Regina in Print: Conversation with Stephen Whitworth, editor of prairie dog
For over 30 years prairie dog has provided Regina with an independent news voice. Unfortunately, the newspaper has been forced to suspend physical print publication and is currently only online. We spoke to prairie dog’s long time editor, Stephen Whitworth, about the current state of physical print media in Regina and beyond, as well as the possibilities for the future.
During this interview we were looking through issues of Toronto newsweekly Now. and Regina’s independent paper prairie dog, provided by Stephen, as well as some issues of The Prairie Fire from the REM collection.
A prairie dog distribution box on 14th Avenue.
I brought out some old print just to kind of look over and show how amazing it used to be. It's probably better than anything I can say. Now. was the Toronto alt weekly back in the day before it was online only, and brought a whole stack of prairie dogs from different years.
Some of them look familiar to me for sure. I'm ashamed to say I haven't picked one up in a while.
Well, because we don't publish anymore.
Really? I didn't know that.
There's not adequate support right now for independent paper in the city.
While I flip through these, I'm gonna start asking questions. What's your story? Can tell me a little bit about yourself?
Me personally? I moved to Regina in a romantic miscalculation in the fall of 1998, which is how this place works, I now understand. It was kind of a wasteland here when I got here.
I worked at The Carillon for a while and ended up being the editor-in-chief there. I got along great with all the students who were from out of province and I had conflicts with pretty much all the students who were born here. That has become an ongoing theme of my entire life in this place. After a year of The Carillon I was pretty much done with it. It was horrible. I mean I made lifelong friends, but it was a horrible experience. I'm sure I wasn't the best either, but it was horrible!
Then, due to an act of god, the publisher of prairie dog bought the house I was renting a basement suite in, and told me I should apply for the upcoming managing editor job, which was a new position. This was in the spring of ‘99, and I didn't have anything else going on.
Almost no one applied for the managing editor position. Two of the finalists for it were both former Winnipeggers, me, and another guy. We had both worked at The Manitoban, the University of Manitoba student paper, together, ironically. It's pretty funny that we were the two finalists and that there was no one local who could do it, or at least not for the complete garbage wage that it paid at the time, which was on a salary lower than minimum wage by far. Really bad pay. The other guy was a lot better than I was, but I was a lot more temperamentally suited, and I'm more of a psycho about the importance of papers like prairie dog, which I think in the end you need to be. You have to really value them and what they do and what they bring and believe in the mission. And I do. They were unable to get rid of me, despite their best efforts for four or five years. I was apparently unable to get fired despite my best efforts. It all worked out. I'm still friends with all the people that hired me and most of them are not at prairie dog anymore, but I saw them on Wednesday, we went out for beers.
Anyway, act of god. Right person at the right time. I was really concerned that working at prairie dog would ruin my life. It probably kind of did but also made it awesome, so my suspicions were correct, but it worked out alright. I ended up with prairie dog and I love the job. I love the media business. It took me years to figure out how to do what I do, maybe even decades. Now, all we have to do is not go out of business. So everything's great.
Why do you think it's important that these publications stay in physical print?
I don't know if I have a straightforward answer to this. I like online publications and they're great. I read publications online all the time, but you gotta have print as well. It's just different to read a physical print paper. You browse it in a different way than you browse stuff online. Being online, you're directed by algorithms and maybe because you're looking for something specific.
In print there's a process of discovery. There's the physical act of participation as you transfer pages. There's more of a sense of authorship, I think.
A cigarette ad! When those were gone they totally killed alt weeklies. That was millions and millions and millions of dollars out of the entire industry. So, when oil creeps complain about being taxed and told to get out of their line of work, I have very little sympathy. Oil's a lot worse than cigarettes. Anyway, that's a digression.
I think it's just part of the mix of a civilized life. I think people still like print. I know that right up to the last issue we delivered our pickup was excellent, so people were still reading it. It's just cool. The way you can lay out a page and have some impact over the way the information is communicated, not just the words in a sentence, but through the design and the balance and even the interaction with advertisements, as a graphic element. Not for the ad content, but just for the experience. Of course print listings are helpful too. We have online listings, people use them all the time, but I think having a couple of pages of print listings was something that this city really misses. I know they really miss it.
My next question is about The Prairie Fire. I brought a few.
Nice. This looks like it belongs to the same condition that prairie dog grew out of. People who founded The Prairie Fire would have ended up being the professors that people who founded prairie dog had when they went to university, right? I just moved here in 98, that didn't affect me in any way, but the culture that this comes out of, has powerfully affected me for my entire adult life.
The whole independent slash alternative news thing would have started in the late 50s or very early 60s with the The Village Voice in New York. It just kept growing from there and growing and growing and growing, through all the 60s, had to kind of reinvent itself in the 80s and then perhaps got a new life from Reaganism and Thatcher and all that stuff. It's a distinctly North American phenomenon, and it's not the same now. There's a lot more radical opinions, they're all over the place, right? So you can't just have one newspaper that's radical, you have to kind of adjust to the needs of the time. This is the kind of thing that's in the same movement. I'm sure they were excited about papers like this in other cities too, especially in U.S cities. Some of these guys might have even been familiar with the self-publishing and comics boom in places like San Francisco that Robert Crumb came out of. Although Saskatchewan was probably more conservative in its leftism. Fewer stoners and more communists. Actual communists, not the centrists that conservatives currently consider communists.
What value do you think these physical print publications have for a place like Regina specifically?
I think they're important everywhere. I think it's a disaster for democracy and public discourse that every single city doesn't have them and that they're not well supported. I think cities should have more than one a lot of the time.
They've been going out of business, just dropping like flies all over North America, including something like The Village Voice. A lot of them are now online only because of the costs of print, and just because advertising has been stolen by Google and Facebook without consequence. We've lost the civic concept that we need to invest in our communities and in our democracy and in an informed public. Some of that's not an accident. There's a lot of people who don't want that kind of investment. I heard a story within the last week from a friend of mine. He has a couple of friends who are multi-millionaires in rural Saskatchewan and his multi-millionaires friends were complaining, “Well, the problem is these days too many people with too much education.” That's just fascism. That's just completely unacceptable. I start yelling at people when they talk like that around me now. It's so hard to stifle.
I think these papers are a central part of democracy. It's no accident that as the wealth gap increases in Saskatchewan and other provinces, and as the rich get richer and everyone else gets dumber and more distracted, and poverty is off the charts and there's more people in back alleys picking through garbage cans, it's no accident that that's happening in conjunction with papers like ours being completely neglected and forgotten, or an afterthought.
I could rattle off names of organizations that people would assume were no-brainer advertisers back when we had our print edition that were so much work to deal with, it was just exhausting. Ultimately the print edition had never had the support it needed. Ever. It definitely did not have enough support in the last year that we had it, so now we're trying to make a go of it online. We're turning much more heavily to donations and probably much more aggressive pitches to the community, which is kind of what you're getting an earful of today, because maybe you found me on the wrong week or maybe it's the right week, I don't know. It's been a week and a month and a year and a decade.
I think the people who say that print isn't needed anymore are the same people who think we don't need libraries anymore, and the same people who would have said that records are obsolete, which apparently they are extremely not. You have to be online, and there's things you can do online that are great, but I think print is a really important part of the mix. It's a tragedy bordering on social negligence that this has been allowed to happen to our publication and I really regret not being a lot harder on it years ago. I really, really, really spent a lot of time keeping my mouth shut to not piss people off as we tried to find every possible market, plus grant based solutions.
Every once in a while I’ll sidekick on a sales meeting. I had a sales meeting with a local business that's got pretty good revenue and strong ecological and green concerns. The meeting was a complete waste of our time. One person was friendly. The people with the money clearly had no interest or understanding of what we did. It was, frankly, an insult and there's just been so much of that. I think one of the things, assuming we can keep this going, that people will see coming up is instead of setting sales targets internally, where we have like a bullpen, the sales team, which we don't have anymore, we'll set sales targets for the community and we’ll be expecting people to work harder to support us. I think it's time to be a lot more pushy and loud… and nice, I still tell jokes, and I'm funny.
One of the things I like about our paper is back when we had money and some resources, we could do so many fun things. You could have so many different things in the paper. You know, we could have awesome listicles, we had quirky news, we had letters with great headlines like “Disappointed by Woodworth.”
What would an ideal future for print media in Regina look like to you?
The ideal future is that it exists.
It exists, it's robust and it works well with an online website as well. In the details of it, I think the ideal newspaper has great art and design. I think it's got comics. I think it covers arts and culture and news from an aggressively reality based and moral perspective. I think most media is just too comfortable reporting facts without really reflecting on what the effect of what they do is. As much as possible, straight journalism where you interview people and you don't insert an opinion, the story is important, but I think people are misinformed by that approach more than they're informed by these days. I know, they are, in fact. I woke up this morning, my alarm went off and I heard Pollievre on the radio being quoted about how safe injection sites are a disaster and it's like that's just not true. I understand the reporter's situation, so I'm not attacking the reporter here, but what you want is a reporter asking those questions, just saying, well all the advocates of safe injection sites say that what you're saying is not true. You've got your facts wrong and you're just politicking and looking for popularity, on the backs of people who are in crisis. You're a terrible person, what do you say to that? There needs to be more of that kind of conversation.
I think print as a physical object is a beautiful, interesting, thing that's fantastic to read and can enrich the community around it. I think the opportunity to just stumble across print and be surprised by something is special. I think print done right can make a city not just smarter, maybe challenge it ethically, maybe help elevate it and just make it a better place. You can also just make it a little weird and I think weird for weird's sake is good and important and it should be more of it. I don't think that's something Saskatchewan understands well enough and it's really frustrating. I'm a former Winnipegger and that's a city that is large enough that the weird people have a strong voice. I mean, the people at the top are the same as the people at the top everywhere, right?
To me, this city sends a clear message to everyone living in it that we all live here to be harvested for our wealth, by landlords, by chain stores, by people looking for profit.. it's all business, business, business. It's not about community, it's not about values, it's not about a better society, it's just about money. I think it's beyond corruption. The size of Regina is part of the reason for this. The fact that Regina’s origins are the guy who owned this land wanted it here. I think our existence can just give voice to things like this, and then we can attract more people who can do more of that. I think we can bring in a lot of people from outside the city who can offer a fresh perspective.
It's not about tearing the city down. I remember Pat Fiaco once referring to prairie dog as being on the demolition squad, people who want to tear everything down. No, prairie dog is the paper that wants to make everything better. That's a real lazy and offensive characterization. I think we just put up with stuff like that for too long and laughed it off for too long. We can still laugh it off, but we're not the bad guys here. We're trying to do something, we need help to do it and we’ve earned it. If we don't get it, fair enough, I can probably double or triple my salary in a communications job within a year and then I can join the forces of people working in communications who send press releases to each other, because there's no media outlets to pick them up. It cannot stay like this, it cannot stay this bad. Even though it can get worse for a while, and that's a positive.
What year did the prairie dog first begin?
1993, launched on Groundhog Day, of course.
Is that our back to school issue? This is one of the issues I'm most proud of. You will never see more work put into something that's disguised itself as a last minute piece of fluff. That's all original art that we paid for and we worked with the artist. We printed t-shirts to go with this feature. Almost all the t-shirts were sold to people who saw the ads in other cities. No one locally wanted to buy them because they were too weird, which I'll never forgive 2010 Regina for. We really worked hard on that one. When you do put out something like this every two weeks, with basically no staff and all freelancers… And like look at the thing. It's a monster. I don't know how we did it. Just look at the sheer number of words in there that I had to deal with. I don't know how I did that for years and years and years, but when you do that much work, there isn't time to hustle to get attention for it.
Is that an ad or an actual comic? Oh, that's Dakota McFadzean. He's a Saskatchewan cartoonist. He started off doing bad cartoons for The Leader Post. He contacted me a few years after that and said that he felt like he'd learned enough to be good enough for prairie dog, which is a great way of getting my attention. I'm a huge comic guy, so it was really exciting. We started working with him, he did all these amazing covers. He did the equivalent of a masters at, I think it's called, the School for Cartooning Arts in Vermont, lived in Toronto for maybe close to a decade, eventually moved back here. He does work on Netflix shows and spots of storyboarding. He's done all kinds of amazing things and no one here knows who he is.
I remember there was a series that had to do with ghosts right?
I was just going to complain about the lack of attention that got. Murray Geister, paranormal investigator. Yeah, that was Dakota's ongoing comic. We were probably the only newspaper in North America running an original serialized comic. I mean we're doing this unique thing and no media noticed it. They would have if we'd sent out a press release, but again I didn't have the time or energy to do. Do you want to do the work or do you want to get the attention for the work? We're at the point now, that a lot of my job is going to be helping us to get attention for the work we do. There's just so much working against something like this existing. It's really frustrating and it's really wrong.
prairie dog has always had dedicated lunatics committed to the idea that this thing needs to exist. A lot of those people are underpaid or not paid, and those of us who are lucky enough to be on staff and are only badly paid, you know, really appreciate that. Stuff like this needs to be supported. This idea that it's the newspaper's fault that we're not having more success is just beyond unfair. No, this failure, it's Canadian. It's not a Saskatchewan thing.
Now. isn't published in print, and look at how amazing it was. That was the best alt in Canada by far and some of its writing was absurdly good. They were massive, yeah. I think their biggest issue was something like 212 pages and it was a weekly! Then there were things like the Reader in Chicago. I don't think I have it anymore but I used to have a copy of the Reader and the thing was like this and it was a weekly. That's almost too much, right?
My favorite alt by far, although it's not what it used to be, and it's not in print anymore, was The Stranger in Seattle. It was the thing that probably most inspired the approach I take with prairie dog and would like to take in a perfect world, which is facts, facts, facts, but also a strong moral voice and also an incredibly strong sense of play. I think you have to have a sense of play. I don't know if you're familiar with the writer and sex columnist and podcaster Dan Savage? I think he's an owner and he was the editor of the paper, and then the editorial director. He was there basically since the founding and was very involved in the day-to-day, maybe up until COVID, I'm not sure. He's not running writer meetings anymore or interacting with the staff, but that one guy changed so much through his newspaper. They were a very aggressive paper and they’re gen X, so super sarcastic. Kind of toxic and angry, plus Savage… He's about my age, maybe a year older, but he's a gay guy and he went through the AIDS shit in the states, which leaves lifelong scars. He was a really good voice. In some ways, the left kind of became too nice for what that paper was, and that's good. It's an interesting process. That was a real huge inspiration on our paper. Of course, we never published Dan Savage, because when we could afford it we were scared it would kill our distribution because this place is so conservative. And then when we were comfortable that it wouldn't kill our distribution, we couldn't afford it. So that stinks.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Another thing that's really important about having a print paper, print and journalism is the first draft of history. I think there's a lot of people in Saskatchewan who don't respect the province's history and despise its great achievements and they want that history erased. I think that's why you don't see history supported as much here as you might in other places or heritage supported as much. I think that's why you see a lot of buildings demolished, because they reflect a different time that people don't like.
A lot of people here hate bricks. They’re worried that there's socialist powder in those bricks, and it might get out again and then next thing you know we have something else instead of just Universal Health Care, which is, of course, terrible because people should have to pay for their health care. Why should they get it for free?
What does conservatism have to brag about in this province? Genocide? Creating wealth for a few people? Being the government during a boom, wasting all the money, and not developing forward looking industries? Conservatives didn't create universal health care. Conservatives didn't create a labor force that’s well compensated where people have jobs that pay a living wage. Conservatives didn't create the situation that let everybody afford houses, which is, of course, good for business, right? Conservatives in this province are parasites, they are everywhere. I really couched my language over the years and tried to be nice, and I recognize that an individual with conservative views can be a lovely person who's very generous in their own way, but it's not all right anymore. We need to voice against that.
If, through some miracle someday we get back in print, and it's not impossible, I think there will be a few years of us being a lot more inflexible. I think that's important and I think we need that. I think the Regina Eco Museum should be the actual Plains Museum at a physical site and it's a failure of the city, not the Plains Museum that it's not. Put that in your article and see how your funding works, right? Although, I don't know, city council is hated by everybody right now.
I understand from the standpoint of just regular people who want a prairie dog, we do get donations, we need a lot more, but we do get them. We’re not a non-profit, we can't issue charitable receipts. I understand and appreciate that everyone here who cares about anything is under attack from ten thousand different directions right now and have been for a long time. It's really bad and that's why we need public investment in media and we need business investment.
How are billboards not taxed with proceeds going to locally owned print media? How is that? Why does the city allow a billboard company to just harvest all its wealth? Why doesn’t the city start a billboard company? The city has lots of land, it could put up billboards, they could hire an independent, arms-length municipal corporation and it could unfairly compete with billboard companies, drive them out of business or at least discipline their rates. And if that money goes into the public chest then that can be used on social programs, it can be invested in culture, it can be invested in museums, and it can be invested in newspapers. The arts, the academy and newspapers are getting absolutely killed, and those are three essential pillars of democracy and essential pillars of civilized society.
You've gotta knock the entitled, privileged, malicious dummies out of the positions of power that keep making the bad decisions. I'm sure there's institutions in this town that have advertising budgets and would have been working with prairie dog, but people on the board will say, “Oh, you can't do that, they have swear words and also they’re communists!” And we're not communists. We certainly like individual entrepreneurship as well, right? Aggressively. I don't want to be an anonymous cog in the collective. I want to be a person and I want to raise up other people as well to have success as individuals. I really like individualism. But, it's a fantasy to think that individualism can be a success when you have a whole society that's just built on wealth and business, business, business. Again, this view of us, of the population, like we’re cattle to be harvested. People will talk about how mad they are at Trudeau, but Trudeau does not own Loblaws, right? Where is that anger? I know there's anger, but why is it not focused? Why is that anger not being amplified? Why aren't people asking tough questions? Like is there a role for public enterprise in our grocery crisis?
Another example, look at Canada Post. It’s constantly losing tons of money. The corporation will argue -- I'm probably going on too long. It's been a week, so I'm really sorry you're getting this version of me right now. Plus I’m way overheated and just a constant puddle and I had a shower an hour ago, which finally woke me up. So, sorry for the just… blaaaaagh! But yeah, I mean, you look at Canada Post and the corporation will argue, “Well, we can't compete with private services because our wages are too high.” You need high wages to make your country work, so why are we not putting Canada Post in a position to hire more people, at more high wages, that puts the pressure the other way, instead of on Canada Post? There’s too many people who look at things the wrong way, like, almost everybody, and then there's the people who know exactly what they're doing and are pretending that it's just somehow justified because it's business or it's some kind of natural order of things.
I'm also just a seething ball of rage over the privatization of liquor stores, because that was three or four hundred jobs province wide. Those were jobs that someone could leave high school, get a job in a liquor store without going to university, without having to go to college, and they could make enough money to own a house someday. On top of that, because it's a good job they'd be encouraged to work there for 20 years. It's actually making them really good at their job, and knowledgeable and useful to deal with. But that public enterprise was just sabotaged first by the the temperance squad left and then by the “We like investors, not workers.” Sask Party crowd.
Everything is wrong, and it needs to change and we need voices to demand that change and we need more of them. Sometimes that has to be couched in humanism, and love, and humour… but also rage, and it should be entertaining, and we can't do it as well when we're not in print!
All images used are taken from issues of prairie dog. Collection of Stephen Whitworth.