Let’s all take a moment today to pay homage to Tom Regan, who, back in the early 1990s, took the Halifax Daily News online, making it the the first newspaper in Canada available on the “information superhighway.”
Tom moved on to the Christian Science Monitor and then to National Public Radio where he is the author of The NPR News Blog.
The Daily News shut down today, replacing itself with the same kind of generic “free daily” you’ll find across Canada and around the world.
The Internet Archive has the Halifax Daily News website as it was in 1997 safely stored away so we won’t forget that it was, in its time, a pioneer.
Comments
Perhaps the most interesting part of the Daily News to Metro switch is that Transcontinental feels they can now make a daily free paper with 80 fewer employees than a daily non-free paper.
I keep saying this, but it keeps being true: one day, maybe one day soon, this whole strategy of cutting people is going to backfire spectacularly. What I mean is, if everyone gets fired, there will be no one left to buy the products being advertised. And no, it is not realistic to expect everyone to become ‘entrepreneurs.’