I always wanted to start a newspaper.
Years ago, while toiling as an editor in the Columbia Valley, I took a good look at starting one. Seeing potential in that growing market and being sick and tired of grinding my own bones so some faceless, nameless shareholders could upgrade to platinum from gold, I decided to look into starting my own paper, along with a good friend.
We kicked tires, scratched chins, scribbled basic mathematics on napkins and placemats, visited experts and searched quietly for investors. After about of year of that, I realized I could not afford to make it happen and backed away.
It was back to toiling for the bottom-line obsessed corporate cheese weasels… year after bone grinding year.
In 2009 I was presented with an opportunity to get out of the weekly newspaper gig and as I stepped away, it was like an airborne soldier hitting the void and pulling the cord. Woomph. Freedom. Glorious freedom. A 20-year career jammed into pause.
Over the last two years I have followed dreams like writing a novel, researching other books and stockpiling, with my partner and the finest human to happen to me, Carrie, about 100,000 images of the Kootenays and beyond for our photography business, Through My Eyes Photography.
All during this time I continued to peruse local newspapers and keep in touch. Once a news junky, always a news junky and once a journalist, always a journalist. The pull of being on the edge of society’s aorta became too great, and, I am what I am. So I started East Kootenay News Online Weekly (e-KNOW).
This ‘online only’ newspaper, sans the newsprint and ink, is going to be a labour of love and we have a mission.
Our mission is to become the best community newspaper in this region, and cover the entire region at the same time. Included in our mission is a promise to report the passage of history in our communities with courage and conviction — and with a degree of colour and fun.
Thanks to connections in the region, we will be presenting a strong variety of East Kootenay writing talent and photographic eyes.
E-Know will become the ‘go-to’ location to find out exactly what is happening with your taxpayers’ dollars, municipally, regionally, provincially and federally.
You will get this news unfiltered and without the current doses of corporate cowardice that is degrading all newspapers nowadays. If you want fluff — go to them.
This position may cost e-KNOW some advertising, but I believe our society deserves better than what the tragically few corporations that control the media are delivering.
And before I go on with this rant, I do not blame the journalists for the heaping doses of easily cranked out stroke-candy one finds on their pages nowadays. They’re just collecting paycheques.
At the heart of the problem are the corporate boards and managements that focus on one major thing — real estate. They don’t care about newspapering or journalism. It’s that simple, really. It’s all about keeping their properties functioning at a rate that keeps them profitable at the expense of disgusting rates of pay for their people and by gouging advertisers with a relentless vomity spatter of supplements or special sections that serve no purpose to those seeking to sell something or services.
You will not see supplements in e-KNOW, though hopefully you see lots of advertising!
Our aim is to provide old school journalism in the new frontier — the digital world.
While researching my business, I visited with an old colleague from my Westmount Press, Quebecor and Black Press days – David Rooney, a venerable journalist who started The Revelstoke Current, an online paper. It was his project that inspired me to this point.
We spoke about the current state of the industry and the fact that there are still so many print products wheezing along out there, like once proud ships allowed to rust and run down.
We also spoke about the fact that we are “old,” as Dave put it. He’s a bit older than me; I am 47. Old? I don’t feel old.
But he’s right. When I started work as a reporter in 1991, I smashed stories onto slate rock faces with pointy bits of granite. Actually, that method would have been quicker than the Macintosh Classics and their four-megabyte memory limits.
We developed film in darkrooms; cut and pasted papers together and trucked the flats to the press. And we were cutting edge baby. We were the new age of newspaper people.
We weren’t the ink stained wretches of old.
But now it seems that we are the old guys.
So it only made sense that we took our skills and curmudgeonly ways and visited them upon on the Internet.
And this is the best bit.
I hate computers. Despise them with a battle-ax wielding twitch and grimace.
But they are the now and they are the immediate future and more and more people are comfortable with getting their fixes of news and information off the web than from print products and that number is going to grow steadily.
And here I am.
I am a journalist who believes in the importance of the truth and in the great value of recording the passage of history with effort and integrity. I also greatly believe in the freedoms our forefathers won us, especially freedom of speech — a gift so many people strive to smother with bafflegab and deception.
With that in mind, e-KNOW will become a place for lively sharing of diverse opinions — right, middle, left, sideways, upside down, gentle, harsh and always colourful and literarily enjoyable. And I urge you to take part. This is a soapbox. You are always welcome to step aboard, but be respectful and realize that differences of opinion are what make our society so special, because they lead to bigger and better things than the tediousness of the safe and same old same old.
Welcome to e-Know.

Ian Cobb

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