Coast Co-Operative

One foggy night five years ago, Brigadier-General Victor Wentworth Odium, C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., walked into the city room of his Vancouver Star, regretfully told the staff that publication was suspended. Reason: with two well-in-trenched evening dailies in the field (population 246,593), a morning paper in Vancouver seemed an economic impossibility. After the General had gone, a group of his ex-employes went into a huddle, decided to carry on anyhow with a cooperative paper. Forty strong they combed Vancouver for funds, credit, advertising, circulation. Resulting enterprise was christened the News-Herald. It started life with 10,000 sympathetic but skeptical readers who thought the paper could not last but wanted to help its newsmen stay off Vancouver's breadlines as long as possible.

Last week, the founder-stockholders scanned their annual financial report with satisfaction. That the breadline had become remote as Mars was evident when they observed that their News-Herald started with a $5,000 shoestring, now had 103 employes earning a $125,000 annual payroll, 250 carriers earning $3,000 a month, an annual business turnover of $250,000, a circulation of almost 20,000, largest of any Canadian morning paper west of Toronto.

Trials & tribulations which led to this substantial co-operative publication success were many. Mouse-poor, the News-Herald founders had to start printing with an ancient press which they dug out from under a pile of rubbish and bought from a job plant, on terms, for $1,100. They turned it over by hand when it failed to function on the paper's first '"run." Later expert Pressman Jim Gauntlet was called in consultation from Seattle. Cried Jim Gauntlet when he spied the News-Herald press: ''Good God! I thought I had seen the last of that thing 25 years ago!" Most unique publishing difficulty under gone by the fledgling News-Herald lay in the fact that while its editorial, business, advertising and circulation departments worked on boxes and kitchen tables in one building, its composing room was a block away and its faithful rheumatic old press and mailing room were three miles outside the city. Founding News-Herald staff members carried copy & picture by automobile, concentrated on keeping expenses down, took stock in the enterprise to compensate for top salaries of $18.50 a week.

Business head most responsible for making this stock worth something was that of Roy Harold Robichaud, a door-to-door circulation solicitor before the Star fell, who was elected president by his associates to head the six-man. Board of Directors which is made up of the paper's department heads. Editor who made the News-Herald well liked by Vancouverites was James Noel ("Pat") Kelly, born on the Isle of Man and a world wanderer until he settled in Vancouver. For world news, he figured correctly that the News-Herald could get along with the half-hour daily "pony" (telephone) United Press service from Portland. For local news, Editor Kelly gave his staff a definite formula : "We realized that subscribers to our paper were also readers of at least one of the other [evening] papers, and ... we carried no rewrites. . . . We published a new paper every morning. . . . We also ignored the theory that a morning paper to succeed should be dull. All stories were made short and snappy, with no turn heads [stones continued on following pages]."

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