National Post Page 1: October 27, 1998

If there’s anything the National Post can cover brilliantly, it’s the National Post. Yesterday, Canada’s conservative voice turned 10 years old, and they’re going all out with a special anniversary section on their website talking about how awesome they are.

Everyone and their cat is producing first-person retrospectives of how new and cool the Post was back in its time. Kirk Lapointe, who worked at the Post during its launch, also chimes in.

Among the other anniversary features:

• Page One highlights, including such factually-correct never-to-be-proven-wrong headlines as:
  • “Rogers, Videotron to merge” (1998)
  • “Bush declared president” at “2:20am today” the day after the 2000 election. (Followed the next day by pictures making fun of other newspapers calling the race wrong)
  • “France, Germany lose taste for (Iraq) war” (2003)
• Best of arts and culture (English only, of course)
• Best of adorable animal stories
• Most scandalous business scandals
• The greatest Canadian athlete tournament
• Gary Clement’s editorial cartoons
• I guess this has something to do with predictions or something
• Shinan Govani Govanis a Govani
• Rebecca Eckler writes about how she The Post revolutionized journalism by writing about herself (I honestly don’t know if this one is supposed to be self-satirical)
• The Post’s successful campaigns, like uniting the right and … uhh … uhh …
• A look back at what happened to the people on their first front page (above). It gets the title of “Sex and the City” wrong.
• East vs. West (can’t be the Post unless it’s pitting regions against each other)

The Post, naturally, also has a bunch of story ideas of questionable journalistic value or relevance, like talking to 10-year-olds about what it’s like being 10 or a story about how Google’s also 10 (they’re like the Post, only not evil).

My take

Love it or hate it, journalists like myself always welcome new voices, and the Post is no exception. It was a bold new paper that took off with a bang. It had big design ideas, it gave a focus to opinion, often promoting such pieces to its front page, and it took some risks.

My biggest problem with the Post has always been its typefaces. Awful, awful fonts. Nothing annoys me about newspaper design more than bad fonts (except, perhaps, long blocks of all-caps text).

As an employee of another Canwest newspaper, whose profits are used in part to keep the money-losing Post afloat, there’s perhaps a bit of resentment. But, like the Ferengi, it’s cute and I’d hate to see it die.

Goodbye, Toronto

The news isn’t all cheery though. Thanks to budget cuts (the Post is widely known as a financial black hole for Canwest), the paper has been forced to cut its Toronto magazine section. Some content will be incorporated back into the rest of the paper, but that still means cuts. (Insert joke here about the rest of the paper becoming the Toronto section of the National Post.)