I just heard that my hometown newspaper, The Guelph Mercury, which has been operating for 149 years—making it one of Canada’s oldest newspapers—will run its last issue ever this Friday. My multimedia-artist friend Dawn Matheson is organizing a “Guelph Mercury Hug Mob Goodbye” where the newspaper’s long-time readers will converge for a group hug of the old downtown Mercury building—and a group hug of the staff itself as they walk out of their jobs for good. All Guelph Mercury staff have lost their jobs. They had five days notice. (Who will cover this local story of the group hug, I have no idea, probably no one.)
So long Guelph Mercury, a newspaper my elderly mother still subscribes to, a newspaper I delivered as a kid, a newspaper which prided itself on being “intensely local” and committed to putting 25 stories and 75 local names in every issue. The Mercury is just another victim in the slow train wreck of print media, and the train’s name, as everyone knows, is the Internet Express. (I just made that up but I think it’s kind of catchy.)
As a writer I see the fallout of print media’s demise every day. I feel lucky because at least I caught the tail end of making a living as a travel writer, a job that is pretty much archaic today. After getting two books published it dawned on me that some people were actually making a living publishing travel writing in newspapers. I thought I’d try this myself and was shocked when I hit it lucky with the very first story I ever submitted, an article on carpets in Morocco. The Globe and Mail actually paid me $1000 for the story and asked for more. I thought, like Mary Tyler Moore, I had made it. I had a real career. And for a while, I did. This was in the days when just the travel section of The Globe was twice as thick as the entire paper is today. It was when people were just starting to talk about the internet and only a few people I knew were actually “connected” to whatever it was that got you connected to the internet back then, phone lines mainly. Back then, the internet seemed to be kind of nerdy. But after a decade passed of my being a travel writer for newspapers and magazines it was all over. Nobody was paying money for travel stories anymore, certainly not cash-strapped newspapers, and only during that short dotcom bubble of the late 90s was I getting paid to write for websites. (Salon.com once gave me an incredible US$1500.00 for a single story, unheard of today.)
So what does a writer do when nobody is paying for the written word anymore?
She gives travel writing classes! She tells people how to become a travel writer!
It’s all an impossible dream of course and I tell people that and you know what? They don’t seem to care. They don’t care because they still want to know what makes a good travel story, how to hook the reader with the first sentence, how to transform their gut-wrenching trek across the north of Spain into an actual story for their children and their friends. They don’t care about getting published—they can take a self-publishing workshop some day or write their own blog. Mostly, these people just want to write, to recall and record the events of their lives. And I’m so happy about that because writing is the best part of being a writer. (See: What Writing Gives Me)
Some day, perhaps, when some cyber-destroying barbaric terrorist group unplugs us all and we’re left to wander outside and have actual conversations, the written word will still be there, quietly sitting on people’s dusty bookshelves or in their compost heaps, waiting to be picked up by someone’s hands and read, page by page, deep into the night.
So long Guelph Mercury, a newspaper my elderly mother still subscribes to, a newspaper I delivered as a kid, a newspaper which prided itself on being “intensely local” and committed to putting 25 stories and 75 local names in every issue. The Mercury is just another victim in the slow train wreck of print media, and the train’s name, as everyone knows, is the Internet Express. (I just made that up but I think it’s kind of catchy.)
As a writer I see the fallout of print media’s demise every day. I feel lucky because at least I caught the tail end of making a living as a travel writer, a job that is pretty much archaic today. After getting two books published it dawned on me that some people were actually making a living publishing travel writing in newspapers. I thought I’d try this myself and was shocked when I hit it lucky with the very first story I ever submitted, an article on carpets in Morocco. The Globe and Mail actually paid me $1000 for the story and asked for more. I thought, like Mary Tyler Moore, I had made it. I had a real career. And for a while, I did. This was in the days when just the travel section of The Globe was twice as thick as the entire paper is today. It was when people were just starting to talk about the internet and only a few people I knew were actually “connected” to whatever it was that got you connected to the internet back then, phone lines mainly. Back then, the internet seemed to be kind of nerdy. But after a decade passed of my being a travel writer for newspapers and magazines it was all over. Nobody was paying money for travel stories anymore, certainly not cash-strapped newspapers, and only during that short dotcom bubble of the late 90s was I getting paid to write for websites. (Salon.com once gave me an incredible US$1500.00 for a single story, unheard of today.)
So what does a writer do when nobody is paying for the written word anymore?
She gives travel writing classes! She tells people how to become a travel writer!
It’s all an impossible dream of course and I tell people that and you know what? They don’t seem to care. They don’t care because they still want to know what makes a good travel story, how to hook the reader with the first sentence, how to transform their gut-wrenching trek across the north of Spain into an actual story for their children and their friends. They don’t care about getting published—they can take a self-publishing workshop some day or write their own blog. Mostly, these people just want to write, to recall and record the events of their lives. And I’m so happy about that because writing is the best part of being a writer. (See: What Writing Gives Me)
Some day, perhaps, when some cyber-destroying barbaric terrorist group unplugs us all and we’re left to wander outside and have actual conversations, the written word will still be there, quietly sitting on people’s dusty bookshelves or in their compost heaps, waiting to be picked up by someone’s hands and read, page by page, deep into the night.
Laurie Gough's Memoir Writing Workshop, San Miguel International Writers' Festival
Laurie Gough's Travel Writing Workshop, Morrin Centre, Quebec City, 2016
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