My years at the Montreal Mirror

   I contributed to the Montreal Mirror from 1986 to 2006, including a few years as city columnist and a news writing staffer.
   My view is that it died not just because of the internet thing but because it just got tired and lost its passion and appetite for risk. Here's my entirely-biased take on my association with the paper.

  It began when I called up the Montreal Mirror out of the blue on my pushbutton Vista phone from my $125 downtown apartment one day in October 1987. I was a 23-year-old History grad from McGill working at Bell Canada.
   Brendan Weston answered. He had moved into the news editor role from the bully pulpit of the McGill Daily, a skittish kid with Billy Idol hair and whose mom reported for Pulse News.
   I told him that I had written articles for local newspapers since I was 16 and wanted to write something, anything.  He sent me to cover some sort of garbage management meeting, then some outrageous plan for Ahuntsic Park.

   I was surprised to get 40 bucks per article; it fed my ongoing addiction to earning money from writing.
   The Mirror office at that time overlooked St. Catherine across from The Spectrum.*
   Kindly editor Martin Siberok told tell me to leave only one space after a period. Computers were still pretty new.
    The office then moved to first-floor digs in an old building near the bottom of McGill Street. Owners Eyal and Catherine had a way-too-large office at the end. Eyal looked grumpy but was in fact, a disarmingly friendly Iraqi Jew. Catherine was unapproachable.
   Albert Nerenberg had been writing some insane stuff for the paper, including one about The Blob, which Douglas Coupland would later re-dub Generation X. I liked his crazy passion, I sniffed some creativity happening there.
   I asked Eyal about selling ads once or twice. He said sure but I never did. It would have been far more lucrative, but I stupidly stuck to freelancing news.
   After Brendan left I concentrated on my MA. I’d pick it up occasionally and noticed someone named Eleanor Brown, apparently a very nice person, writing ferocious pro-feminist articles. And people like Christina Stockwood would write big features with ledes such as “Prime Minister Brian Mulroney proved himself to be a lap-dog of the Americans once again …”
   It didn't seem like my kind of publication any more.
   Sometime during that period, I brought in a story I had been working on about a bizarre woman I had interviewed who hoped to personally persuade the authorities to legalize prostitution. The hooker was stark raving mad but I managed to frame the article in some useful overviews and other academic perspective.
   I brought it in and got icy stares from Karen Herland or whoever was there. No go.
   I then sold same the article to MTL magazine for a lofty $300. I had introduced myself to Alastair Sutherland, the editor, by cold-calling him at home and telling him that I'm the best freelance writer in Montreal. He ran a few more of my pieces and we became friends.
   Soon after, Peter Scowen began editing the Mirror. He grew up a few blocks from me on Landsdowne in Westmount but I didn’t know him. He had apparently edited some paper in the Townships and his father, of course, was a prominent longtime Liberal MNA.
    People complained that Scowen was unknowable but he seemed normal to me. I didn’t spend much time in the office but it seemed full of entertaining gossip, two editors caught smooching at a desk and so forth. It reached its height of absurdity when Jake Richler was brought in to pen a column but he didn’t last long as he just sent in humourless right wing screeds.
   Around that time I wrote a feature scrutinizing psychic Jojo Savard, which was published while I was traveling in India. News editor Chris Sheridan liked it so much he made sure it got nominated it for some kid of journalism award. I was pretty happy about his support.
   In 1993, I wrote a story about white slavery in a strip club near where I lived, which the news editor by now Patricia Bush, was so keen on that she added her own interviews to. The article was as smash hit and really put the Mirror onto lips around the city. I overheard people talking about it on the Ste. Catherine.
     By this time MTL magazine had gone belly up and I spent hours drinking and playing tennis with its former editor Alastair. He got work doing proofreading at the Mirror. Scowen moved to Toronto and Sutherland took over.
    Columnist Josh Bezonsky left to move to Toronto, so I took that over. The pressure was high because Hour was all fired up and trying to take over the alt weekly market now under the leadership of Scowen, who had made the switch over to the upstart, which was launched after owners spurned offers from Voir to buy the publication.

   The Mirror countered with its own French publication called Ici, which never really took off and was pretty quickly put out of its misery.
      Some of my columns were pretty dreadful at the start but it was through no lack of effort, I’d wear out my phone, ringing up any and everybody with questions. There was no stopping me, I’d be quite rude and demanding and cajoling, whatever required to score something fresh that nobody else was doing.
   I would pick up the phone book and call one association after another to see if I could get scuttlebutt or an idea. Hello Blind Association, I'm calling to talk to whoever talks to journalists, I want to know what you people are up to, what can you tell me?
     Often the people I called had no idea what Montreal Mirror was. But meanwhile there were readers and aspiring writers who held the publication in strangely high esteem and seemed to know my work better than myself.
    The paper would publish any old ad hominen attack in its letters to the editor section. Once I described something as being “as hot as a crack pipe on welfare day.” People got a chuckle about it but some outraged character wrote to complain.
   One letter suggested that I should get hit on the head with a vodka bottle. They published it.
    My philosophy towards writing: I imagine myself in a bar at a table full of a dozen drunken friends. I stand up and try to make a little speech. That speech is my article. Their attention span is about half a second so I’ve got to really make it good. That’s what an article has to be. Not just interesting, but crazy interesting, funny as hell, desperate, educational and maybe a little naughty or dangerous if possible.
     One time I saw a story about four teenage girls on trial for assault for beating up Quebec rock star Serge Fiori. I was all over that story like peanut butter.
   I revealed how Fiori’s psychologist described him and his girlfriend as lunatics and how the two had scored a pretty good sum from the victim’s compensation fund for the scuffle.
   The story was a massive, boiling success, but by this time Quebecor had bought the paper (in 1996) and moved it into a sterile office building up the street.
      I had a title as some kinda of editor but I just wrote articles and rarely edited anything. I worked from home and only attended the weekly meetings. I would drink with the guys but I was happy to be out of the office.
    I had to work 50 weeks a year, so I stupidly tried to work through the construction holidays, insisting as always to get original content.
   I’d call companies, beg, barter, yell at secretaries, berating them if necessary if they couldn’t find someone to give me a comment.
   I was so determined to root out original stories, even during dead times, that I occasionally scored a gem out of sheer willpower, such as the story that sparked the campaign to put the suicide-barriers on the Jacques Cartier Bridge.
    Unfortunately one of my good friends Louis-Martin was one of the last to jump to his death from that bridge after I wrote that article and I still feel a bit guilty about writing it now.
    Eventually I moved on and did more real estate, which paid much better. Many of the same faces were still there when it closed and I felt sad for them.
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*The first offices were 408 St. James W., Suite 42, the second offices at 305 St. Catherine W., in August 1988 the paper moved to first floor at 400 McGill and stayed there for many years before moving across the street into the less-funky Quebecor offices.(Thanks to former employee Paul Etch for precise info).