McClelland & Stewart - April 2004
368 pages - Hardcover

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B O O K   R E V I E W

EGO AND INK: The Inside Story of Canada's National Newspaper War
by Chris Cobb

The world of politics is a world well known to newspapers – a national daily wouldn’t be worth its weight in recycled newsprint if political coverage didn’t make up a major portion of its textual real estate.

Yet the world of the Canadian corporate newspaper industry has a surprising share of internal political strife and the stress that goes along with it. Politics, drama, and high-tension, high-stakes plays are an immensely prevalent day-to-day happening in the newsroom and boardroom’s behind Canada’s Big Three newspapers – the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and the National Post, the inner-workings all of which are examined in Chris Cobb’s Ego And Ink: The Inside Story of Canada’s National Newspaper War.

As a reporter, Cobb brings credence to the “inside story” portion of the book’s subtitle – he has written for the National Post and Ottawa Citizen, the former being the main focal point of Ego. But he doesn’t speak from experience as much as he lets his journalism experience bounce him from newspaper industry big-shot to another, getting quotes and info from everyone who’s anyone on Canada’s national newspaper scene. Whether its Conrad Black or Christine Blatchford, Cobb has the information, having weaved it into a book certain to captivate devotees to Canadian publishing or media issues – or anyone interested in the stories, backstory, and politics of the people that bring you the stories, backstory, and politics you find on your snow-laced doorstep every morning.

The writing is crisp and clear, the research is fantastic, and Cobb brings the story that hasn’t yet been told in such a format.

While the book’s subtitle emphasizes a war between two (or three, if you include the non-national Toronto Star) opposing factions – the Globe and Mail and the National Post – signifying an equal treatment of both of them, Cobb could’ve subtitled it “The Inside Story of Canada’s Brilliant New National Newspaper”; that paper being the National Post, which Cobb characterizes as the answer to the staid, elitist Globe. Throughout the book, the Post is portrayed in a more positive light – a Conrad Black-backed grand savior that changed Canada’s newspaper industry for the better. While characters and events are presented in a straightforward fashion, one gets the feeling that Cobb indeed favors the Conrad Black-National Post-CanWest team.

Indeed, as mentioned, Cobb is a part of that very franchise, and indeed (at the risk of giving away the ending) the very last – and defining – paragraph of the book is a long quote by CanWest Global CEO Leonard Asper, speaking on what Cobb supportively, sympathetically introduces as “Asper insist[ing] his company will do what it takes to keep the Post alive”.

Giving his boss the last, defining quote in a book about a “war” his very newspaper was engaged in? One can sense a sort of pathetic little conflict of interest, if not a sad deference to the big man in charge. Aside from these noteworthy problems, Cobb has researched and written a book like none other – one that will preserve the wild ups and downs of the ‘national newspaper war’ that Conrad Black started when he took the mighty risk of forming a newspaper to go up against the monopolistic Globe.

Robert Furs