Ego and Ink THE INSIDE STORY OF CANADA'S NATIONAL NEWSPAPER WAR

THE END OF THE BEGINNING "It was the dream job." Scott Burnside, reporter It was September 2001, less than a month since the Asper family of Winnipeg had bought full control of the National Post from its founder, the former Canadian citizen Lord Black of Crossharbour, and just six days since the al-Qaeda attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Post employees were uneasy about the new owners, and many had seen Conrad Black's final exit in late August as an act of betrayal, a retreat in the heat of battle. That Black's leaving so shocked and dismayed his troops spoke not only to their passion for the newspaper but also to the remarkable level of trust and respect the larger-than-life press baron had engendered. Black had built the National Post on the backs of his thriving Southam dailies with a staff of hand-picked journalists. His newspaper hired established names for big money and nurtured reporters of the ilk he once described as "swarming, grunting jackals of investigative journalism." They thought Black was in for the long haul, which is why some had cried when he said goodbye. Others, angry at being jilted, had fumed. How could they have been stupid enough to imagine Conrad Black would think of anything but his own bottom line? Columnist Christie Blatchford, who had evolved as the journalistic personification of the National Post, wrote touchingly about Black's departure: As I spoke to Mr. Black yesterday, my own face was wet with tears, he murmured a reassurance that things would be fine. "It won't be the same," I said. So in his immediate vicinity, there were three of us in various stages of girlish ruin, and all around him, a variety of other clearly shattered folks. Mr. Black was composed, as always alarmingly articulate, and dry-eyed (though of course, he may have been inwardly sobbing) and I wondered whether this was what F. Scott Fitzgerald meant about the very rich being different from you and me. As it turns out, it was. And she quoted Fitzgerald: "'They possess and enjoy early and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful.'" Working at the Post, Canada's first new daily newspaper in years, had been a labour of love less of a job, more of a mission. After a three-year emotional high, and some of the most inffluential, entertaining journalism Canada had experienced, the wheels on the National Post express seemed to be falling off. Black had made reassuring statements a year earlier, in 2000, after he had made his $3.2-billion deal with the Aspers' CanWest Global Communications Corp. He hadn't wanted to part with any piece of the Post, but his company was in debt and he needed the money. It wasn't much more complicated than that. In exchange, the Aspers got the profitable Southam newspaper chain, 50 per cent share of the Post, which had racked up $200 million in debt, and the chance to move into a new world of convergence, where TV, newspapers, and the Internet intertwine. CanWest insisted on getting the Post, and its national presence, as part of the package.Cobb, Christopher is the author of 'Ego and Ink THE INSIDE STORY OF CANADA'S NATIONAL NEWSPAPER WAR' with ISBN 9780771021732 and ISBN 0771021739.