SHAME ON THE IRVINGS!!! THEY COULD HAVE MENTION THE OTHER BLOGGERS IN NEW BRUNSWICK!!!

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Originally uploaded by Oldmaison.

Have you noticed the Irvings never interviewed other bloggers during the election campaign???

Media change, but not the message

Edtih Robb
City Views

The first thing you see when you step into the entryway of the 939 Main St., Moncton headquarters of the 130-year-old Times & Transcript newspaper is one of the original, hand-operated, hot-lead typesetting machines. It looks like a sculpture, but it was actually in use when I first started working at this newspaper.

Personally, it reminds me daily of the renaissance I have experienced in my business, and it always moves me. That sentiment was re-inforced in the middle of the election night buzz on Monday.

Flashback briefly to the first election I was involved in as a reporter. October, 1970. As a fit and energetic teenager who had just entered the employ of what was then The Times and The Moncton Transcript, my editor asked if I wanted to be involved in the election, making it sound like the holy grail of the writing world.

Eagerly I agreed. I researched every little detail I could find about P'tit Louis, the affable Acadian premier Louis Robichaud who was seeking to extend his decade in power, and his opponent Richard Hatfield.

I told the editor how excited I was to be in the newspaper business. He corrected me, telling me I was in the readership business. I never forgot that.

Election night arrived and I learned my assignment was to grab the copy paper off the editor's "out baskets" as fast as it was marked up from the reporters' old manual typewriters and sprint with it to the "back shop" where typesetters using the old machine now in the front lobby set it with letters that fell out upside down and backwards for the printer.

The night ended with the usual triumphs and disasters. Louis Robichaud lost, and said he was disappointed but not upset. "I believe strongly that we had given good government for 10 years, but that no government stays in power indefinitely," he said.

Richard Hatfield said he had taken on "a king-sized job" to cure the province's ills, a job he stayed at for the next 17 years, making him New Brunswick's longest-serving premier.

I wrote one unassigned column in between my sprints to the back-shop that night, on the thrill of voting for the first time. The editor was amused. The column ended up on the front page and my writing career took a serious leap forward.

Hatfield got 32 seats that night; Robichaud 26. In terms of popular vote, the Liberals actually achieved a slightly higher percentage than the Conservatives. The Liberals had 48.6 per cent and the PCs had 48.4 per cent, while the NDP (which won no seats) had 2.8 per cent.

Fast forward to Sept. 18, 2006. Election night in the newsroom is still a wondrous experience. Okay, the beer bottles, blue jeans, and cigarettes are gone, replaced with Tim's cups, suits and ties, and pizza at midnight, but the excitement remains.

For me this year, it was breaking ground all over again. With Canadaeast.com's new "blogger" Clarissa Anderson and Webmaster Tony Golding, I was supervising our first real-time, on-line coverage of a provincial election.

The political results are old news now, with Liberal leader Shawn Graham already planning his new government and outgoing Premier Bernard Lord looking at adjusting to a job as Opposition leader for his Progressive Conservative Party. No NDP members were elected. The party in power did not, again, get the largest percentage of the popular vote, but secured the necessary number of seats. What is old is new again.

But we blogged all night. People logging onto Canadaeast could see a flash graphic that was constantly updated, showing which party had won a seat. You could mouse over a map of the province and see prominents and how they were doing. You could see poll counts as they came in. You could see comments as fast as the leaders made them. It was exhilarating; it was still the readership business but delivered in a whole new format.

The next morning, you could still sit with your cup of tea and see all the information in its traditional package. The results were posted clearly across the top of the front page, followed by information-heavy pages offering the scoop on every riding, number of votes achieved by every candidate with key information in boxes and sidebars, and tabulated charts of riding by riding results. It was an awesome package.

People have been talking doomsday about the readership industry for decades; they just don't get it. Mediums change, but people still want the message.

We are in the golden age of information, the renaissance. Speed has increased. Delivery modes are changing. The new is blending with the traditional to build something better, just as it always has.

There is now, as there has always been, only one challenge. That is relevancy.
City Views appears daily, written by various members of our staff. Edith Robb is editor of Canadaeast.com and her column appears each Saturday.