Duk RECESSION HEL. 7 is oOvER, oe GOWER. A THNG OF THE PAST Tracing life’ mileposts in the daily press SINCE I can predict with confidence what you are doing at this very moment — reading a newspaper — you must have at least some inter- est in the species. And if you know something about the daily variety, you are aware that in many cities they share a certain feature, and I don’t mean Ann Landers: they are struggling. Fewer people are reading them. So it is fascinating that the long- reigning newspaper champion in the gorythat.. F ONittett States -tr tire cate, A common success glaring — differences, the 51 countries represented at the Commonwealth Games are living up to:their capitel C billing. ‘Witness the scene at the warm-up track behind U. Vic’s Centennial Stadium, where individuals from vastly different cultures embraced as friends, bonded by the spirit of competition.-Diplomats from these very countries would do well to take a lesson from these athletes. Witness the ecstatic reaction of Sierra Leone’s Horace Dove-Edwin during his real- ization of winning his country’s first-ever Commonweaith Games’ medal. The elo- quently named sprinter, after a show-stealing flag-draped victory lap, piedged his 100 metre silver medal to the people of his war- ravaged homeland. | But as with any international sporting Te SPITE of all their obvious -— at times event in these bottom-line days, a big ques- tion that remains to be answered is whether . economic expectations will be met. Cabbies , and hotel managers have been grumbling about the absence of warm, dollar-laden bod- ies. Judging from the yellow-shirted volunteer brigade, however, locals are behind the Games 100 percent, Grumbies have also come from the gath- ered mediz, who demanded, and received, a $10,006 wooden floor in the media tent at Centennial Stadium so as not to dirty their loafers. But the $7.2 million cost of the games has been met with ticket sales, and the streets of the Inner Harbor bulge with people at night. The bottom-line: the 1994 Commonwealth Games to this point has been a great success, on and off the field of play. Pot point missed in reader’s missive Dear Editor In reply to the letter submitted by Patrick Bruskiewich printed in your Aug. 17 issue: I am surprised that such a seem- ingly intelligent and knowledgeable gentleman should have missed the entire point of Margaret Bryant’s Publisher Managing Editor .. Associate Editor.. article, whicih said that the use of marijuana is no more detrimental to the human body and society than alcoho] and that by criminalizing its use we create an illegal and extreme- ly profitable trade in the drug. We all know that alcohol, mari- juana, and tobacco are very harmful Display Advertising 980-0511 Classified Advertising 986-6222 Fax Distribution Real Estate Advertising 985-6982 Subscriptions to the human race. So why not, as Miss Bryant suggests, redirect the resources presently used in the futile attempt to enforce the ban on mari- juana to educate and encourage soci- ety to choose a drug-free lifestyle? Bernice Lynn North Vancouver 986-1337 986-1337 985-3227 Newsroom North Shorea News, founded in 1969 as an independent suburban newspaper and i qualified under Schedule 111, Paragraph 111 of the Excise Tax Act, is published each Wednesday, Friday and Sunday by North Shore Free Press Lid. and distributed to evary door on the North Shore. Canada Post Canadian Publications Mait Sales Product Agreement No. 0087238. Mailing rates available on request. Submissions are welcome but we Cannot accept responsibility for unsolicited material including manuscripts and pictures which should be accompanied by a stamped, addr: V7M 2H4 North Shore Managed 985-2131 Administration 985-2131 MEMBER 1139 Tonsdale Avenue North Vancouver B.C. SDA DIVISION 61,582 (average circulation, Wednesday, Friday & Sunday) ‘essed envelopa. Entire contents © 1994 North Shore Free Press Ltd. All rights reserved. really counts — market penetration, ; meaning sales of the paper as a per- centage of households in its circula- tion area, meaning the figure that concentrates the advertiser's mind and money quickest — is not in any of the prosperous cities you might expect. It’s in Buffalo, New York. It’s the Buffalo News. It sells about 300,000 copies a day and 390,000 on Sundays, including sev- eral thousand across the Niagara River in Canada. ’ Buffalo — its metropolitan popu- lation, generously defined, is 1.6 million, (roughly Vancouver-sized) 66 The feminists so influential in the news- paper business these days would go mad. 99 — is the classic rustbucket city. Twenty-five years ago it had muck and money. Now it has muck — and pluck. It has lost huge steel compa- nies like Bethlehem and Republic. It has kept 27,000 auto industry jobs, an internationally renowned art gallery, 2 good state university, tight- ly knit neighisorhoods, some fine old architecture, an¢ au almost perverse will to survive. And here is the scoop on its newspaper: “Fxtra! Extra! Buffalo News Knows What Its Readers Want and Gives It To Them! Read All About ni The News violates just about every dogma of contemporary sophisticated journalists. Or pseudo- sophisticates. You know, journalists very much like myself. I, especially my younger self, don't absolve myself. I examined a recent Sunday edi- tion. [t carried an honor roll of awards, promotions, etc. It carried a log of phone calls to police. (How many times have you’ seen a pretty big accident, been curi- ous, and not a word of it in your paper?) It carried seven news page obitu- aries, all local. No celebs. The first - was for a letter carrier. A nurse, a car radiator assembly-line worker ... common lives rounded off. No news “angle,” no catchy leads, no fake . mouming. Dignified. Trevor GARDEN OF BIASES It carried, evidently a regular fea- ture, the yea or nay of New York senators in Washington on recorded votes, It carried two-thirds of a page of “serious” poetry. It carried nine write-ups (as non- journalists call them) of couples mar- ried 50 years. With photos. In neat rows. No fancy makeup. Most awesomely, it carried 58 wedding reports. Each with a picture of the bride, and three or four inches of type on the wedding: where; when; the officiating clergy; where the bride and groom were educated; worked; were honeymooning.... “* Again — in rows. No condescen- sion. No twittery stuff either. Straight-up reporting. - The feminists so influential in the newspaper business these days would go mad. But if you imagine this is Tri- : Week Trumpeter joumalism, you'd * be wrong. The Buffalo News is a handsome - paper, very well written and careful- ly edited, by no means ignoring national and international (or bad) news, intelligent in its use of graph- ics, perhaps — because of its 40- year-old presses -— a bit weak on color, but above all a Jocal news paper, I asked managing editor Foster Spencer: What’s the paper’s philoso- phy? (By the way, he's 62. His bass, editor Murray Light, is 68 — and neither Light nor his superiors want him to leave. Most papers nowadays give the big newsroom jobs to those in their 30s, cut off promotion for the 40s, and sitently hope the 50s will do the decent thing and die or quietly go away.) Spencer is a New Englander, so his reply was diffident, But eventual- ly he let slip the company secret: “We figured it was a reader’ s paper, not an editor's paper.” Friends, that’s Earthquake City. To tell the newspaper pros that the readers have a better handle on what’s news than we do is like telling the politicians, bureaucrats, doctors, educators etc. that the great unwashed know what they want bet- ter than they do. Here’s a paper that readers can see themselves in. Can trace their life mileposts through. Will buy. And will stick with, perhaps not because of loyalty to the paper but to them- selves, a paper that provides docu- mented proof of the meaning of their own lives. It’s a lesson for all papers, includ- ing this one. Get better. But don’t get grand. And keep in touch.