.”
None of the editorial staff followed Langdon to the FreePress and he was forced to start from scratch.
Cooper, 33, was the first reporter hired.
After only a couple issues, the paper was in trouble. It was being given away for free as a launch promotion but the editorial content needed to be improved or it would be at risk of losing circulation when it eventually started charging.
“The paper was terrible,” Cooper said. “The front page was just a saccharin picture. There was no front page news, no breaking news or hard news.”
Langdon introduced Rupert to the newsroom as a consultant, a man with vast journalistic experience who was going to help form the paper into a winner.
“We had no idea who he was or what he was there for. So he comes in and he starts ripping pages and sits everyone down,” Cooper said.
“It wasn’t a newspaper at all. I drove people hard and we improved it immediately. It was night and day,” Rupert recalled.
His entrance didn’t sit well with the slim editorial staff at first, especially the editor Rob Perkins. Perkins had been an editor at the Oromocto Post Gazette and had been working at Ayr Motor Express prior to his hiring at the FreePress.
“[Bob] took the entire staff through the paper and tore it to shit from the headlines, the way the news was presented. Everything he criticized ended up being something Rob was responsible for,” Cooper said. “Rob was the one writing headlines. Rob was the one laying out the paper. Rob was the one deciding what goes where. Basically for half an hour to 45 minutes he tore Rob’s work apart in front of the entire staff of the paper. It was the first we had ever seen of Bob.”
