Recollections of the birth of The Bulletin

By Frank Touby –

Paulette and I had just been married at St. Michael’s Cathedral after 19 years of “dating” from the same bedroom. My last “solid” job, as a senior editor at Financial Post, was several years behind me—a victim of the recession. And so on a diningroom table in a Henry Lane Terrace apartment The Bulletin had its birth 10 years ago.

It involved a lot of cutting with scalpels, hot wax, sweat and tears. It took the last money we had to paste it together, print and mail it to 12,000 St. Lawrence Neighbourhood dwellings, hungry for local coverage. Either it would pay us what we had estimated, or we would be on welfare and there wouldn’t be a second issue.

Since most of Downtown is apartments of various natures that don’t have front doors, the mail was the only way to ensure the paper was received. To make it interesting was the only way to ensure it was read.

Many of the advertisers who were to pay us had held off until the product was in the mail. Small-time publishers before had stung them. So if it didn’t get mailed as promised, we wouldn’t be paid. But it did. And from the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood Community Bulletin we shortened our name and broadened our reach to 70,000 mailed copies each month to cover most of Downtown.

Things have changed mightily. Anisa Lancione became our devoted Managing Editor. Devoted to The Bulletin’s readers, that is. We now engage in daily journalism through our website at www.thebulletin.ca and our Audio-Video Producer Peter Reynolds (like I, an old pro) ensures there is new, fresh and interesting online streaming video and audio. Don’t miss the long interview I had with Pam McConnell on a range of topics from the dog-park situation in Corktown to how we can recapture The Esplanade and St. Lawrence Hall from city departments.