Happy Anniversary to CFP readers everywhere!

Today is a special one for Canada Free Press (CFP). It’s CFP’s fourth anniversary as an online daily.

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As testimony to its international status, there’s a marquis extending anniversary wishes to CFP at the top of the online version of Weekly Blitz in Bangladesh today. The story of CFP taking the bold step to go daily starts with a meeting when Associate Editor Arthur Weinreb suggested we’d make a bigger impact on the Internet if we moved to a daily publication. Weinreb’s suggestion had me spending hours at my PC. If we were going to burst into daily publishing, I wanted backup stories for slow news days. From the beginning, going daily proved to be the right thing to do. Only one month into our new schedule, a piece by Weinreb lamenting a poll indicating that over 40% of Canadian teens thought of America as “evil” hit the Drudge Report. Traffic hit the ceiling. Tekkie supremo Brian Thompson had to take a crash course on bandwidth. CFP was on its way. On the Internet for years before striking out as a daily, CFP had a reputation for feisty reporting like the investigative print journal Toronto Free Press (TFP) that was its blueprint. The summer before Weinreb and Yours Truly wrote and posted a double byline story entitled, “The White Jays Brigade”. It was the CFP response to a Toronto Star banner story, claiming that the Toronto Blue Jays were not diverse enough. Toronto’s popular “Boys of Summer” woke up to find their pictures, in full colour on the newspaper’s June 28 front page. “The White Jays?” asked the Star headline. “In a city of so many multi-cultural faces, Toronto’s baseball team is the whitest in the league. Why?” Many Jay’s players were understandably upset by the politically correct story, which happened to coincide with the team’s opening-day roster. CFP wasn’t long in noticing that the accusatory Toronto Star was the whitest in the newspaper industry and ran pictures of Star editors and reporters on its website site to prove it. The “White Jay Brigade” was picked up and carried by Fox News. From opening chapters CFP has been popular among an American readership. Its editors believe that it was largely courtesy of www.newsmax.com, “America’s news page”, which ran three out of seven CFP cover stories in our first year of operation. Since the first whoop of joy that went out when we made it to the Drudge Report, courageous Canadian climatologist Tim Ball made it old hat. Ball’s columns faithful to the theme that global warming is not man-made have taken us far and wide on the worldwide net, and CFP is proud to be the Home of Tim Ball. The proudest moments for CFP’s editor came when radio giant Rush Limbaugh read, three CFP columns on his radio show, word-for-word, something that Rush himself admits he rarely does. Then on one of those couldn’t sleep nights last summer, I came across a list that categorized CFP as number 47 on the top 100 most influential Conservative websites, worldwide. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing on my computer screen, so went to perk a pot of 3 a.m. coffee to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. Within an hour, congrats were pouring in from places in the world where it was already daylight, including Warsaw, Poland from where CFP columnist David Dastych sent a congratulatory note. Canada Free Press has the best roster of columnists anywhere. Some 72 columnists now file to us from all corners of the globe. Most recently we were joined by the award-winning Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, harassed and imprisoned by the authorities in Bangladesh for flagging the outside world to the rise of radical Islam in his mother country, and his “brother” Dr. Richard Benkin, Chicago-based academic who fights so valiantly to keep the persecution of Choudhury before the world’s journalistic community. My most heartfelt 4th Anniversary congratulations go to CFP readers because it is them who have taken us so far. Happy Anniversary CFP readers and thank you for keeping CFP an Internet success!