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Editor's Desk

Another TFP Moment

by Judi McLeodMay 30 - June 20, 2000

Saturday, May 27, 2000-As this history of Toronto Free Press was being written, ‘a typical TFP moment’ came along to interrupt. Sales Manager Simon Genest telephoned to ask if he could borrow a pair of my boyfriend’s underwear. He needed the underwear to complete the Superman’s costume he would be donning for a picture needed to illustrate Jeff Goodall’s page three story. The idea to pose Simon as Superman came during a sales meeting last night. The photograph will be taken within a day of TFP’s print deadline, making it ‘another TFP moment’.

The history leading to the 10th anniversary of this newspaper is full of many memories. Some stand out as signposts marking the way.

On the wall of our Elm Street office are a number of cartoons, the work of a talented artist called Lefty, including the one that graced our first front page, Councillor Jack Layton climbing into a city limousine with his bicycle, ready for a photo op, tied to the back.

TFP was fired off the launching pad with the help of a small group of Toronto City Hall politicians. Hellbent for re-election, the politicos were casting about to find someone to help them with an election rag at the same time that former Toronto Sun reporter Judi McLeod was looking to start up her own newspaper. Although the incumbent councillors waxed eloquently about the need for a newspaper that would focus on municipal politics, they really wanted a pre-election pamphleteering exercise to counteract a newspaper called The Badger. Resurrected for every municipal election, The Badger was house organ of the NDP caucus. It regularly editorialized about the need to defeat ‘right wing politicians’ who were ‘in the pockets of the big developers’. Their claims would have been much closer to the truth had they only added that some NDP councillors were in the pockets of the ‘co-op housing developers’.

TFP spies actually attended a Badger fund-raiser at the Bamboo Club, returning to home base thoroughly demoralized because of the amount of money that had been raked in. But editors of The Badger unwittingly gave TFP, then known as Our Toronto, its first scoop. The Toronto Star’s Kelly Tughill had written a story containing politician’s complaints about both hard-hitting publications. Tughill wrote that she had interviewed the O.T. editor in a humble one-bedroom apartment that doubled as the newspaper office, while the Badger editor, interviewed in an upperscale Italian restaurant, had been reticent about the nature of his day-time job. McLeod was intrigued about why the editor would be cautious about telling the Star reporter where he worked. It turned out that Paul Carney edited the radical Badger by night while holding down a day-time job, managing the portfolios of local luminaries like Paul Godfrey and Gordon Chong as an employee of Mackenzie Financial, by day.

Like an ill-fated Hollywood marriage, our union with the municipal politicians was over within months. Strategy meetings had been dominated by spats over which politician’s picture should have been more dominantly displayed in the last issue.

McLeod struck out on her own, and save for an almost-partnership with a would-be mogul driven by an unknown agenda in 1999, has been on her own ever since.

For most of its tenure, TFP has been a monthly publication. In the beginning, we were a cut and paste operation of eight pages.

Journalistically, we strive for investigative news aimed at the municipal level of government. We

believe that municipal government, the level closest to the average person, is the most important one of all. Over the years, we have never changed our belief that wasteful municipal government, because of its nature, is the one that potentially gets away with the most. Public apathy at election time and not close enough media scrutiny in the years between elections keep municipal government needing major reform to bring it back to more accountability for John Q. Public.

Controversial newspapers into investigative journalism are often in trouble. Publishing an independent newspaper in a competitive Toronto market makes for a busier than usual schedule, and we have not always been able to easily identify barbarians at the gate (candidates for jobs sent along by disgruntled city politicians).

For posterity’s sake, there are a couple of �firsts’ that belong in this history. Back in 1995, a local businessman by the name of Victor Pappalardo asked to have an aerial shot of the marvelous Toronto City Centre Airport replace the cartoon that usually graced the front page. Pappalardo, CEO at Trans Capital Air, was valiantly trying to save the airport from death by politics, a pursuit that continues. We were about to get our first print job in Tonawanda, N.Y. Because the airport issue was time sensitive, Pappalardo arranged to have Brian Thompson and the O.T. ‘flats’ flown down to our printer.

In August of 1996, we were printed for the first time in full color by The Tribune in Welland, Ont. Staffers Brian Thompson and Julie Mah drove the front page color output, from downtown Toronto to the editor, weekending at Dave Barr’s Trout Fishing Farm in Violet Hill, near Airport Road and Highway 89.

In six years, Our Toronto had grown from eight black and white pages to 32 pages, full color, front, centre and back.

To this day, we continue to be printed in Welland by the pros at The Trib, now overseen by courageous war veteran Verne Shaull, whose colorful life as a newspaper man equals anything written here.

In May of 1999, TFP took the big plunge and began publishing once every two weeks.

The almost-partner who came in with a promise of newspaper boxes, which never materialized, soon departed the scene. The editor had taken great pride in running TFP absolutely debt-free for nine straight years. For the first in our history--and after only four months with the agenda unknown almost-partner, we were left in debt not entirely of our own making.

In May 2000, we begin a publishing schedule of every three weeks.

The front page headline of our 10th anniversary issue declares, ‘We made it!’ We would never have made it without the inspiration of the editor’s personal hero Conrad Black, whose kind words of encouragement in a letter written in January of 1994 kept us determined to go on, no matter how rough the going. Mr. Black’s words, ‘It is a useful service you perform and I would be distressed if there were any cloud over your ability to continue it,’ will forever be TFP’s main source of inspiration.

Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com


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