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The Globe and Mail

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The Globe and Mail
The January 25, 2013 front page of The Globe and Mail
TypeDaily newspaper
FormatBroadsheet
Owner(s)The Globe and Mail Inc.
(Woodbridge – 85%, Bell Canada – 15%)
PublisherPhillip Crawley
EditorDavid Walmsley
Founded1844
Political alignmentCentrist,[1] Economic liberalism
Headquarters444 Front Street West
Toronto, Ontario
M5V 2S9
Circulation291,571 Daily
354,850 Saturday
(March 2013)[2]
ISSN0319-0714
Websitetheglobeandmail.com
The Globe's Office in Toronto

The Globe and Mail is a nationally distributed Canadian newspaper, based in Toronto and printed in six cities across the country. With a weekly readership of approximately 1 million,[3] it is Canada's largest-circulation national newspaper and second-largest daily newspaper after the Toronto Star. The Globe and Mail is regarded by some as Canada's "newspaper of record".[4][5][6][7]

History

The predecessor to The Globe and Mail was The Globe, founded in 1844 by Scottish immigrant George Brown, who would later become a Father of Confederation. Brown's liberal politics led him to court the support of the Clear Grits, precursor to the modern Liberal Party of Canada. The Globe began in Toronto as a weekly party organ for Brown's Reform Party, but seeing the economic gains that he could make in the newspaper business, Brown soon targeted a wide audience of liberal minded freeholders. He selected as the motto for the editorial page a quotation from Junius, "The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures." The quotation is carried on the editorial page to this day.

By the 1850s, The Globe had become an independent and well-regarded daily newspaper. It began distribution by railway to other cities in Ontario shortly after Canadian Confederation. At the dawn of the twentieth century, The Globe added photography, a women's section, and the slogan "Canada's National Newspaper," which remains on its front-page banner today. It began opening bureaus and offering subscriptions across Canada.

On November 23, 1936, The Globe merged with The Mail and Empire,[8] itself formed through the 1895 merger of two conservative newspapers, The Toronto Mail and Toronto Empire. (The Empire, coincidentally, was founded in 1887 by a rival of Brown's, Tory politician and then-Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald.) Press reports at the time stated, "the minnow swallowed the whale" because The Globe's circulation (at 78,000) was smaller than The Mail and Empire's (118,000).

Globe and Mail staff await news of the D-Day invasion. June 6, 1944.

The merger was arranged by George McCullagh, who fronted for mining magnate William Henry Wright and became the first publisher of The Globe and Mail. McCullagh committed suicide in 1952, and the newspaper was sold to the Webster family of Montreal. As the paper lost ground to The Toronto Star in the local Toronto market, it began to expand its national circulation.

In 1965, the paper was bought by Winnipeg-based FP Publications, controlled by Brig. Richard Malone, which owned a chain of local Canadian newspapers. FP put a strong emphasis on the Report on Business section that was launched in 1962, thereby building the paper's reputation as the voice of Toronto's business community. FP Publications and The Globe and Mail were sold in 1980 to The Thomson Corporation, a company run by the family of Kenneth Thomson.

The Globe and Mail has always been a morning newspaper. Since the 1980s, it has been printed in separate editions in six Canadian cities: Halifax, Montreal, Toronto (several editions), Winnipeg (actually printed in Brandon, Manitoba), Calgary and Vancouver.

In 1995, the paper launched its Web site, globeandmail.com; on 9 June 2000, the Web site began covering breaking news with its own content and journalists in addition to the content of the print newspaper.[9]

"Bell Globemedia" Merger (2001)

Since the launch of the National Post as another English-language national paper in 1998, some industry analysts had proclaimed a "national newspaper war" between The Globe and Mail and the National Post. Partly as a response to this threat, in 2001, The Globe and Mail was combined with broadcast assets held by Bell Canada to form the joint venture Bell Globemedia.

In 2004, access to some features of globeandmail.com became restricted to paid subscribers only. The subscription service was reduced a few years later to include an e-edition of the newspaper, access to its archives, as well as membership to a premium investment site.

On April 23, 2007, the paper introduced significant changes to its print design and also introduced a new unified navigation system to its websites.[10] The paper added a "lifestyle" section to the Monday-Friday editions, entitled Globe Life, which has been described as an attempt to attract readers from the rival Toronto Star. Additionally, the paper followed other North American papers by dropping detailed stock listings in print and by shrinking the printed paper to a 12-inch width.

At the end of 2010, the Thomson family, through its holding company Woodbridge, acquired direct control of The Globe and Mail with an 85-percent stake. BCE continued to hold 15 percent, and would eventually own all of television broadcaster CTVglobemedia.[11][12]

Redesign and relaunch 2010

On October 1, 2010, The Globe and Mail unveiled redesigns to both its paper and online formats, dubbed "the most significant redesign in The Globe's history" by Editor-in-Chief John Stackhouse.[13] The paper version has a bolder, more visual presentation that features 100% full-colour pages, more graphics, slightly glossy paper stock (with the use of state-of-the-art heat-set printing presses), and emphasis on lifestyle and similar sections (an approached dubbed "Globe-lite" by one media critic).[14] The Globe and Mail sees this redesign as a step toward the future (promoted as such by a commercial featuring a young girl on a bicycle),[15] as well as a step towards provoking debate on national issues (the October 1 edition featured a rare front page editorial above the The Globe and Mail banner).[13][16]

The paper has made changes to its format and layout, such as the introduction of colour photographs, a separate tabloid book-review section and the creation of the Review section on arts, entertainment and culture. Although the paper is sold throughout Canada and has long called itself "Canada's National Newspaper", The Globe and Mail also serves as a Toronto metropolitan paper, publishing several special sections in its Toronto edition that are not included in the national edition. As a result, it is sometimes ridiculed for being too focused on the Greater Toronto Area, part of a wider humorous portrayal of Torontonians being blind to the greater concerns of the nation. Critics[who?] sometimes refer to the paper as the Toronto Globe and Mail or Toronto's National Newspaper. Recently, in an effort to gain market share in Vancouver, The Globe and Mail began publishing a distinct west-coast edition, edited independently in Vancouver, containing a three-page section of British Columbia news,[citation needed] and during the 2010 Winter Olympics, which were staged in Vancouver, The Globe and Mail published a Sunday edition, making it the first time that the paper has ever published on Sunday.[citation needed]

In October 2012, The Globe and Mail relaunched its digital subscription offering under the marketing brand "Globe Unlimited" to include metered access for some of its online content.[17]

In 2014 the then-publisher Philip Crawley announced the recruitment to Editor-in-Chief of David Walmsley, a former staffer returned from afar, to be enacted 24 March.[18]

Report on Business

Report on Business commonly referred to as simply ROB, is the financial section of the newspaper. It is the most lengthy compilation of economic news in Canada, and is considered an integral part of the newspaper. Standard Report on Business sections are typically fifteen to twenty pages, and include the listings of major Canadian, US, and international stocks, bonds, and currencies.

Every Saturday, a special Report on Business Weekend is released, which includes features on corporate lifestyle and personal finance, as well as extended coverage of business news. On the last Friday of every month, the Report on Business Magazine is released, the largest Canadian finance-oriented magazine.

Business News Network (formerly ROBtv) is a twenty-four-hour news and business television station, founded by The Globe and Mail but operated by CTV through both companies' relationship with CTVglobemedia.

Top 1000

See also: List of largest public companies in Canada by profit

The Top 1000 is a list of Canada's one thousand largest public companies ranked by profit released annually by the Report on Business Magazine.[19] For 2012, the largest company was Toronto-Dominion Bank, up from the second position.[20]

Controversies

On September 25, 2012 The Globe and Mail announced they had disciplined high-profile staff columnist Margaret Wente after she admitted to plagiarism.[21] The scandal emerged after University of Ottawa professor and blogger, Carol Wainio, repeatedly raised plagiarism accusations against Wente on her blog Media Culpa.[22]

On October 22, 2012 online Canadian magazine The Tyee published an article criticizing the Globe's "Advertorial" policies and design. The Tyee alleged that the Globe intentionally blurred the lines between advertising and editorial content in order to offer premium and effective ad space to high-paying advertisers. Tyee reporter Jonathan Sas cited an 8-page spread in the October 2, 2012 print edition called "The Future of the Oil Sands," to illustrate the difficulty in distinguishing the spread from regular Globe content.

Political stance

Even before the Globe merged with the Mail and Empire, the paper was widely considered the voice of the Upper Canada elite—that is, the Bay Street financial community of Toronto and the intellectuals of university and government institutions. The merger of the Liberal Globe and the Tory Mail and Empire prefigured the paper's characteristically Red Tory editorial stance, as its support alternated between the two established national parties. In the past century, the paper has consistently endorsed either the Liberal Party or the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in every federal election. The paper had endorsed a third party on two occasions at the provincial level: it endorsed the social-democratic New Democratic Party in the 1991 Saskatchewan provincial election and British Columbia provincial election. The New Democrats won both elections and went on to form provincial governments.

While the paper was known as a generally conservative voice of the business establishment in the postwar decades, historian David Hayes, in a review of its positions, has noted that the Globe's editorials in this period "took a benign view of hippies and homosexuals; championed most aspects of the welfare state; opposed, after some deliberation, the Vietnam War; and supported legalizing marijuana." It was a 1967 Globe and Mail editorial that coined the phrase "The State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation," in defence of legalization of homosexuality. The line was later picked up by future Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to become one of his most famous slogans.

Satirical nicknames for the paper include Mop and Pail or Grope and Flail, both of which were coined by longtime Globe and Mail humour columnist Richard J. Needham. The University of British Columbia's student paper, The Ubyssey published a parody issue titled Glib and Male. The spring 2008 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism referenced the nickname "Old and Male" for the paper's employee base and perceived target audience.

Under the editorship of William Thorsell in the 1980s and 1990s, the paper strongly endorsed the free trade policies of Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. The paper also became an outspoken proponent of the Meech Lake Accord and the Charlottetown Accord, with their editorial the day of the 1995 Quebec Referendum mostly quoting a Mulroney speech in favour of the Accord.[23] During this period, the paper continued to favour such socially liberal policies as decriminalizing drugs (including cocaine, whose legalization was advocated most recently in a 1995 editorial) and expanding gay rights.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the paper generally supported the policies of Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. In the 2006 federal election, the paper turned away from the Liberals to Stephen Harper's Conservative Party of Canada. In the subsequent 2008 federal election[24] and 2011 federal election the paper's editorial board again endorsed the Conservatives.[citation needed]

Editors-in-chief

Key people (present)

Senior editors

Foreign bureaus

Americas
Europe
Middle East, Asia and Africa

Staff columnists

See also

References

  1. ^ "World Newspapers and Magazines: Canada". Worldpress.org. 2007. Retrieved November 12, 2012.
  2. ^ "Total Circ for Canadian Newspapers". Alliance for Audited Media. March 31, 2013. Retrieved June 21, 2013.
  3. ^ Archived 2008-06-26 at the Wayback Machine.
  4. ^ Clement, Wallace (1996). Understanding Canada: Building on the New Canadian Political Economy. McGill-Queen's University Press. p. 343. ISBN 9780773515031.
  5. ^ "Globe and Mail to cut jobs". Straits Times. January 11, 2009.[dead link‍]
  6. ^ "What's behind the shake up at 'Canada's newspaper of record'?". rabble.ca. June 2, 2009. Retrieved January 17, 2010.
  7. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. "Encyclopædia Britannica entry". Britannica.com. Retrieved June 15, 2010.
  8. ^ "The Globe and Mail Inc.: Private Company Information – Businessweek". Bloomberg BusinessWeek. 2012. Retrieved April 13, 2012.
  9. ^ Canada (June 17, 2010). "10 Years of globeandmail.com". Globe and Mail. Toronto. Retrieved January 5, 2011.[dead link‍]
  10. ^ Canada (April 21, 2007). "The next generation of The Globe". Globe and Mail. Toronto. Retrieved June 15, 2010.[dead link‍]
  11. ^ Canada (September 10, 2010). "Bell to acquire 100% of Canada's No.1 media company CTV". BCE. Retrieved January 5, 2011.
  12. ^ "Torstar completes first stage of CTVglobemedia sale". Toronto Star. January 4, 2011. Retrieved January 9, 2011.
  13. ^ a b "A new Globe — in print and online", Editor's Note from The Globe and Mail, 10/1/2010
  14. ^ "Globe and Mail unveils bold design"[dead link‍], from cbcnews.ca, 10/1/2010
  15. ^ "The Globe commercial and the promise of the future", from The Globe and Mail, 10/1/2010
  16. ^ Q&A with Editorial Board chair John Geiger from globeandmail.com, 10/1/2010
  17. ^ "Globe Unlimited press release". The Globe and Mail. October 22, 2012
  18. ^ globeandmail.ca: "The Globe and Mail appoints David Walmsley as editor-in-chief" 18 Mar 2014
  19. ^ Top 1000 Homepage
  20. ^ Top 1000 list
  21. ^ (2012-09-25). The Globe and Mail. Globe takes action on allegations against columnist Margaret Wente Retrieved (September 25, 2012)
  22. ^ (2012-09-25). Toronto Star. Margaret Wente affair: A timeline of plagiarism allegations Retrieved (September 25, 2012)
  23. ^ Globe and Mail, Oct 30, A12
  24. ^ Canada (October 9, 2008). "Harper is growing into the job". Globe and Mail. Toronto. Retrieved June 15, 2010.[dead link‍]
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