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The Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail is a Canadian English language nationally distributed newspaper, based in Toronto and printed in six cities across the country. With a weekly readership of 935 000, it is Canada's largest-circulation national newspaper and second-largest daily newspaper after the Toronto Star. The Globe and Mail is widely considered to be Canada's newspaper of record. It is owned by media conglomerate CTVglobemedia.

History

The predecessor to The Globe and Mail was The Globe, founded in 1844 by Scottish immigrant George Brown, who would later become a Father of Confederation. Brown's liberal politics led him to court the support of the Clear Grits, precursor to the modern Liberal Party of Canada. The Globe began in Toronto as a weekly party organ for Brown's Reform Party, but seeing the economic gains that he could make in the newspaper business, Brown soon targeted a wide audience of liberal minded freeholders. 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 (which had a circulation of 78,000 by this point) merged with The Mail and Empire (circulation 118,000), itself formed through a merger in 1895 between The Toronto Mail and Toronto Empire. The Mail was 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. Press reports at the time stated, "the minnow swallowed the whale". 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 Winnipeg-based FP Publications controlled by Brig. Richard Malone, which owned 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. FP Publications and The Globe and Mail were 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 six 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 and remains its largest shareholder, 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 Bell Globemedia (now CTVglobemedia), which became a subsidiary of BCE with the Thomson family retaining a minority stake. In late 2005, BCE reduced its stake in Bell Globemedia, leaving the Thomson family, through its holding company Woodbridge, with a 40-percent stake. BCE, Torstar (owner of the Toronto Star) and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan each control a 20-percent stake.

Political stance

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 1991 Saskatchewan provincial election and British Columbia provincial election. The New Democrats won both elections and went on to form provincial governments.

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 deliberation, 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, with their editorial the day of the 1995 Quebec Referendum mostly quoting a Mulroney speech in favour of the Accord. 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 generally supported the policies of Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. In the 2006 federal election, the paper turned away from the Liberals to Stephen Harper's Conservative Party of Canada.

Recent developments

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. The University of British Columbia student paper the Ubyssey published a parody issue titled Glib and Male. The spring 2008 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism referenced the nickname "Old and Male" for the paper's employee base and perceived target audience.

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, however, The Globe and Mail has continued to outsell the National Post.

On April 23, 2007, the paper introduced significant changes to its print design and also introduced a new unified navigation system to its websites. The paper added a "lifestyle" section to the Monday-Friday editions, entitled Globe Life, which has been described as an attempt to attract readers from the rival Toronto Star. Additionally, the paper followed other North American papers by dropping detailed stock listings in print and by shrinking the printed paper to a 12-inch width.

Key people

Senior editors

Cathrin Bradbury, managing editor (features)
Neil A. Campbell, executive editor
Edward Greenspon, editor-in-chief
Colin MacKenzie, managing editor (news)
Tom Maloney, sports editor
Stephen Northfield, foreign editor
David Walmsley, national editor
John Stackhouse, editor, Report on Business
Sylvia Stead, deputy editor
John Geiger, editorial board editor
Patrick Martin, comment editor
Jill Borra, Globe life editor

Foreign bureaus

North America

Paul Koring, Washington Bureau Chief
Barrie McKenna, Washington Bureau
Sinclair Stewart, New York Bureau Chief
Simon Houpt, New York BureauEurope
Doug Saunders, European Bureau Chief (London)
Elizabeth Renzetti, European Bureau (London)
Eric Reguly, European Bureau (Rome)
Graeme Smith, Moscow Bureau Chief
Jane Armstrong, Moscow BureauMiddle East, Asia and Africa
Mark MacKinnon, Middle East Bureau Chief (Jerusalem)
Geoffrey York, Asia Bureau Chief (Beijing)
Carolynne Wheeler, Middle East Bureau (Jerusalem)
Stephanie Nolen, Africa Bureau Chief, Johannesburg

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)
World Press Review online, "Canada: Newspapers and Magazines Online" http://www.worldpress.org/newspapers/AMERICAS/Canada.cfm