The National Sports Daily

Could you imagine putting that baby on eBay?
The shipping cost would be astronomical.
Some library could take them and digitize them, and put them on CD-ROM, hell, I'd buy it and I already own almost a year's worth.
Reid, I hope your house (knock on wood) is fireproof.

 

I hope he has a life.

 

Nice comment, jackass.

In addition to being one of the most accomplished and respected editors around, Reid is also one of the truly good people in this business. Ask anyone he has worked with/for at Dallas, The National, Houston, San Jose or Boston.

So next time, you might want to think first before you post something that reveals how stupid you really are.

 

fw, cool your jets. That's how we play around here.

 

I would vigorously volunteer my school (if it had a journalism department), only so I could say it possessed every back issue of "The National Sports Daily."

 

I can only say I'd pay huge amounts for that collection.

 

I think an interesting ripple effect of the National, seeing that list of employees, is some of the relationships that developed there and have led to some incredibly fertile work. I'm not great at connecting the dots, because I don't know many editors in the business, but the obvious one to me is Charlie Pierce and David Granger... Later working together at GQ and then Esquire. I mean, because of the National, we got "The Man. Amen." It's like the butterfly effect, only with newsprint instead of, um, butterfly wings.

Okay, that's a lame-ass, barfy analogy, but you know what I mean.

Also, Johnette Howard's "Making of a Goon" is one of my favorite pieces of all time. I think it was in BASW of the Century, if I'm not mistaken. For a story of that quality to be printed on fishwrap, these folks must have been doing a lot right.

And last, the National Post in Toronto (where I got my start) had the same experience. Great product, at least at first, lousy mechanics. I can only wish they had learned the National's lessons. It's amazing how the science so often gets overlooked in favor of the art in the newspaper business. In every other line of work just about, it's the other way around.

 

Reid:
How in the world did you get your hands on every issue, not only every day but localized editions? That's totally awesome! Even when you were in NY, all of the regional/local editions were being printed in their respective cities, and I can only imagine copies of those were at a premium in NY.

I am ashamed to say I kept only one copy intact, the last one, and I managed to have a couple bylines in it, so at least I"m a small part of that piece of posterity. I clipped all the others.

Well done. By the way, I knew you when you were working in Dallas circa 1982-83 and was later a teammate of yours at The National.

And folks, trust me, Reid is a really good guy. Ditto for Dave Kindred, etc.

 

Kitties planning a burglary at Chateau Laymance?

 

Jones, can you fill us south-of-the-border folk in on the Post's backstory? Heard a few people mention it when I was up in TO, but never heard the real story.

 

Well, wicked, I don't want to distract from the National thread, but the stories are similar.

Conrad Black started up the National Post in October, 1998. Basically, he bought a Toronto-only business tabloid, The Financial Post, and then wrapped it within pretty revolutionary News, Arts, and Sports coverage.

In the run-up to launch, he hired Ken Whyte, the former editor of Saturday Night magazine, to be editor-in-chief.

Ken, with considerable financial freedom, then poached some of the more promient newspaper talent in Canada: Roy MacGregor, Christie Blatchford, Cam Cole, Mordecai Richler, and so on. He filled in the blanks with cheap unknowns, including some people who'd never written a published word before (that would be me, among others... We were called, pretty derisively, "Ken's Kids.")

Anyway, there were about 300 hires. It was a bumper time for Canadian journalists. The night of the first paper, it was like a party. Everybody wanted to be in the paper. Everyone wanted to stay late. After we'd filed, we went downstairs to the cafeteria and had a big splash. There were always parties, a few times each year. A great sense of purpose and unity.

And the paper was good. Really creative. Great design. Indepth stories (double trucks were not uncommon, even for something like a boxing match). Lots of risks. Lots of money spent. I was heading to the All-Star Game in Atlanta when I got a tap on the shoulder: I was off to cover the Tour de France for three weeks and to run with the bulls in Spain instead. That trip alone cost the paper $20,000. All sorts of crazy pitches got through. Watching meteor showers in Mongolia (too bad it was cloudy); taking the last flight of the Concorde. As it turned out, a lot of good stories came out of that kind of thinking, too.

But there were distribution problems. The Post's main competitor, The Globe and Mail, got much better (including the introduction of color). Toronto became a four-newspaper town, intensely competitive. Our deadlines, because we were printed on the presses of other papers, and because of our national scope, were terrible. I think the national deadline was something like nine o'clock. In Toronto, if we were lucky, we had until 10:30 or so. Advertising revenues never improved. We all felt like we were putting out the best paper in the country, and wonks in advertising and delivery were letting us down. From the first morning, there were reports of the paper not showing up. Those mechanics always felt lousy, or at least teetering on the brink.

In September 2001 or thereabouts, Black called it quits and sold the paper to CanWest Global. Not long after, maybe 150 members of the staff were cut loose. Sports was gone -- I mean, there was no more sports section. Everything was thinned dramatically, except for the original Financial Post. Today, the National Post still exists, but really it's just a shell around the business section, which is still good and fat.

So, in a lot of ways, it was like the National. I feel like the National Post was a good product, even revolutionary. But the spending was crazy, and the blue-collar work of it was too much of an afterthought. It couldn't last.

Rumor was, like the National, that Black lost $150 million on the venture. Rumor also was that CanWest bought it for $1.

Now, years later, casting back, it proved a tremendous kickoff to a lot of careers, including mine. Most of Ken's Kids made it pretty deep into the business. Canadian journalism salaries were picked up by it. A lot of good came from it. But I often look back at that time and wonder whether it could have been madfe a better bet, with a bit more foresight and planning.

Still, a helluva ride -- just like the National was, I imagine, for the folks who worked there. Loved every day I had there.

[Just so no one thinks my version of events is sour grapes, I left the Post before the layoffs. But I did go the wake. A lot of tears. A lot of drunks. I was one of the drunks.]

 

Moral of the story: Never let journalists run a business.