Orgies, arson, prostitution, and other news from Fort Nelson

1.
Picking up a newspaper—as I so rarely do these days, shame on me, I know—I have a tendency to weigh it in my hand, as if I could tell its health just by feel. In a sense, I suppose I can. You can feel the weight loss, the way advertisers are being shed like fat, then precious muscle tissue. Sense the creeping desiccation. The poor things are withering away, right in my own hand, I can feel it. I can barely stand to flip through them these days. It’s like pawing a corpse.

I consider the two major local dailies. The local tabloid chugs along, fed on a steadily diminishing diet of used car ads. Due to its combination of slight content and mild titillation, it sustains its readership numbers on a middle-aged male populace that apparently has little interest in the Internet or television. The font seems to grow bigger with every passing year, clearly indicating the paper knows its core readership is starting to enter old age. Its front page typically alternates between a sports figure of some sort in the midst of a feat of athletic fortitude, a bikini-clad lady holding cash for a prize giveaway, or something simply blowing up. Headlines are typically stark evocations of violence, the typographical equivalent of a gun pointed at your head: “Baby dead!”, “Riot!”, “Decapitated!”, etc (headlines may not be exact, but you get the idea—death and exclamation points, basically). The other local daily’s survival efforts are hamstrung by its own sense of propriety. Its most recent gambit is to place bar codes on every section that can then be scanned by cell phones, allowing you the convenience of not reading the paper wherever you are.

Obviously, these publications are far too depressing to read with any regularity. Not necessarily because of the news contained within, but because each carries the gangrene stink of a wounded animal. Every page feels printed with the knowledge of its own redundancy. Every section is the obituary section now.

2.
When I wish to see my fingers stained with ink, I bypass these poor, doomed papers (called “rags” in their prime, the term “shrouds” now fits better). Instead, I turn to a little weekly newspaper known as the Fort Nelson News.

I do not wish to suggest that this humble publication can stave off the demise of the printed paper; it can no more change the inevitable than a steerage passenger could have saved the Titanic. But in its cheaply printed pages, a mixture of murky blacks and gaudy explosions of colour, it captures the quickly vanishing pleasures of reading the paper. The Fort Nelson News is not a rallying cry for a beleaguered medium—it is a eulogy.

Admittedly, sometimes it bores me, as any respectable eulogy would do at some point (the whole thing can’t just be crazy anecdotes from college, after all). As well, I do not live in Fort Nelson, nor have I ever been to that surely lovely town. Headlines like “New program minimises wood waste in northeast” do not tantalize my curiosity.

Nor is this a particularly beautiful example of the art of newspaper making. Full pages of ads look like several different jigsaw puzzles mixed together—the ad sizes are purely random, leading to jumbles of rectangles adrift in pools of white space. Titles are haphazardly inserted into wherever there is space on the page. Every photo is stretched and distorted, all the smiling citizens looking as if someone had just crushed their heads in vices. The poor print quality turns all of these squished faces a troubling shade of purple-blue, creating the fascinating possibility that there is a glass dome over the town and everyone is slowly running out of air (perhaps the faces are distorted because the pictures have been taken by someone outside the dome…ah, it all falls into place now, the strange town under glass, the citizens, delirious, smiling as they slowly die of asphyxiation—we could all learn something from their graceful acceptance of the inevitable).

The whole thing is conducted with an air of moxie and enthusiasm, the ramshackle charm of some small towners saying, “Let’s put on a show!” One likes to imagine the undoubtedly plucky crew of this newspaper periodically bursting into song. And why not? Most big-city print media types can barely find the spirit to hum a dirge these days, never mind spout a merry tune. But the Fort Nelson News feels vital—and most remarkable of all—necessary.

Where else, for instance, will you find out about that new program minimizing wood waste in the northeast? The giants of the print world find themselves in a fracturing mediascape, competing for a smaller fraction of the audience against a growing legion of rival news sources (television, radio, the Internet). Increasingly, any sort of interaction with the media feels like entering a crowded market where the customers are outnumbered by the vendors, all of whom are shouting for your attention. It’s a bewildering, overwhelming chaos, and unsurprisingly, people are just as likely to tough it out as they are to leave the market altogether and fritter away a couple of hours each night on one of those Tumblr blogs about Tom Selleck or funny cats or whatever.

Do they even have the Internet in Fort Nelson? (I’m guessing not, considering the giant glass dome and all.) Small towns are where the old-fashioned newspaper still serves a necessary purpose. Relics in a big city, newspapers in a small town still serve as the primary chroniclers of area news. No other media competes for the reader’s attention in Fort Nelson, no evening newscast or robust online aggregators. Where else can you turn to find out that the Fort Nelson Rod and Gun Club is closed to the public May 31st and June 1st-3rd? (For more information contact Dwayne.) The strongest competitor to the Fort Nelson News is the bulletin board at the entrance of the local grocery store.

3.
As the employee of a company that is owned by another company, which owns another company, which owns scads of small-town newspapers across western Canada, I was startled to see that small-town weeklies would even be on the map of any corporation. But who competes with the Fort Nelson News? Small towns might well be the last frontier open to dominance by print media (and within that frontier, the Fort Nelson News is a rare example of complete independence—whatever maps they own in Vancouver and Toronto, this little northern town must not be on it).

I can only assume that the Fort Nelson News must be the primary—and perhaps only—form of news media available in the entire town. This would also help explain why the paper feels the need to do everything a newspaper can conceivably do. There are book reviews, cowboy poetry (“A seventy two point score, I know it might sound a little silly / But I won my first buckle on a white faced bull named Willy”), comic strips (who knew Broom Hilda is still going strong?), and even a birding column, which offers opportunities for starkly intriguing headlines like, “The Sex of Eddy has been Determined.” (It’s a she, and she just laid an egg, which sadly broke—that’s all the news that’s fit to print, and then some.)

And then there are the paper’s baffling aspirations to provide international coverage, which includes a syndicated column from Gwyn Dyer on various matters of importance around the globe, as well as “Bogdan Kipling, special Washington correspondent to the Fort Nelson News.” Because every small-town paper needs their own Washington correspondent. We should all have our own Washington correspondent. They’re more fun than a pet fish (we have one at the office, and all he does is hide behind his plant or float at weird angles like he’s contemplating playing dead but hasn’t decided yet).

Of course, this is probably just another syndicated column with a rather bold byline added by the editor, but let it not be said the Fort Nelson News lacks for chutzpah. It does not want to be a mere community newsletter, though it certainly fulfills that duty. No, it wants to be your source for local, provincial, national, and international news and commentary. That’s right, all wrapped up in a mere twenty or so pages once week, with talk about instability on the Korean peninsula sharing the page with news that bufflehead ducks have been spotted in the river by the post office. If nothing else, the international news provides a useful context to local events, with the violence in Gaza lending an underlying pathos to coverage of a charity hospital-bed race. This is a deeply poignant newspaper.

4.
At the heart of the paper’s charm is the tragicomic police beat column, provided by one Staff Sergeant Tom Roy, whose bemused depictions of the endless parade of drunk drivers and dim-witted petty criminals are the first thing that should be read every issue. It takes a great deal of patience and good humour to catalogue human stupidity in such detail, and the sum of Roy’s column might resemble a great novel (think of a Thomas Pynchon novel written entirely from the perspective of a straight-laced cop). It is to Roy’s credit that he uncovers new ways to describe DUIs each week.

Perhaps Roy is a frustrated writer finding relief as an archivist of debased pleasure. For evidence of his literary bent, consider this passage from Roy’s May 26th installment (enticingly titled, “Purse, Keys, Coat, Sword Stick”), in which a man is taken to the station on suspicion of cocaine dealing: “Police tested the strange white powder and watched as it turned a beautiful shade of aquamarine, sealing the man’s fate.”

Note the poetry of the police report, how the colourless sin blossoms into luminous shades of justice. The column continues, charting with guileless aplomb, a woman walking through a bar unknowingly (honestly!) concealing a sword in her walking stick, a bloody orgy, a drive-by firebombing, and finally, arson. A typical weekend in Fort Nelson, to judge by the column’s blasé tone.

5.
If that doesn’t keep you coming back each issue, then there’s always the continuing saga of the town zoning bylaws. This sordid melodrama unfolds in the dry-as-dust minutes of town council meetings and, like a classic epistolary novel, in letters printed in the editorial pages.

It began with council planning to vote on changing where zoning bylaws would allow adult businesses (that is to say, massage parlours and escort agencies) could operate in town. The moral majority—or perhaps minority, considering the evidence of Roy’s columns—naturally protested, but the council used the excuse that lawyers had advised they had no legal grounds for denying the change. One man, Councillor Doug Roper, opposed the vote, and has since become ostracized from his fellow council members.

Now the reports from council meetings are filled with signs of passive aggressive feuding amongst Roper and the rest of the council, and every few weeks sees another defiant letter to the editor from Roper, always signed with this damning appellation, “Councillor Doug Roper (not speaking on behalf of Council).” These letters are often combative, but only in the most plainspoken manner, except for occasional digressions into stranger waters. “Remember when a helicopter was called a helicopter?” begins Councillor Roper in one letter, prompting astute readers to agree, yes, they do remember when helicopters were called helicopters, as he is describing the present, which is very hard to forget. (In fairness, Councillor Roper is on his way to making a valid point about how the legal language hides the true nature of the adult businesses being allowed in town, but his rhetorical methods are somewhat baffling.)

This reminds me of my own hometown paper, which hosted a proxy letter feud concerning one lone rebel county reeve and the rest of the council, which had essentially kicked him out of government after he punched another reeve at a meeting. This sort of rawness is often missing from our sanitized national discourse, which of course affects the big-city papers that cover such news. We all know that our political representatives are filled with seething contempt for each other, bristling with anger and irrational behaviour, petty grievances and corrupt intentions. We know it because these people are no different than us, and frankly, we can all be real jerks sometimes (sorry, it’s true).

So little wonder people grow increasingly bored with the major newspapers. Now, I’m not suggesting the solution is to become tawdrier, but sanitization has certainly had an effect on our relationship to the news, and particularly newspapers. Don’t you feel alienated from politics? I know I do. That’s why I’m so strangely compelled by the political happenings in a town I’ve never been to and likely never will—when Councillor Doug Roper writes a letter, I know he wrote it, not some staff member aided by several policy analysts, with final authorization from some professional spinner or marketing expert. This is politics not yet scrubbed clean for our consumption. It’s greasy and messy but at least natural, for once, thank god. If sanitized news and rewritten press releases are increasingly the core of large newspapers, is it any wonder readers are losing interest? Print is dying, yes, but is it murder, natural causes—or suicide? (Dun-dun-dun!)

6.
I know, I know—print has been dying since the moment it was born. But it seems increasingly likely that the way we consume news is going to radically change in our lifetime. Once the older generation finally snuffs out—or else is simply too cataract-ridden to read anymore—the lowly newspaper will very likely have to be buried with it. By then, the rest of us will probably have moved on to some sort of post-literate cybertopia, where the government beams information into our dreams using chips implanted in our brains. But then again, this will probably be made moot because by the time technology reaches this point we will all be mere flesh-slaves to our hyper-intelligent iPads, which will evolve intelligence around 2021 and take control of the planet around 2026, if current projections hold true. We’ll be mindless but happy, so who needs the New York Times?