Reading Old Newspapers

By Andrew Nurse

I like reading old newspapers and I know that is not out of place for an historian.

In one way or another, media are history’s life blood, even if we don’t all make use of them in the same way. The range of media at which historians look is broad. It includes posters and recordings, maps and letters, films and oral traditions, and all matter of other things. We are trained to account for source biases, find ways to respect authors and audiences, set works and words in context, and think about how communications are part of systems of social relationships.

All of this is important, but that is not why I like reading old newspapers, or at least not all of it.

I like them because they surprise me. They show me things about the past I had not expected and, on a human level, they let me see into lives of the people on which they report. This might not work the same way for large-scale media, but community newspapers are often tightly focused on the suburbs and small towns that are their centre and market. 

Recently, I’ve been reading The Spryfield News, a long defunct community newspaper that ran for just a bit more than a year in 1976 and 1977. 

It reported on Spryfield, Nova Scotia, a working class suburb then only recently amalgamated to Halifax. On a whim, I took a pic of a cover that featured school music students and teacher and sent it to my wife, who grew up in the area. She recognized some of the kids in the picture and knew the teacher but had never been in her class.

This old newspaper did something else. It provided a connection between past and present; it animated the past and, for my wife, focused her attention on parts of her own history that she might have forgotten.

I started reading The Spryfield News because I work in the history of newspapers, particularly in Halifax and, in particular, on what was then called “alternate” media of the late 1960s and 1970s.

The Spryfield News was owned by a small company: NIF Publishing, which also published The 4th Estate (a more serious venture investigative journalism), a weekly entertainment guide, and a range of supplements that included a short-run literary magazine Voices Down East, edited by Silver Donald Cameron with the assistance of Brenda Large.

What does the history of this short-run community newspaper tell us?

The short answer is: more than most of us assume. 

First, The Spryfield News was a product of the rapid urbanization and growth of Halifax beginning in the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s, over 25,000 people lived in the area. This made Spryfield a new market, one that the Bedford-Sackville Daily News tried to expand into in another suburb. Moreover, it was a market without competition on a community level. While NIF’s The 4th Estate competed with the larger Halifax daily papers, The Spryfield News’ community-focus attempted to stake out a new ground in what was really a new community. It showed how population change created new forms of journalism. 

Second, the newspaper’s contents also highlight the problems of what was, in fact, poorly planned urban growth. The Spryfield News looked different from Halifax’s other papers. It had a headline that often focused on a sports team or school event, completely neglecting national issues or provincial politics, but no front page stories. Instead, its front page was taken up with a large image, advertising, and a capsule of content.  Its inside stories focused on the Spryfield Residents Association and local concerns about a lack of infrastructure or traffic congestion. It was also almost unreservedly boosterish. Other stories focused on whe way the community addressed its own problems, say by creating cooperative day cares, the growth of minor athletics, academic accomplishments, or how poorer neighbourhoods had been unfairly stigmatized.

In short, The Spryfield News captured the self-conceptions of a rapidly developing community. It looked to promote a positive community self-image that took cooperative self-help as a mechanism of suburban development. 

The Spryfield News was a freebie. Its contents included not only local news but incidences in community history, syndicated columns, colouring competitions for kids, a lot of pictures, and a lot of advertising. The Spryfield News styled its contents as a response to local demand: 

“[t]he new paper is the result of a demand from residents and businesses through the area for a newspaper that can provide interesting, informative, and current news on the community to all residents, and also serve as an important vehicle for local advertisers so residents can be aware of the best buys available.”

In this way, The Spryfield News blurred the boundaries between news and advertising. For its anticipated readership, advertising was not the price of the newspaper — the revenue that allowed for its free distribution — but part of its content that, it believed, was important to its readers. 

Finally, over the span of its short run, The Spryfield News showed some changes. A new editor seemed more committed to more serious reporting, promised to develop an editorial section, and introduced a free classified section. One noteworthy change came in the form of syndicated editorial cartoons. Over the span of its brief history, the cartoons began to focus more and more on the problems of the working and middle classes, the incompetence or indifference of politicians, and the economic squeeze brought on by stagflation and the oil shocks.

Said differently, its cartoons moved from simple humour to take on a more cutting edge that expressed the middle and working class economic and social concerns of the time. 

There is much more in The Spryfield News.

Its contents were ideologically unstable. My favourite story is about a class that made a full-scale paper maché model of Halifax city council. I, personally, don’t find it all that flattering but I don’t think that was point. The model was displayed in a local shopping mall and highlights the idiosyncrasies and oddities of community news.

The Spryfield News collapsed in 1977 because its parent company closed under acute economic pressure. It likely turned a very small profit, but not enough to help its parent company weather the competitive economic storms that the Royal Commission on Newspapers (the Kent Commisson) detailed in its 1981 report.

There were other efforts to fill the space left by The Spryfield News, other community-oriented newspapers that had brief runs. The new media world that was emerging in the 1970s, however, made it difficult to create community-oriented journalism in the face of competition for advertising dollars. And, this might be the final thing that The Spryfield News demonstrates: the increasing ways in which consumerism, media, and journalism had become intertwined. 

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Andrew Nurse is a Professor of Canadian Studies at Mount Alison University

This post is part of an activehistory.ca series on media and history in Canada. Media have been both remarkably important and intensely theorized but also historically understudied. We hope this series highlights the diversity of ways the study of media history informs and contributes to our knowledge of the past and our understanding of the role of media in the present. The editors encourage other submissions on topics related to media history, broadly conceived. If you are interested in contributing or even just finding out more about this series, please feel free to write to Andrew Nurse at anurse@mta.ca or Hannah Cooley at hannah.cooley@mail.utoronto.ca.