Dose Vancouver's First Issue: A Review
By Richard Eriksson on April 4, 2005 - 9:32pm
Just as the Dose website exceeded Roland's low expectations, the print version of the daily newspaper exceeded my low expectations. I read the first issue cover to cover, and I'm impressed. Herewith some thoughts on the paper and the ridiculous reaction from my alma mater's student paper to the influx of the 3 new free daily newspapers in Vancouver.
All told, the first issue (of the Vancouver edition at least) is 24 pages long, with a grand total of 3 pages worth of advertisements. In stark constrast to the two mainstream Vancouver daily newspapers, The Vancouver Sun and The Province, both of which featured large close-ups of the dead pope, on the cover of Dose are three twentysomethings: a Catholic in the main photo, and a Jew, a Muslim and an agnostic on the bottom row. (What, no apatheist?) The writing about the Pope celebrates his life and discusses some of the rituals of the Catholic church that follow his death. The other features were either funny or at least snappily-written, such as the advice to Prince William on whom he should really date and the "Munchies Madness", which pitted junk food against each other à la the NCAA basketball tournament bracket. The "Who's your hero?" section was interesting, though I think Paulina Gretzky is actually younger than the demographic the paper targets (which they mention in the slightly weird feature on another 17-year old, this time a high school football player with a few too many concussions). I note the absence of dumb comics designed to fill space.
Just as I finished reading Dose, I happened on a copy of The Peak, the student newspaper of my alma mater, Simon Fraser University. Featured is an article on the student reaction to the new newspapers, with much ink spent on the efforts of the dailies to legitimately (and, evidently, illegitimately) distrubute copies on the university's campus(es). The article quotes Steven Fagan, business and advertising manager for the paper:
My recommendation was against the university allowing the free dailies on campus and that the issue could perhaps be revisited in a year or so when the circulation numbers and advertising rates hopefully stabilise.Free daily has mixed reaction on campus
The article goes on to mention other university papers which have asked to increase student fees in response to lower advertising rates due to competition from other free (or otherwise) newspapers. Fagan is probably right that allowing the free newspapers on the campus would cut into The Peak's readership, but isn't that how it's supposed to work? Shouldn't universities allow for a diversity of opinion to enter students' minds, and shouldn't a student-run free (weekly) newspaper at least have a chance to prove that it's really better than a commercially-run (daily) one? To say that the university should wait a year before determining whether to allow the papers on campus smacks of protectionism. I understand that where one stands depends on where one sits, but this is so transparently an attempt to shut out a competing views (though the dailies, granted, are fairly light on opinion writing).
All that said, I'm not a very loyal reader of something I have to go somewhere to pick up, so unless they provide RSS feeds notifying me of interesting stories—I differ with those who don't like headline- or teaser-only RSS feeds from news websites, since I like the notification aspect and sometimes teasers work well (a good example is The New York Times' implementation of RSS). Dose so far leads as far as the three free daily newspapers in Vancouver are concerned, at least for the 18-34 demographic, of which I am a member.
