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Farewell to a mentor
Kootenay Crust (Op-Ed Commentary)
By Ian Cobb
The world of Canadian community journalism lost a great one August 13 when Canmore’s Carol Picard passed away at home.
Carol was already the fixture of Bow Valley media before she founded Rocky Mountain Outlook with the late Larry Marshall and Bob Schott in 2001. She was editor of the Canmore Leader for years before that landmark move, which bolstered and perhaps saved newspapering in the Bow Valley and area.
Prior to arriving in the Bow Valley, Carol honed her skills at daily newspapers, beginning in Winnipeg and then Edmonton.
While she may have never worked in this region, she influenced many journalists who worked here, including having a massive influence on me.
I met Carol at my first newspaper chain annual conference. In this instance, it was a gathering of Black Tusk publishers, editors, ad sales and reporters – in the bustling Alberta farm town of Strathmore.
Carol and Larry Marshall, who was Banff Crag & Canyon editor and publisher, were the senior company journalists who all the younger journalists looked up to and learned from. Despite a head thickened from 99 cent draft the night before, I hung on every word she said, seeing Carol as a shining example of how and who to be.
Black Tusk was a small company, featuring newspapers in mostly tourist towns such as Banff, Canmore, Invermere, Golden and Jasper. It eventually expanded to many more papers under the stuffier name of Westmount Press, which was gobbled up by Quebecor before eventually falling under the umbrella of Black Press.
Carol and Larry saw the writing on the wall before most of us; corporations were methodically destroying community newspapers. They showed the way for other journalists to ensure the fairness, quality and community embrace in local newspapers could be maintained beyond the clammy real estate-driven desires of the corporations maxing the patience of advertisers in small markets that once thrived before they came along and began interfering with big city tactics.
The independent Rocky Mountain Outlook launched and was immediately one of the best newspapers in Canada. They pushed the Crag & Canyon and Leader to pull up their socks and inspired other newspaper editors, including myself, to follow suit.
However, the early days of the Outlook were far from easy as they managed a quality product in an ever-narrowing market (globally) and the original owners struggled to make ends meet.
I was blessed to have Larry Marshall as my editor at the Sunshine Coast News in 1994. A crusty ink-stained, pint sipping stereotype, Larry was the quintessential pro. The stickler for details and digging was a mentor to Carol and she passed that along to greenhorns like me. My penchant for making up words (for opinion pieces) confounded her! “There are already so many great words!”
Carol was the same kind of character as Larry and other journalists who started their careers in the 1960s and ‘70s, but in a small body with sharp eyes casting a vibe that forced you to pay attention and show some respect. Pierre Poilievre would not have the balls to munch an apple at her. And he’s lucky he never had the chance.
She was also endlessly giving of her time (her volunteerism was another massive chapter) and expertise, which I leaned heavily into over the years.
It was the training I received from Larry that led me back to the Columbia Valley as editor of The Valley Echo in 1994 and it was the timely advice and mentorship I received from Carol that kept me in line.
Realizing the benefit of peer interaction, Carol and I, and other editors, began implementing gatherings of journalists –those working in different companies in southeast B.C. and southwest Alberta. We’d get together every few months in Banff, Canmore, Golden, Invermere and even Whiteswan Provincial Park. We’d eat, drink, mull over story ideas and bitch and then head home the next day ready to get back at it.
I believe it made for better overall newspapers and seeing as how we all worked in relative professional isolation in our rural communities, it helped keep us sharper and more inclined to produce quality work.
The Valley Echo was one of the most peer honoured newspapers in Canada from 1998 to 2008, and Carol Picard was a major reason why. Myself and other Echoites mimicked her. Consistent best work was Carol’s simplest requirement of her reporters and peers and no one wanted to disappoint her.
Carol was also a beacon of light when middle management ladder occupiers took aim at me and cleaved me from the herd I helped establish in 2009.
I saw the writing on the wall and started contemplating creating my own newspaper before that happened. Several meetings at the Rose & Crown in Canmore followed where myself, and a potential partner, picked Carol’s brain on how to do it. In the end, after she even allowed us to read her business plan, I realized I could not suffer the torment that she did in the early days of the Outlook and spared myself (and my partner) financial horror by starting a newspaper.
Around the same time, Carol had in part inspired another former colleague, David Rooney in Revelstoke, to start an online-only newspaper. It was his product that in turn inspired Carrie and I to begin e-KNOW.
Carol sold the Outlook in 2008 after Larry and Bob both passed away. It was the exact same time that community newspapers began seriously fading away, as the Internet and social media finished off the goring work of the flappy-headed corporations.
In the time leading up to the sale, Carol Picard had, through her work and guidance with reporters, helped countless people and organizations and took on every town council, mayor, civil servant and speculating developers who needed putting back into place. The mark she left on the Bow Valley, Alberta, B.C. and Canada is deep, though many would not know it. She didn’t seek limelight.
Carol embodied the credo: strive through your work to try and make a better and more just society.
Did she ever. She received the King Charles III Coronation Medal on June 20 this year. She also received the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal in 2022, to give you a bit of an idea as to her impact.
In 2021, Carol reflected on the state of the newspaper industry in the Outlook.
“Print media has been profoundly battered in this 21st Century world of social media and Wikipedia “research,” but community newspapers continue to soldier on. Who else but a local reporter is bench warming in the marathon local council meetings and school board meetings, the capturing of the minutiae of things that impact you most directly? Or that you might want to reference in 20 years in the bound copies they faithfully preserve?
“The world of social media has done an amazing job of knitting together our communities into needs/wants being fulfilled, especially during these pandemic years. The dark side is the unfiltered, unedited opinions finding oxygen and thereafter longevity to become “truth.” This is what editors and professional reporters are for, to sift through the chaff and spot the BS and only give you the legit, not the rumour mill. We do this by verifying with the source, be it a professional in an administrative role or a locally elected politician who has read the reams of background information and can answer a question knowledgeably.
“Misinformation and disinformation are the scourges of our 21st Century world.”
I will leave the last word to Carol’s daughter Sam: “My mother was a stubborn force of nature, right down to her core. A tiny spitfire of a woman, who knew how to capture a room despite her small stature and still make you feel important, and seen, and welcome. A rare breed of human who knew exactly what she was destined to do from a young age, and overcame so much to pursue it and use it for good.
“I have no doubt that the words I write here today will pale in comparison to her obituary, which she herself wrote years ago “in the event of her untimely demise” like the true journalist she was. If anyone’s having the last word, it’s her.”
With condolences to Carol’s family, friends and many readers.
Rest well Carol. Signed an eternally grateful disciple.
Learn more about Carol Picard.
Rocky Mountain Outlook photo
Ian Cobb is owner/editor of e-KNOW
