In an era in which circulation figures for most newspapers are falling faster than water over Niagara Falls, do newspaper endorsements in election campaigns still matter? At the risk of appropriating the language of click-bait, the answer may surprise you.

While the Canadian experience is less immediate and, even among the most politically engaged Canadians, less discussed than the recent American example, let us begin to by examining the situation at home.

There’s a growing concentration of media ownership: There are only two truly independent dailies publishing in English—The Whitehorse Star and the Fort Frances Daily Bulletin—and the same number in French—Montreal’s Le Devoir and L’Acadie Nouvelle, from Caraquet, N.B. Consequently, endorsement decisions are no longer made at the editor’s desk in each Canadian community, to the extent that they ever were.

During the 2015 federal election, every Postmedia daily that endorsed a party called for the re-election of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives (some published an editorial credited to Postmedia and some wrote their own endorsement). That spate of endorsements was, surely, almost as predictable to their readers as the Toronto Star’s pro forma call on their readership to again back the Liberal Party.

Consider the fact that, in many Canadian communities, there simply is no longer a daily newspaper. Oshawa, Ont.—a city of 168,000 people—lost its daily in 1994 when it closed down in the midst of a labour dispute. Dailies serving Guelph, Ont. and Nanaimo, B.C., closed in 2016, while dailies in two other B.C. towns, Cranbrook and Kimberley, became weeklies in the same year.

The Guelph Mercury, a paper born in the same year as Confederation, struggled with declining circulation numbers for years. When its owners at Torstar finally pulled the plug on the paper, it had circulation of just over 11,000 (subscribers and individual sales), in a city of 120,000 people (not including surrounding townships). While some might argue that it’s difficult to lament the loss of an institution that was apparently so little valued in its own community, the truth is a little more nuanced.

The Mercury had for the last eighteen years of its existence been tied together with the Waterloo Region Record. For most of the time, it shared a publisher and an editor with the Record, and all copy editing, page layout and printing was farmed out to the Hamilton Spectator. With the remaining eight reporters doing their best to cover local news, sports, and entertainment, the real wonder is that the paper lasted as long as it did. It is hardly surprising that the longstanding indifference of its owner was met with the indifference of its target audience.

With daily newspapers suffering declining readership, does it even matter who they endorse? Certainly, the New Democratic Party, which received the endorsement of not a single daily newspaper in the 2015 federal election, would argue that it matters. Indeed, historically, the NDP has received support from a daily newspaper only twice in its history (the Toronto Star in both 1984 and 2011), and both of those were highly qualified, almost grudging endorsements that were widely assumed to have been brought on by the weakness of the Liberal Party at the time.

Meanwhile, the Bloc Quebecois can usually count on the support of Le Devoir, but other newspaper endorsements are split between the Liberals and Conservatives (as noted above, often predictably). For better or for worse, the prevailing “red door/blue door” narrative of Canadian politics is largely supported by a news media that assumes that there are no other choices, and—in the case of newspapers —makes that abundantly clear in its endorsements.

If endorsements didn’t matter, newspapers wouldn’t bother to publish them. Clearly, the owners of newspapers feel that they have influence over their readers and are not averse to using that influence. After all, television networks and radio stations in Canada don’t take editorial positions during election campaigns, although they are often accused of being too close to or to hostile to particular governments in their news coverage.

Even as their traditional readership declines, newspapers are part of a fierce competition for clicks, likes and shares. Published endorsements are spread widely on social media by partisans and others before the ink that printed them is even dry. In this way, they can be expected to have a much stronger impact now than when newspaper circulation was much higher.

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Even with the growth in the importance of Facebook and other online advertising, newspapers still hold more credibility than bloggers, Twitter trolls or Instagram users, which is presumably why so much of the “fake news” that dominated the American presidential election pretended to come from more legitimate sources (if you’ve ever clicked on, or worse yet shared, a link from the Denver Guardian, for example, you were supporting the burgeoning fake news industry).

If the U.S. presidential election taught us anything (other than to be very afraid of whatever lurks in the souls of American voters), it is that newspapers and their endorsements still matter a lot—although not always in the way that they were intended to matter. Take, for example, the case of the Arizona Republic, which endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. That might not seem like such a big deal until you consider the fact that the paper began publication in 1890 and had never endorsed a Democrat until 2016.

In a story written for National Public Radio, Meg Anderson argues that “newspaper endorsements matter most when they’re unexpected.” She cites a 2008 Pew Research Center survey, in which “nearly seven in 10 Americans participating said that their local newspaper’s endorsement had no effect on who they voted for, regardless of who the paper picked. The rest were split between saying it made them more likely and less likely to support a candidate.”

She also points to a separate study that found “one scenario where a newspaper editorial board may make a difference: when a newspaper bucks its own tradition”; that is, when a conservative-leaning publication cannot stomach their party’s nominee and endorses a Democrat, or simply denounce their party’s nominee without formally endorsing their opponent.

One suspects that endorsements or anti-endorsements from publications that don’t normally express an opinion at all would similarly carry more weight than one from publications that habitually endorse one party or another. Thus, when the USA Today broke with 38 years of traditional neutrality to scathingly denounce Donald Trump or when Vogue made its first presidential endorsement ever, it was much more surprising to readers than the endorsements from the New York Times or the Washington Post.

To be sure, certain supporters of Trump thought the Arizona Republic’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton mattered a lot. The paper was besieged with death threats and vitriol for weeks after publishing its endorsement. Its publisher responded with a very brave editorial speaking out against the backlash (reiterating the reasons for their endorsement and citing something called the First Amendment), which only led to further attacks against the paper and its staff.

More newspapers endorsed “not Trump” than endorsed Trump himself (although he did receive the endorsement of the National Enquirer and the Crusader, the official newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan). He received far fewer editorial endorsements than did Mitt Romney in 2012 or John McCain in 2008, and many staunchly Republican papers endorsed Clinton.

Of course, both Romney and McCain lost, while Trump pulled off an improbable victory. Some might see this as a clear indication that newspaper endorsements don’t matter, or at least didn’t matter this time. But, in fact, it can be reasonably argued that they mattered a great deal.

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One of Trump’s recurring narratives—and one that worked particularly well for him—was that the corrupt media elites were out to get him. As Time magazine noted during the campaign, “Trump has been laying out his theory for weeks, gradually expanding the list of institutions that are rigged against the American people…. Most of all, he blames the national media, which he claims is single-handedly keeping the Clinton campaign afloat. He said the Washington elite and national media existed for a single reason: ‘to protect and enrich itself.’”

If you believe Trump, and the election result is conclusive evidence that nearly half of the people who voted did, every newspaper endorsement (regardless of the source) was just further evidence that he was right about the media. There is something called “confirmation bias,” which Psychology Today explains as follows: “When people would like a certain idea [or] concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true.” It prevents climate change deniers and anti-vaccine campaigners from accepting facts that contradict their own deeply held beliefs. Similarly, the more the news media reported on outrageous things that Trump said, the more they became part of the grand conspiracy to keep him from becoming president.

In an interview with the CBC following the election, John Cruickshank (a former publisher of both the Toronto Star and the Chicago Sun-Times) responded to questions from host Diana Swain about the message that election results send to the media. “I think we’re part of the lives of about half of the population, and that was really proved out in the election in the United States. And we’ve seen it here, too, in Canada, where there is tremendous dissatisfaction among people who are of a more conservative bent, or more from the rural part of Canada, with the media…. The campaign was covered as if it were a plebiscite on the character of Donald Trump, but it wasn’t, really.”

Does this mean that the media should stop doing its job? Most assuredly not. But, they should recognize that all of their fact-checking and endorsements won’t change the minds of those who have already decided that the traditional media is the enemy.

Fact-checking and editorial endorsements will also do nothing to counter what has been called “the post-fact era,” in which uninformed opinion is given the same weight as evidence-based scientific studies and fake news and conspiracy theories get far more clicks than well-researched analysis. Countering that trend will take a much larger effort on behalf of citizens to demand better from both their politicians and their media and, in the case of the latter, to be willing to pay for it.

In January 2016, just weeks before the Chronicle Herald would begin its still-unresolved strike, management at the paper offered Nathan Clarke a job. Clarke covers sports, and the Herald, Nova Scotia’s newspaper of record, wanted him to be its sports reporter, stepping in to fill the shoes of a striking worker—what’s called being a strikebreaker or, depending on whom you ask, a “scab.”

Clarke wrestled with the decision. (His name has been changed to protect his identity.) Steady, full-time work in journalism was—and still is—hard to come by. He had another freelance gig that kept him at the local hockey rink enough that he didn’t think it would make him look suspicious to other journalists if he took the job. But it was one of the Herald’s striking workers who recommended Clarke for the freelance job when he was an intern at the paper in 2012.

“The people who are on strike have actively helped me get work,” he says. “Here I am with the option to take a job that will give me money that, quite frankly, I really need. But at the same time I would be screwing over people that I work alongside and who have also helped me get to the point where I’m at.”

Clarke knew the risks. Kelly Toughill, now the former director of the journalism school at the University of King’s College in Halifax where Clarke studied, warned students and alumni against doing the jobs of the Herald’s striking workers. Toughill has spoken publicly about how the school doesn’t support students breaking the picket line. One-onone, when asked directly for advice on whether to take a job as a replacement worker, she’s told young alumni that the implications of working a “scab” job could follow them around for the rest of their careers, thwarting future job opportunities. That wasn’t a risk worth taking for Clarke, and eventually, he declined the offer. “I just can’t put a dollar value on that sort of thing,” he says.

But now more than ever, the dollar value bottom line dominates the newspaper industry. Papers across the country are hurting. Fewer resources, outdated business models, a public unwillingness to pay for news, and shrinking newsrooms plague print media. Unions such as the Halifax Typographical Union (HTU), which represents the striking workers of the Chronicle Herald, protect the people who propel newspapers forward and safeguard the editorial content from the market forces that newspapers’ management can’t seem to beat.

At the same time, millennials like Clarke are graduating from journalism school with thousands of dollars of debt and throwing themselves headlong into a contracting and competitive job market, where unpaid internships and years of unstable work are standard. Getting a full-time job out of school, let alone a job with a pension, benefits, and job security, is unlikely for most. Journalists are entering the workforce at a time when the five-day work week and eight-hour work day are taken for granted.

When the Herald’s unionized staff did strike weeks after Clarke’s job offer, management hired temporary replacement reporters in place of striking workers as cheap labour. Many of these reporters were young journalists and recent graduates, like Clarke, with little newsroom experience. The HTU has been ruthless in calling out these replacement journalists on social media, engaging in shaming tactics to ensure their names remain known after their stints at the Herald. Whether these shaming tactics are effective and conducive to dialogue is up for debate. Certainly, unions are in a tough position of balancing priorities: taking a stand against strikebreakers while also doing more to reach out to millennial freelancers—some of Canadian journalism’s most precarious workers.

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The Chronicle Herald’s management locked its employees out of their offices and banished their bylines from its pages on January 23, 2016. Sixty-one members of the HTU—unionized reporters, editors, and photographers—voted almost unanimously to strike after contract negotiations fell through. As this story went to press, the strike at the Herald had been ongoing for 250 days. As the strike persists, the largest independently owned newspaper in Canada continues to operate with a skeleton newsroom of five full-time replacement reporters between the ages of 25–30. Meanwhile, its unionized workers have spent more than eight months walking the picket line every day through nearly four seasons.

The Herald strike is symptomatic of a broader state of crisis in the Canadian media industry. Recent years have brought a slew of bad news for newspapers. The same month the Herald went on strike, two other Canadian newspapers, the Nanaimo Daily News and the Guelph Mercury, folded. In August 2016, the Toronto Star announced 52 layoffs. Bell Media cut 380 jobs last year. CBC cut 400 jobs in numerous rounds of layoffs over the past two years. And this year, Postmedia announced 90 layoffs. Not even digital media emerged unscathed, with BuzzFeed shuttering its Canadian political bureau in Ottawa this summer. Media organizations continue to struggle to do more with less. “The whole business model of the penny press—supporting mass market journalism with advertising— is collapsing,” Toughill says.

In Halifax, this collapse has played out in ugly ways. The Herald dispute has been called a union-busting drive. David Wilson, the chief negotiator for the Communication Workers of America Canada (CWA) who represented the HTU in negotiations, says management proposed more than 1,000 changes in the collective agreement, including significant salary cuts and increased working hours, reduced benefits, and the removal of a pay equity clause (which it has since agreed to put back into the agreement). The HTU and management have, however, agreed to a five percent acrossthe-board wage cut. Wilson says the Herald’s management is asking for concessions that have never been asked for by any newspaper chain. “It’s a very scripted, one-sided negotiation where the local was expected to make all the moves, and the employer would do absolutely nothing,” he says. “That does not happen—this is not typical at all.”

The unusual circumstances surrounding negotiations didn’t stop the Herald’s striking workers from rallying as a team, says HTU vice-president Frank Campbell. For the most part, he says, the Herald’s striking workers have stuck together. Many began writing for Local XPress, an independent online newspaper the striking workers founded in January. But eight months can erode the morale of even the most dedicated picketers. Over the phone, Campbell’s voice sounds worn—it appears exhaustion has set in. And in April, photojournalist Eric Wynne suffered a stroke on the picket line. “When you’re in this thing for eight months, different people are at different places in how they deal with things emotionally,” Campbell says. “Personally, I try to stay as positive as I can. Would I rather be working and earning a steady paycheque for what I love to do? Sure.”

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On April 9, 2016, the Chronicle Herald published an article about refugee children violently abusing other students at a Halifax elementary school. The news story had no byline attached to it, because it was written by a replacement reporter—a practice that had been put into place at the beginning of the strike. The story quoted anonymous parents who alleged that refugee students had been “pushing, slapping, and verbally abusing” their fellow classmates. The Herald was blasted for the story by local and national media, including the Globe and Mail, and the story was picked up by Ezra Levant’s right-wing outlet, Rebel Media, and anti-Muslim blogs. In the days that followed, the news story was edited and amended a number of times before it was deleted entirely from the Herald’s website. An editor’s note that appeared in the paper admitted that the story “needed more work.” The story is just one example of the many dangers of relying on the paper’s skeleton staff. Campbell says the story would never have gone to print looking the way it did if professional, experienced journalists and editors had been handling it.

Lezlie Lowe is a journalism professor at King’s and was a freelance columnist with the Herald when the story was published. She’s not a member of the HTU, and when the workers went on strike, she continued to file her weekly column rather than breach her contract. She faced backlash from the HTU and the community in the form of shaming tweets and what she calls anonymous online commentary. But when the refugee story broke, she quit. “It felt like continuing with the paper in the face of that was implicitly condoning the bad journalism, and condoning the idea that it’s okay to do that, and it’s not,” she says.

It’s not just experienced writers who have condemned the paper since the story broke. David Swick, who previously taught journalism ethics at King’s and dispensed advice to journalism graduates on scabbing, says he knows of three King’s graduates from the class of 2015 who were approached by the Herald to scab and turned the opportunity down. During lunchtime conversations, Swick says he was struck by how many students spoke up against strikebreaking practices. “I don’t know if it was an appreciation of unions, or an instinct for justice,” he says. “But you’ve got young people who were heading out into a tight workforce, and who were saying they would not take a job with the newspaper of record in town because it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

But in a tough job climate, what’s stopping other young journalists from taking a much-needed job as a strikebreaker? For Toughill, it’s a matter of pragmatism: some news organizations won’t hire a journalist if they’ve “scabbed”—the media scene is small, and careers will effectively be ruined. She adds, however, that while she doesn’t think it’s a good idea, she does understand why some young journalists feel compelled to do it—it’s tough financial times for journalists and they have to pay the rent. For Nora Loreto, a freelancer and Quebec director of the Canadian Freelance Union (CFU), it’s much more clear-cut: “From the perspective of someone who has been on strike for a hundred-plus days, their kids might not have clothes bought for them because someone is scabbing.”

For this story I reached out to four young replacement reporters for the Chronicle Herald. Of the four, two agreed to speak with me and then later reneged, saying they didn’t want to put their jobs at risk, or that it was their own story to tell. Two declined outright. To say the Herald’s replacement staffers are cagey is an understatement.

The HTU uses Twitter and its Facebook page to shame replacement journalists, calling them out by name, and posting images of the stories they’ve written with their bylines and tagging them in it. In March, for instance, the HTU tweeted, “Congrats to a certain young scab who’s just signed [a] contract as multimedia CH journo! Enjoy my your job! #CHstrike.” Attached was a photo of a vulture and a dead animal carcass. While not part of the union, Lowe says she received her fair share of online hate: people would take photos of her from the internet and make memes. “I got baited a lot,” she says.

To people unfamiliar with labour politics, this culture of shaming might seem heavy-handed and counterintuitive to sparking dialogue about the negative effects of strikebreaking labour. While it might not be an effective way to stop people from scabbing, says Toughill, such shaming tactics have a long history, even if some might feel they’re “somewhat repugnant.” “In many cases, that’s what we do as journalists,” she says. “We hold people up to the light and say, ‘Look, this is what this person is doing. What do you think of what this person is doing?’” Toughill admits it’s a easier in the age of social media. “I would be very distressed if it were following someone’s children or their spouse,” she says, “but I think it’s a little bit naive if you’re going to work for a striking organization, to think you’re not going to be called out for that decision.”

***

It was clear to Clarke that he wasn’t being approached by the Herald back in January for any reason other than a profit-serving one. “Looking at the quality of some of the reporting since the strike began, I don’t feel like it was ‘we’re looking for the best young journalists in Nova Scotia to help us put this paper out during the strike,’” he says. “It seemed like a ‘get whatever we can’ kind of grab.” Meanwhile, Mark Lever, the Herald’s CEO, has called freelance labour a cost-effective strategy to producing content.

The CFU is in a unique position to reach out to young journalists like Clarke who are trying to carve out a living independently. Founded 10 years ago under Unifor, the union is charting new territory, but has to be careful of stepping on the toes of other locals of full-time newsroom staff. The CFU is one of a few freelancer unions in Canada, and represents a broad cross-section of people, but each of their 250 members is a precarious communications worker. “The existence of my union is an experiment,” says Loreto. “We’re not a real union, because freelancers don’t have a common employer.” While she admits unions are human, fallible organizations, she says that when we prioritize the discussion surrounding the one or two people strikebreaking and erase the fact that there are 30 people on the picket line defending the basic tenets of journalism, it’s a move that is reducing all of these complicated social issues to the individual level. “It’s making the problem about whether or not we’re being fair to this 22-year-old guy from the University of King’s College,” she says.

Recognizing this fundamental difference of understanding of “the collective” is core to being able to talk to young workers, particularly those under 40, about the importance of unions and organizing. “If you’re a young journalist,” Loreto says, “you have to be critical of the mainstream, profit-serving narrative.” Rebecca Rose, a young freelancer who has been the CFU’s Atlantic organizer throughout the strike, says she organized trips to the picket line for King’s students, spoken on panels and wrote literature, and offered outreach for students and young freelance journalists. She says the visits by current or future freelancers to the picket line meant a lot to the striking workers. “Herald management went really hard with trying to recruit recent grads,” she says, “and to see us resisting that was really important for the strikers.”

Rose says the Herald’s striking workers are people she wants to learn from. Walking the picket line with them over the past year, she says she’s gotten valuable advice from their decades of experience. “But that’s the thing: as a freelancer, do you want it to be just you, isolated, working from home and without a community of other freelancers? Or do you want to have that camaraderie?” she asks. “I want to have that camaraderie. It’s just fighting back against this individualistic mindset we’ve been sold.”

David Skok. Illustration by Dave Donald

David Skok, the managing editor of GlobalNews.ca, checked into Harvard University in September to begin a one-year Nieman Fellowship. The 33-year-old is the first Canadian digital journalist to receive the prestigious award. He’ll be studying “how to sustain Canadian journalism’s distinct presence in a world of stateless news organizations.” He spoke with This two weeks before heading to Boston.

THIS: I’ve seen you referred to as an online journalist and a digital journalist. Which do you prefer?

SKOK: Digital journalist. Online is a little too specific to the web. What we do is beyond that. It’s mobile. It’s iPads and everything else.

THIS: Do you like being called a digital journalist?

SKOK: It’s fine for now but I look forward to the day when there’s no label that separates digital versus broadcast versus a print journalist.

THIS: Do you think the established media consider digital to be less important than traditional media?

SKOK: It depends on what we’re talking about. There are two ways to look at digital media. For me there’s the newsgathering … and then there’s digital media for publishing and distribution. I think digital media [for the latter] is becoming more accepted, if not by choice but by necessity. From a newsgathering point of view, I think there’s a long way to go.

THIS: For example?

SKOK: Look at the Arab Spring and how Andy Carvin of NPR used Twitter to verify information and facts. And he did the same thing with Syria. He was in Washington, DC. He’s being more effective at getting the accurate, fair, correct news out than the mainstream or legacy news organizations. That’s something I don’t think many news organizations have actually caught on to yet. And if they have it’s in a very tokenistic way, not as a real way of telling stories.

THIS: There’s a concern that if someone Tweets something, how do you know it’s true?

SKOK: Exactly. When I speak within my own newsrooms, I often make the point: how is a Tweet any different than a press release, or a report you’re hearing on a police scanner or anything else? Every piece of information we get needs to be verified and Twitter is no different.

THIS: Can you sum up your overriding goal for your fellowship?

SKOK: It’s probably too far-reaching but there are three parts I really want to look at. The first is the new tools of journalism, such as Twitter, open data, data journalism and even things like WikiLeaks. Second is how should Canadian newsrooms evolve in light of all these changes. This one hits me very close to home because I run a digital media organization within a legacy news organization. We created that from scratch and eventually, ultimately we have to integrate our product and our journalists into the main news organization as a whole. The third part is how can we, as Canadian news organizations, think of our role in the global sphere.

THIS: What do you mean by stateless news organizations?

SKOK: Ones that are based in a country but whose target audience is not that country. Al Jazeera, for example. Its target audience is not Qatar, where it’s based or Dubai or even the Arab world. I watched Al Jazeera and BBC World and CNN International on my iPad during the Arab Spring demonstrations. I didn’t need to be watching a Canadian news organization. Do we even need a national news organization anymore?

THIS: What else will you be studying?

SKOK: I’m noticing, as someone running the digital side of things, that we’re increasingly reliant on private enterprise to host the content. For example Facebook, Twitter, even the servers we use, Amazon, let’s say, they’re all private companies that host content in California. What interest do they have in sustaining Canadian journalism? What obligations does the CRTC place on them? There’s something about that we should be questioning. I’ll also be taking some courses at business school to understand more of the business side of things. As journalists we’ve always had this church and state mentality and I don’t know if we can still afford to do that anymore because we’re not making money anymore.

THIS: Are you excited about spending a year at Harvard?

SKOK: Absolutely. The resources at Harvard are immense. There are so many bright people. But not just that, there are programs that are thinking about all these issues we’re talking about, whether the law school, the Kennedy School, MIT. And they’re tackling these issues every day. To be immersed in that environment and be able to tackle them without the day-to-day operational running of a newsroom is incredibly exciting.

In the documentary Helvetica, incensed graphic designer Michael Bierut hilariously critiques ads from old copies of Life Magazine. He attacks the verbosity and shrill insistence of early 1950s Coke ads prior to the introduction of Helvetica then flips admiringly to a minimalist ad set in the new font. Here again is a reminder of how design and material delivery can influence the content of a message. Just as I’m not likely to meet many wedding invitations written in a ransom-note font, I can’t imagine reading a romantic novel on an e-book.

Given both historical precedent and the exponential rate of media evolution, eventually I will do much of my reading on some kind of e-reader. Novels didn’t exist without industrialization (i.e., the printing press). With the hindsight of history, it’s easy for us to dismiss as naive the seventeenth-century book collectors who vowed never to own that cheap, ghastly and faddish new thing—the printed book. Today, newspapers already feel so last century, with their slaughter of trees for a day’s worth of programming which is pushed at crowds indiscriminately, not pulled selectively by readers. But then here I am, preferring my tales of head and heart on paper, not any kind of screen. If I can see the relationship between literacy and democracy with the technological shift from handwritten to printed books, what holds me back from doing the same with digitization, that next step in media evolution?

The answer lies in the nature of the novel itself.

Medieval literature was laboriously copied by hand. With this material preference for brevity, the author of medieval literature worked long before the writing advice “Show; don’t tell.” Medieval quests were written with bald declarations like, “He was very afraid.” Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human goes so far as to say that a few centuries after the medieval romance, Shakespeare essentially invented the three-dimensional character. With their self-investigative soliloquies and their observation by an audience, if not other characters, Shakespeare’s characters are formed within their stories, not before them. (I know, I know: here come the parchment-and-quill hate mail from the medievalists). But these were plays: as with today’s noisy, ad-saturated cinema, you had to see them in a crowd, and on their schedule, not yours.

The novel—which you can read on your own schedule—is the child of poetry and drama, and like most children it displays inherited traits from both parents. Like the hand-copied medieval manuscript, the novel is read in private, not viewed in public like a play. But the novel also carries the play’s gene for evolving action and characters-in-flux. In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera admits, “As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped?

It’s one of those fundamental questions on which the novel, as novel, is based.” In love stories like Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version or Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood or Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, characters find out who they are— and are simultaneously revealed to the reader—as they find out who they love. If that’s the content I’m looking for, I want the nakedness, tactility and privacy of a paper book, not the proprietariness and gadgetry of an e-reader.

There’s a tactile nakedness and independence to the book well-suited to the expansions and confessions I want from literature. I still have the copy of Louis de Bernières’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin that I read a decade ago on the Greek island of Cephallonia, where the novel is set. I’d rather pass a romantic partner that copy, not an e-file.

After all, for the past 400 years, literature has combined abstract words with the subtle physicality of paper books. That subtlety presents a challenge. In From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, American fiction writer and creative writing professor Robert Olen Butler notes that literature is unique amongst the arts for not being inherently sensuous. Abstract and symbolic writing does not have the emphatic physicality of theatre, visual art or music. Books have to make the most of what they’ve got: If a romantic novel and I are going to undress each other, I want to feel each page unfurl. And I want to be able to read it in the bath.

With the rise of paid death notices, the old-fashioned obit's days may be numbered. Photo by Graham F. Scott.

Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs’ conspicuously detailed death announcement, accidentally published by Bloomberg news service in 2008, revealed a little-known fact about the craft of writing obituaries: the blood doesn’t have to have gone cold before someone writes the first draft of your final epitaph. In fact, there doesn’t even have to be a reason to suspect that you’re in dire straits for an editor to assign a writer the task of encapsulating your entire life history into six inches of column space.

That’s why it might not be too early to start writing about the death of the obituary itself. Obituaries may not be dead and gone, but they’ve certainly seen better days. And as things stand now, obituaries may just predecease the rest of the newspaper industry. “The dead beat,” as it’s called by professional obituary writers, may finally live up to its name.

“In this country I think there are five or six people left on ‘the dead beat,’” says the Globe and Mail’s Alan Hustak, a 30-year veteran obituary writer with 700 obits to his name. “I would venture to guess all across North America there are probably no more than 100 of us.”

Most newspapers don’t have the luxury of having a full-time obituary writer anymore, he says, since they’re too busy trying to survive with a reduced staff. Instead, they buy articles from American wire services. “If you look at Canwest newspapers, very few Canadians die now, but you’ll have a detailed obituary about the floor salesman who worked at Filene’s Basement or a hairdresser for Marilyn Monroe,” says Hustak.

John Heald, a funeral director by trade and vice-president of sales for Tributes.com, stands to gain from the newspaper industry’s losses. “If you look at the current state of the newspaper industry now versus what it was three years ago,” says Heald, “the only section of the newspaper that hasn’t successfully migrated to the internet are death notices and obituaries.”

The brainchild of Monster.ca founder Jeff Taylor, Tributes.com hopes to change that by cataloguing new and archived obituaries going back to 1936 from those submitted to newspapers by funeral homes. As a business model, literary obituaries aren’t nearly as profitable to newspapers as paid obituaries from the families of the bereaved.

“In the newspaper industry, there used to be an editorial staff that wrote obituaries that told a life story and which would take up a couple of inches of a newspaper,” says Heald. “But what would happen was an obituary was always free, because it was just good content, and that couldn’t be supported.”

What remains, says Heald, is a paid death notice in the form of classified advertising.

“It’s too expensive to tell everyone how much of a great person this guy was and his interests and his hobbies, so the days of some really robust good editorial obituaries being written are far and few between,” he says.

Obituaries for the rich and famous, however, are still in tight supply.

Marilyn Johnson, author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, got her start writing celebrity obits at Life magazine in 1997, following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Many of her assignments, however, were for people who still had a pulse.

“I actually had assignments from a series of magazines to write obits of celebrities who were presumed to be on their way out, and everybody I wrote about sort of got a fresh wind,” she said. Her obituary of Katharine Hepburn, originally intended for Life, didn’t see the light of day after the magazine predeceased Hepburn by three years when it folded in 2000.

Hustak, who left the Montreal Gazette in March of last year after 22 years on the obit desk, says people often stop him on the street to say, “Oh, you’ve left the Gazette? That must mean no one’s going to die anymore.”

Hustak hasn’t stopped writing obits entirely, and even if he did you would still be able to run into his byline for years to come, since he has a cache of 100 unpublished pieces just waiting for their recipients to expire.

So could the obituary industry go on living longer than expected? If the experience of obit writers is anything to go on, mortality is a fickle thing.

“One of those obits I’ve already written was written 14 years ago because I was told this man had one week to live,” says Hustak. “I had lunch with him two weeks ago. Only [God] knows.”