20 Years: The National Post’s supporters, detractors, insiders on the paper’s founding and its impact.
The newspaper wars weren’t all about politics. The Post hired Rebecca Eckler as its young, bad-girl columnist; the Globe followed suit with Leah McLaren. Both wrote without apparent boundaries, digging into their personal lives for revelatory columns. In an email conversation, the two writers look back on those years.
RE: Honestly? I can’t believe it’s been 20 years! In some ways, it seems like eons ago. In other ways, it seems like yesterday.
LM: I started at the Globe the same summer the Post launched and one of my first memories is of the party we threw because we were “going colour” to keep up with the competition. It was highly controversial at the time. When I started we didn’t have Google. We didn’t use email either. Instead we had this inter-office messaging system called ATEX. It was the same system they used in Bridget Jones’s Diary.
RE: There were no internet trolls, there was no such word as branding, and there was no such word as influencers. In a way, we were branding how we wrote; we paved the way for other writers or bloggers (another word that wasn’t in our vocabularies) to be personal writers, to share their stories. Basically anyone can write now and have an audience.
LM: I do think it was the advent of the internet and social media — rather than us — that paved the way for bloggers and influencers.
I’m so much in awe of the way young female journalists today are able to hone their voices and control their own platforms. We were very much at the mercy of the organizations we worked for.
RE: I don’t really regret any of the personal stories I wrote (Well, maybe the wet T-shirt one.) But I loved how I could write about how single women went to Loblaws to buy rotisserie chickens and that would be their meal for the week. People loved that story! About roasted chickens! I think that it resonated with people because it was true. Single women were buying up the rotisserie chickens.
LM: I remember the chicken column — it was classic. I also remember the one where you were pregnant and couldn’t sleep and your fiancé was snoring so loud you wanted to smash his head in with an alarm clock.
RE: Oh my god! My pregnancy. When the Post put on the front page that I was pregnant, I was shocked! I still am. I also remember that a lot of readers cancelled their subscriptions because of that. They didn’t like that I wasn’t married and was pregnant.
LM: It’s because of the Globe that I ended up in London. I was breaking up with my boyfriend and I went to the Editor-in-Chief and said “I want to quit my job and go travelling.” I was 25 and I’d never been anywhere. And he said, “Where do you want to go?” I said, “Maybe London?” So off I went. Then the union objected because the position hadn’t been posted and the editor got in tons of trouble but it was too late, I was already over there. Something like that would never, ever happen today.
RE: I had sort of the same experience when I wanted to be in New York. I told Ken Whyte, who was and still is my mentor, best boss ever, that I wanted to go and he said ‘No,’ but in the same breath said, ‘But if you hopped on a plane, I can’t really stop you.” That would never happen either these days.
The Post had a lot of money to throw around back then. I remember when one of George Bush’s daughters got drunk at a bar in Austin on Jell-O shots, said ‘I want to go to Austin and go to the bar and do Jell-O shots.’ They said ‘Go!” I literally flew to Austin just to do Jell-O shots at the same bar. It was like an alcohol field trip, but I was getting paid to do it.
LM: The expense accounts at the Post were legendary. I remember you did a story on what it was like to stay in the rock star suite at the Four Seasons for a weekend and you threw a 48-hour party, which was nuts.
RE: I remember being at a party and some guy saying, “You wrote the story on getting a bikini wax!” And he kept staring at that, um, area. I told him, ‘No, Leah Mclaren wrote that.” He didn’t believe me, no matter how many times I told him it wasn’t me.
LM: It was definitely you who wrote the bikini wax column. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
RE: The parties aside, I don’t think people realize how hard it is to write in that personal, conversational style, as if you were talking to a friend. That’s how I always wrote. I just wrote like I was talking to a friend. It really is harder than it seems.
LM: I have slightly more complicated feelings about that era. People like to put female writers in boxes and there’s often a sense that you can’t be funny and personal as well serious and thoughtful. I now often advise young female journalists to think twice before taking on assignments that feel weirdly sexualized or exploitative. The fact is, editors just don’t give those kind of assignments to young men. The one thing I really regret about my early career is that I was much too eager to please.
RE: Back then, every newspaper had a 20-something writing about their lives, like Carrie Bradshaw. If I heard one more time that ‘People love to hate you,” or about “navel gazing,” I would implode. Now there are a million writers on the internet who are navel gazing and no one seems to have much of a problem with it.
Rebecca Eckler is the executive editor of SavvyMom. Her memoir, Blissfully Blended Bullshit, will be published this spring.
Leah McLaren is a journalist, author and scriptwriter who lives in London.
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