The Globe and Mail: Difference between revisions

The Globe and Mail is a Canadian English-language national newspaper, based in Toronto and printed in seven cities across the country. The paper is often considered the newspaper of record in Canada. With a weekly circulation of two million, it is the country's second-largest daily newspaper after the Toronto Star, and the largest national daily newspaper.

The paper is a division of CTVglobemedia publishing Inc. The parent company, CTVglobemedia, is a Canadian media company whose largest shareholder is the family of the late Ken Thomson. The company also owns the Canadian television network CTV.

The predecessor to The Globe and Mail was The Globe, founded in 1844 by George Brown, who would later become a Father of Confederation. Brown's Whiggish politics lead him to establish the Reform Party, precursor to the modern Liberal Party of Canada. The Globe began in Toronto as a weekly party organ for Brown's Reform Party. 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 daily 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.

In 1936, The Globe merged with The Mail and Empire, itself formed through a merger in 1895 between The Toronto Mail and Toronto Empire. The Mail was originally founded in 1872 by a rival of Brown's, Tory politician Sir John A. Macdonald. Macdonald was the first Prime Minister of Canada and the founder of the party that spawned the modern Conservative Party of Canada, and The Mail served as a Conservative Party organ.

With the merger, The Globe became The Globe and Mail. 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 FP Publications, owner of 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. The paper was sold in 1980 to the Thomson Group, 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 seven 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, which had its own content and journalists in addition to the content of the print newspaper. It later spawned a companion Web site, globeinvestor.com, focusing on financial and investment-related news. In 2004, access to some features of globeandmail.com became restricted to paid subscribers only.

Although the Thomson family has served as the figureheads of the paper since 1980, control of the paper was sold to telecommunications company BCE Inc. in 2001. A year earlier BCE had also acquired CTV, a major private television network. With the sale, the Globe and CTV were merged into a new company named CTVglobemedia, which became a subsidiary of BCE with the Thomson family retaining a minority stake. In late 2005, BCE announced it would significantly reduce its stake in Bell Globemedia, leaving the Thomson family, through their holding company Woodbridge, as the largest shareholder with a 40-percent stake. BCE, Torstar (owner of the Toronto Star) and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan would each control a 20-percent stake. Because several of these companies own competing broadcast outlets, the deal required approval from the CRTC, Canada's broadcast regulator. This approval was granted on July 21, 2006.

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 editorial stance, and its support alternated between the two established national parties. In the past century, the paper has consistently endorsed either the Liberal Party or the now-defunct 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 1990 Ontario provincial election and the 1991 British Columbia provincial election. The New Democrats won both elections and went on to form provincial governments.

Since the 1960s, the politics of Toronto's elite has generally been socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and these views are consistently reflected The Globe and Mail's editorials. 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 delibration, 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.

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, Mulroney's twin attempts to integrate the Province of Quebec within the Canadian constitution after it had been excluded from the talks of the 1982 Patriation. 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 supported the policies of Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, though not unreservedly. In the 2006 federal election, the paper turned away from the Liberal Party, which had been tainted by association with corruption from the sponsorship scandal. Instead, the paper endorsed the Conservative Party of Canada led by Stephen Harper. The election resulted in the Conservative Party winning a narrow minority government, and Harper becoming the 22nd Prime Minister of Canada.

In recent years, 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. (A similar criticism is sometimes applied to The New York Times). Critics 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 three-page section of British Columbia news in the B.C. edition of its paper.

Other 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.

Since the launch of the National Post as another English-language national paper in 1998, some industry analysts have proclaimed a "national newspaper war" between The Globe and Mail and the National Post. Thus far, The Globe and Mail has continued to outsell the National Post.

• Cathrin Bradbury, managing editor (features)
• Neil A. Campbell, executive editor
• Edward Greenspon, editor-in-chief
• Colin MacKenzie, managing editor (news)
• Steve McAllister, sports editor
• Stephen Northfield, foreign editor
• Noreen Rasbach, national editor
• John Stackhouse, editor, Report on Business
• Sylvia Stead, deputy editor

• Alan Freeman, Washington Bureau
• Hamida Ghafour, European Bureau (London)
• Simon Houpt, New York Bureau
• Paul Koring, Washington Bureau Chief
• Mark MacKinnon, Middle East Bureau Chief (Jerusalem)
• Shawn McCarthy, New York Bureau Chief
• Barrie McKenna, Washington Bureau
• Stephanie Nolen, Africa Bureau Chief, Johannesburg
• Elizabeth Renzetti, European Bureau (London)
• Doug Saunders, European Bureau Chief (London)
• Graeme Smith, Moscow Bureau Chief
• Carolynne Wheeler, Middle East Bureau (Jerusalem)
• Geoffrey York, Asia Bureau Chief, Beijing

• John Barber, Toronto politics
• Stephen Brunt, sports
• Murray Campbell, Ontario politics
• John Doyle, television
• Marcus Gee
• William Houston, sports
• John Ibbitson
• Liam Lacey
• Roy MacGregor
• Leah McLaren
• Neil Reynolds, Economics/politics
• Doug Saunders
• Jeffrey Simpson
• Margaret Wente
• Hugh Winsor
• Jan Wong
• Konrad Yakabuski

• David Hayes, Power and Influence: The Globe and Mail and the News Revolution (Key Porter Books, Toronto, 1992)
• "The Globe and Mail" in The Canadian Encyclopedia, Second Edition, Volume II (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1988)
• World Press Review online, "Canada: Newspapers and Magazines Online" http://www.worldpress.org/newspapers/AMERICAS/Canada.cfm

• CTVglobemedia
• Media in Canada
• Report on Business

• The Globe and Mail
• Canadian Newspaper Association: Readership Facts.
• Canadian Newspaper Association: Circulation Data