Tim Bousquet, pugnacious news editor of the Halifax news and entertainment weekly, The Coast, responds to Contrarian's chiding of local media for failing to cover issues surrounding The Old Mill's closure. Hardly a week goes by that someone isn't asking me — usually angrily — "Why isn't The Coast covering issue X???" There are a variety of reasons. The Coast — which is basically me, plus whatever freelancers I can lure with a minuscule budget, and the occasional intern — isn't covering an issue. Sometimes the issues are too far afield, out of our distribution area, so aren't a priority. Sometimes other media...

18 July, 2012

Saturday's guest post about the closure and pending demolition of The Old Mill, a seedy Wyse Road bar housed in the only surviving part of Dartmouth's historic Rope Works, criticized peninsular Halifax heritage buffs for not trying to save the building. Our correspondent also said a new Sobeys supermarket on the site would lead to closure of the community Sobeys in Woodside, making life harder for impoverished mothers and seniors. Beverley Miller, a member of the Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia board of directors, responds: Preservationists can only do something if they know about a pending demolition...

18 July, 2012

It's easy to overlook the loss we've suffered as traditional news outlets contract in Nova Scotia and elsewhere. This message from a former Halifax journalist, unpublished for four years, shows he has lost neither the itch nor the knack: My wife, a friend and I went to the Old Mill tavern Thursday night to have a beer and laugh at a Dartmouth dive on the eve of its destruction. What we discovered, instead, was a fascinating story of history, community, and class. The huge wooden beams running across the pub’s ceiling – six of them, at least 16 inches on the side,...

14 July, 2012