The Globe and Mail

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The Globe and Mail is a large English language national newspaper based in Toronto, Canada. It bills itself as the newspaper of record in Canada. It has a circulation of around 1,965,991 weekly.

"The Globe" has, under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Edward Greenspon, instituted many editorial, news coverage, and cosmetic changes, in response to other Canadian news agencies. These have helped the Globe and Mail remain Canada's second-largest newspaper.

1 History
2 Politics
3 Modernization
4 Regular contributors
5 See also
6 External links

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History

The paper was founded as The Globe in 1844 by George Brown, who was later a Father of Confederation. Brown 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.

Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries the newspaper was strictly a Toronto-oriented daily, competing with the Toronto Star in a heated newspaper war. In 1936, after a merger with The Mail and Empire (the Mail had been the paper of Brown's arch-rival, Sir John A. Macdonald), the Globe became The Globe and Mail. The merger was arranged by the Globe and Mail's first publisher, George McCullagh, who fronted for mining magnate William Wright. (McCullagh committed suicide in 1962, and the newspaper was sold to the Webster family of Montreal). As the Globe and Mail lost ground to the Star locally, the newspaper began to circulate nationally in search of subscribers, adopting the masthead slogan "Canada's National Newspaper" in the process. The Globe and Mail has always been a morning newspaper.

In 1962, the paper added its popular Report on Business section. Report on Business Magazine, published by and carried in the newspaper, follow, along with the specialty television channel, Report on Business Television.

Long owned by Kenneth Thomson and his family, in 2001 control of the paper was sold to BCE Inc., also owners of the CTV network. The network and paper are now owned by Bell Globemedia, of which the Thomson Corporation is the majority shareholder with 40%, while Bell, Torstar (which owns the Toronto Star) and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan control 20% each.

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Politics

Editorially, the Globe and Mail has historically been seen as a conservative and business-oriented paper. The paper was an ardent supporter of the now defunct Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, being most pronounced in its many pro-free trade editorials during the election in 1988. After 1993, the paper moved its electoral support to the Liberals. Since the 1998 launch of rival conservative paper the National Post, the Globe has been seen as increasingly centrist or even liberal; however, no media studies have yet examined whether the editorial thrust of the paper has actually changed (as opposed to the zeitgeist changing around it) and recent anecdotal observations are typically made in comparison to the Post.

Following the tenure of chief editor Edward Greenspon in 2002, the Globe and Mail has been criticized for returning to its conservative tradition; its editorial cartoonist Brian Gable has mocked it as sensationalistic, and its columnist Lawrence Martin has called for the creation of a new national newspaper [1]. In the 2006 federal election, the Globe and Mail endorsed the Conservative Party, endorsing a different party than the Liberals for the first time since 1993.

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Modernization

Possibly due to this competition, the paper has made other changes such as the introduction of colour photographs and the creation of the Review section on arts, entertainment and culture. Though promoted as a national paper and sold throughout Canada, The Globe and Mail also serves as a Toronto metropolitan paper, publishing several special sections in its Toronto edition which are not included in the national edition. As such it is sometimes popularly ridiculed as being too focused on the Greater Toronto Area, which could be seen as part of a wider humourous notion of Torontonians sometimes being blind to the wider concerns of the nation. (A similar criticism is sometimes applied to the New York Times). For this reason, critics sometimes refer to the paper as the Toronto Globe and Mail or as 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 Globe and Mail has outsold the National Post throughout the so-called "national newspaper war", and has begun to regain some of the lost ground as the Post's new owner, CanWest, has been reluctant to invest in expansion.

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