Day One of the Northern Daily; Where’s the local news??

Well the folks at the Daily News can relax for a bit, the debut of the Northern Daily was a rather uneventful and less than news worthy event. The free paper offered up to the Northwest on a Daily basis, resembled something like a Google news page printed out.

The front page featured a story about a possible backlash against Muslims in Canada over the recent terror arrests in Toronto, inside there were some snippets of news from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran and elsewhere, a story on how Dark Soya sauce is better than red wine and how yoga can benefit cancer patients. And on an on things went for twenty pages, not one of which featured any news from anywhere in the Northwest let alone Prince Rupert.

Now perhaps they need a bit of time to get up to speed on the “local” aspect of news, though one would have thought they would have wanted to launch with a bit of a splash, by showing how relevant they could be to the local area. Instead, issue number one was your basic bit of wire copy, filling in the spaces between the ads and public service mentions.

Mind you they didn’t have any problem with the “local” aspect of advertising as Full page ads for City Furniture and Sullivan Motors were prominent on pages 2 and 20 as well as smaller efforts for mainly Smithers and Terrace businesses. If you want to find a good restaurant in Smithers, this might be your best resource, but don’t expect to find out the issues of the day from there, if the debut is any indication.

The actual design is fairly good, it’s a bright looking, neo tabloid kind of look, the articles such as they are (wire copy for day one) is easy to read and is set up quite nicely. But in an age where the internet rules the habits of many a news seeker and consumer now, the placing of basically generic stories one after another over twenty pages seems kind of pointless. There was nothing in the first edition of the daily that anyone couldn’t find simply by clicking on their favourite news site on the net like Canoe, The Globe and Mail, Google News or Canada.com.

The key for success for this effort is going to be a much more intense local presence, it was a bit of a disappointment to pick up the paper and breeze through it in record time, finding nothing of local interest to keep me hanging around between pages one and twenty.

Perhaps they need some time to find their purpose, but if they actually plan on taking on the Daily News locally, they had best get to work on the content and work on it quickly. Until there is some serious local and regional news in place, this is just another one of the endless advertorial things that dot the landscape of the northwest, one that is on its way to the recycling centre or the bottom of a bird cage at a pretty fast pace!