Jeff Burgar
The past 25 years, from about 1997 to today, in many respects were very much like the first 25 years of the Lakeside Leader.
The Leader has from the start been one of the most progressive weekly newspapers in Alberta in both technical capability and newsworthiness.
Over the years, Slave Lake and region continued its traditional “boom and bust” economic cycle with the fortunes of the community tied so much to oil and gas. Even with the growth of forestry, commercial enterprise, education and tourism, we continue to see this.
As we have said many times, we can see the prosperity of our region mirrored right in our own bound books – the books which contain each edition, week by week, of the Leader.
Some years are fat, as existing businesses expand and grow. New businesses try to take market share. Government and agencies work hard to get their messages across. All are advertising and creating news and jobs. But then times get tough. Often, not just locally in our community, but right across Alberta. And sometimes, right across Canada and the world. The story continues today, as we once again enjoy higher energy prices and all that means.
While the Lakeside Leader was still relatively new, a Canadian telephone network system called Datapac was rolled out in 1976. A few years earlier, in 1969 in America, a network system called ARPANET, a defense research project, began operating. This came about as inventors and scientists dreamed of a network that would enable researchers across the United States, and later around the world, to use computer technologies of the day and share their research. It was a good idea. Sensing this, the American military became involved, forming a somewhat parallel operation called, naturally, MilNet. Eventually, over the next 20 years, this all turned into an operation called the Internet. Little did people know what would happen.
But sensing the world to come, computer companies like Hewlett Packard and Western Digital booked their claim to ‘domain names’ hp.com and wd.com in the mid-80s.
However, it was not until 1994 that, with the unleashing of Netscape’s web browser, the World Wide Web, also known as www, came into common public existence.
The world would never be the same. And of course, the newspaper industry and in fact, the entire media industry, would never be the same.
But to back up a bit, scientists and researchers and computer people were not the only ones finding value in networking online. In fact, many business people, particularly agricultural producers, were already ‘online.’ Banks were using Interac, their own network.
Many ag people traded commodity options and futures on the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange and even the Chicago Mercantile. They used dial-up modems, on phone lines, on that Datapac limited service from Telus, plus a trading platform called Grassroots. In the early 1990s, only two people working at Telus were the public face of Datapac. They were the ones who answered the phones and helped customers. Two, serving an entire province!
In 1994, as Netscape and the World Wide Web were sweeping the world, our newspaper asked Telus when the Internet service would be available in Slave Lake and High Prairie. Telus told us ‘Perhaps in 1997, and most likely somewhat later.’
Although the technology did not exist at the time, we could see the impact networking around the world would have just on our own little corner of the publishing world. Our method of ‘cutting and pasting’ our news stories and ads and headlines onto what we called ‘flats’ had already given way to partial digital creation. We set up everything on computers.
Our early dream was to replace our typewriters and typesetting machines and even, dare to think it, darkrooms and film cameras! We wanted a computer on every desk. This became mostly reality in the 1980s.
The next step was to ‘wire’ pages to another computer device in our own office. From device to device and paste up, we made film negatives. Then from there we made photo sensitive metal plates that we mounted on the big printing press.
The dream now was, why not just ‘wire’ the entire newspaper from the computer right to the press? The day came when were indeed almost fully digital in our office. Which soon enough, we knew, would made it possible to ‘wire’ the entire newspaper, using of course, the Internet.
No more 2 a.m. drives back and forth between Slave Lake and our own press in High Prairie. No more shipping ‘flats’ on the Greyhound bus, which often misplaced the big box 2 foot x 3 foot x 3 inches of the flats and negatives.
It actually took 13 years to get to that point. From 1986 and so-called desktop publishing, to 1995 when we had our own Internet service (not Telus) in High Prairie. To late 1999. Technology all made it possible and cost effective for our little newspapers to do our first full colour photos on pages on presses in Edmonton.
Then, shortly after, around 2002, it was indeed possible to ‘wire’ our entire newspaper to another innovative company. Not in Edmonton, but in Wainwright, Alberta.
There were many adventures along the way. Community involvement from our staff. Changing from film cameras to digital. Finding software that would do what we wanted. While so many newspapers run on Apple equipment, from our early days in the late 1970’s when we used Radio Shack gear, to 1982 when we went to IBM based PCs because of better value. In 1986 for example, we added five PC’s and two laser printers to our computer fleet for the same cost of one, that’s right, one Apple system.
Around 1998 we started an online edition of our sister newspaper, the High Prairie South Peace News. It was good enough that one of our former employees who was then working at Alberta Report magazine mentioned our name to his boss, Ted Byfield.
For a few years, we did the online edition of AR as we called it, until they transitioned to a more robust in-house version once we trained a few of their people.
Our work was also good enough it caught the attention of some people in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. These folks had built an online classified advertising platform and were trying to interest the newspaper industry to use it.
At the Canadian Community Newspaper Convention in Calgary in 2000, they made a pitch to have their platform, Cansell, adopted by newspapers across Canada. The decision to not use Cansell is still echoed today in failures across the world. Newspapers, like many a political party or business group, too often just don’t want to work together against common foes. Common foes can get very big very fast while their enemies squabble and compete among themselves.
Google started making inroads in 1998, replacing search engines Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite and Lycos. Facebook was nothing until 2006 when it pushed aside MySpace which had itself pushed aside leaders like Compuserve and Yahoo.
All the while, all media could not, and still have not, built a strategy to take back their business lost to the two giant companies. Which, it should be noted, make extravagant claims of reach, claims which are only verifiable through their own statistics, not independent third-parties.
While all this march of progress was happening, and continues happening today, we were covering the news in Slave Lake and region every day and every week.
So, over the period of half a century, we have seen good times and bad times. Across the world, we have watched the birth, and collapse of both daily and weekly newspapers everywhere, including right here in Slave Lake. Much the same with television and radio and magazines.
From our early days of print-only publishing, we have joined the online move to the Internet. We started The Leader online at lakesideleader.com in 2016-2017. We are now both online and in print. We are proud to be what our industry calls the local ‘newspaper of record’ for Slave Lake and region. We reach more than 10,000 readers and unique viewers in print and online each week.
To our readers and advertisers, we extend our thanks for your support. We promise we will continue to strive to make the Lakeside Leader one of the best, if not the best, single source of fair and balanced news in our great region.
Again, thank you for allowing us the past 50 years.
Jeff and Mary Burgar of High Prairie purchased the Lakeside Leader from Jerry Wallsten in 1981.
