Almost 12 years ago – on Thanksgiving weekend 2002 – asked by my immediate supervisor, Terry Kruger, then co-ordinating editor for Northern News Services Limited (NNSL) in Yellowknife, who has been manager of communications there for De Beers Canada Inc (DBCI) since January 2010, to come up with a concept and a name for a new column to showcase our staff writers, I chose “Soundings” as both the idea and name. I was a news editor at NNSL at the time. For those not familiar with the name Northern News Services Limited or NNSL, let it be said that publisher Jack Sigvaldason, known simply as “Sig” by everyone who knows him, runs the finest group of fiercely independent community newspapers North of 60 in Canada and perhaps anywhere in the Circumpolar Arctic for that matter.
Sig is originally from Winnipeg. He joined the Winnipeg Free Press in 1952, working in advertising and editorial, then with Stovel Advocate publications working on their business publications. He started his own advertising agency, Sigvaldason & Associates, in 1957 where he worked in advertising and public relations, which included a daily radio show and writing newspaper features. Then from 1963 to 1969, Sig worked for the Baker Lovick ad agency as an art director, copy chief, radio and television director, creative director and a columnist for an agricultural paper.
In 1969, Sig moved north with his family to Yellowknife to be editor of News of the North. The Northwest Territories has never been the same since. Established in 1945, News of the North covered the 61 communities in the Northwest Territories, a 1,4-milion square mile region North of the 60th parallel.
Two years after he arrived, Sig was fired from News of the North in 1971 for antagonizing the territorial government (GNWT), the federal government, city council, the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories and Inuit Tapirisat of Canada. Oh, yes, and the majority of advertisers also. There is an old truism in journalism that if a journalist hasn’t been sued and fired, they’re not doing their job. Sig has always done his job.
Within 90 days of his firing as editor of News of the North, Sig had started the Yellowknifer, still the must-read paper of the territorial capital, with Jack Adderley, who had been fired also from News of the North. The Yellowknifer’s mission statement, according to the first editorial, was to combine “having a ball with making a buck by providing a local fun paper crammed with news and pictures concerning Yellowknife personalities and events at least once a week.”
In March 1972, they started Northern News Services, which now publishes the Yellowknifer, two editions of News/North, a western edition for the NWT, and an eastern edition for Nunavut, where stories are also translated into Inuktitut syllabics, and the weekly Deh Cho Drum, from Fort Simpson, Inuvik Drum in Inuvik, and Kivalliq News from Rankin Inlet, with all the papers going through final editing and production in Yellowknife before being printed there.
There are now more than 100 NNSL staff working in six locations in three time zones. As a news editor, it wasn’t unusual to find myself calling the Mackenzie Delta bureau of News/North in Inuvik or the South Slave bureau in Hay River, both located in the same Mountain Time (MT) zone as me in Yellowknife, and then making a call to Darrell Greer, editor of the “Kiv” in Rankin, where it was an hour ahead in the Central Time (CT) zone. While my job responsibilities didn’t require me to have to call the Iqaluit bureau of News North as often, I quickly learned that calling the bureau at 4 p.m. there was a hit-or-miss proposition since it was 6 p.m. for them in the Eastern Time (ET) zone. Geographically, simply as a matter of longitude, the Nunavut communities of Qikiqtarjuaq, Pangnirtung, Clyde River – and Iqaluit – should all be in the Atlantic Time (AT) zone anyway, but for general convenience, they’re not.
Seven years after Sig was fired from News of the North, he bought the paper, kept the staff and changed the name to News/North.
As for Soundings, as I wrote in a first anniversary column in October 2003, “I borrowed a Maritime oceanic term, Soundings, to name the weekly column because we wanted our diverse group of staff writers — reporters and editors — to find their depth and have a space to muse on things that mattered to them, but they may not otherwise get to write about.
“The words you read here do not necessarily reflect the corporate opinion of this newspaper as the editorial does. These words are the writer’s opinion. Getting personal has not merely been tolerated; it’s been actively encouraged.
“A year later,” I wrote in 2003, “both the name and purpose of the column have stuck. And giving voices to otherwise anonymous news editors has sometimes struck a chord with readers … This is a sometimes cantankerous cohort of reporters and editors who are passionate about journalism under a unique, iconoclastic proprietor. In other words, it’s a journalist’s newsroom and hence a pretty good place to work. ”
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