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The Globe and Mail is a large English language national newspaper based in Toronto, Canada, and printed in seven cities across Canada. Since 1900, the paper has called itself "Canada's National Newspaper," and it is often considered the newspaper of record in Canada. It has a circulation of around 2 million weekly. It is Canada's second-largest daily newspaper, after the Toronto Star, and Canada's largest national daily newspaper.

The paper is part of Bell Globemedia, a Canadian media company whose largest shareholder (pending regulatory approval) is the family of the late Ken Thomson. The company also owns the Canadian TV network CTV.

History

The paper was founded as The Globe in 1844 by George Brown, who was later a Father of Confederation and whose Whiggish politics led him to found the Reform Party, precursor to the modern Liberal Party of Canada. Brown 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. In 1880, Brown was fatally shot by a disgruntled ex-pressman from the Globe.

The Globe began as a weekly party organ for Brown's Reform Party. By the 1850s, it had become an independent and well-regarded daily newspaper, and in the 1870s, shortly after Canada's confederation in 1867, it began distribution by railway to other cities in the province of Ontario.

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, which had been founded by Brown's arch-rival, the Tory politician Sir John A. Macdonald, who was the first Prime Minister of Canada and the founder of the party that spawned the modern Conservative Party of Canada. The Mail was created in 1872, at first as a Conservative Party organ; it merged with the Toronto Empire in 1895.

With this merger, the Globe became The Globe and Mail. The merger was arranged by the Globe and Mail's first publisher, George McCullagh, who fronted for mining magnate William Wright. (McCullagh committed suicide in 1952, and the newspaper was sold to the Webster family of Montreal). As the Globe and Mail lost ground to the Star locally, the newspaper increased 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 new Report on Business section, which had been launched in 1962, building the paper's reputation as the voice of the Toronto-based business community. It was sold in 1980 to the Thomson Group, a company run by the family of Kenneth Thomson, who was repeatedly cited by Forbes Magazine as Canada's wealthiest businessman.

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; Calgary and Vancouver. In 2005, it launched a British Columbia edition with separate B.C. news pages. In 1995, it launched its web site, www.globeandmail.com, which has its own content and journalists as well as the content of the print newspaper. The site has since given rise to companion sites including globeinvestor.com, focussing on financial and investment-related news. Some features of globeandmail.com were restricted to paid subscribers in 2004.

While the Thomson family have remained the figureheads of the paper since 1980, in 2001 control of the paper was sold to BCE Inc. (Bell Canada Enterprises Inc.), Canada's major telephone company, which had also acquired control of CTV, Canada's major national private TV network. The Globe and CTV were merged into a media company, Bell Globemedia, which was owned by BCE although the Thomsons retained a major 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 40%, while BCE, Torstar (which owns the Toronto Star) and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan control 20% each. This transaction requires CRTC approval.

Politics

Even before the Globe merged with the Mail and Empire, the paper was widely viewed as the voice of the Upper Canada elite - that is, the Bay Street financial community of Toronto and the communities centered around the university and government institutions of Toronto. This merger of Liberal and Tory broadsheets prefigured the Globe's editorial stance, which alternated its support between those two well-established national parties. Since the 1960s, the Toronto elite's politics have generally been socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and this has been the more or less consistent voice of the Globe and Mail's editorials. During 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 (which is unsurprising, as Canada has never actually had a third party strong enough to form a national majority government). On the provincial level, there have been exceptions (it endorsed the social-democratic New Democratic Party in Ontario and British Columbia in the 1990s, both of whom went on to form provincial governments).

During the 1980s, especially under the editorship of William Thorsell, the paper joined the majority of Canadian voters in breaking from the country's longstanding Liberal Party consensus, strongly endorsing 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 defuse the Quebec sovereignty movement by granting more power to the provinces. During this period, the paper nevertheless editorialized repeatedly in favour of such socially liberal policies as legalizing marijuana and cocaine, and of expanding gay rights.

In the 1990s, it became a champion of the policies of Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, though not unreservedly. In 2006, the paper turned away from the Liberals, endorsing the right-wing Conservative Party of Canada under the leadership of politician Stephen Harper. The Conservative Party won a narrow minority victory, but was granted few seats by Toronto-area voters. Though the paper argued in its editorials that the Conservatives should win in order to give the Liberals a chance to renew themselves, the endorsement can also be seen as a move away from the political views of central Canada in an effort to embrace western Canadian readers.

Modernization

Possibly due to the new competition of the National Post, the paper has made other changes 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. Though promoted as a national paper and sold throughout Canada, The Globe and Mail also serves as a Toronto metropolitan paper, publishing several special sections in its Toronto edition which are not included in the national edition. As such it is sometimes popularly ridiculed as being too focused on the Greater Toronto Area, which could be seen as part of a wider humourous notion of Torontonians sometimes being blind to the wider concerns of the nation. (A similar criticism is sometimes applied to The New York Times). For this reason, critics sometimes refer to the paper as the Toronto Globe and Mail or as 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.

The Globe and Mail has outsold the National Post throughout the so-called "national newspaper war", and has begun to regain some of the lost ground as the Post's new owner, CanWest, has been reluctant to invest in expansion.

Senior Editors

Foreign bureaus

Staff columnists

References

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)

See also

External links

National newspapers in Canada | Bell Globemedia | Newspapers in Ontario | Toronto media | 1844 establishments

The Globe and Mail

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "The Globe and Mail".

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