I am a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. I got that membership when CTV brought me to Ottawa in January, 2005 to join its bureau there.
For most of my career, though, I worked for what the Prime Minister and his communication advisers would likely characterize as local media. I never got a journalism degree but learned the craft on the job at the Orangeville Banner, the Orillia Packet & Times, the Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal, and the Hamilton Spectator.
I'd say those papers are pretty typical of the range of local print media in the country. The Banner is a twice-a-week paper serving a smaller rural town that, when I was there, was struggling to deal with the pressures of rapid growth due to it being a 30-minute drive from the populous Ontario metropoli of Brampton and Mississauga. At the other end, the Hamilton Spectator is, depending on how and when you count, one of the ten largest daily newspapers in the country and has the resources and aspirations to do Really Important Journalism. (Let me stray for a minute to congratulate my former colleagues there: The Spec picked up a National Newspaper Award last night for investigative journalism. One of the writers to share the prize was none other than Steve Buist. Who's that? Why he just happened to be the sports editor when I first volunteered at the University of Guelph's student paper The Ontarion and handed me the assignment — covering a U of G hockey game — that gave me my first-ever byline in any paper anywhere. So — way to go Steve!)
But it was at the Orillia Packet & Times — in my first week on the job — that I first met members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery and a Prime Minister.
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was coming to town to visit Orillia and Midland with no other purpose than to raise the flag for his friend Doug Lewis, the local MP and Solicitor General in his cabinet.
My city editor Randy Richmond told me to track the PM on his day in Simcoe County and report back.
I headed out to meet the PM's tour and was informed that the PMO was giving us 'local media reporters' time to ask Mulroney some questions and that this trip to Simcoe County was “really not for the national press corps.” So, the first thing I did, of course, was seek out Hugh Winsor, Jason Moscovitz and Tim Harper — all of whom were travelling that day with Mulroney and covering the trip for, respectively, The Globe and Mail, CBC Radio, and the Toronto Star. I asked them what sort of questions Mulroney would not want to answer and I vowed to be the one to ask exactly those kind of questions. I was going to show the PMO that, even with one week on the job as a daily newspaper reporter, I wasn't any pushover.
I don't know if the question I asked was, in fact, one that really got to the PM but I do recall that the story I did was probably not “the message” story that the PM wanted us to do. I think Randy and I may have decided to do a piece on the national press corps covering the PM, what it was like covering Mulroney, and so on.
Brian Mulroney would soon give way to Kim Campbell who also came to Orillia during her only election campaign. She, too, did the same thing — her staff stipulated that only local media would meet her at the Sundial Inn on Highway 11 for a Q&A. As I did with Mulroney, I canvassed the national press corps travelling with her to see what they would ask.
You might say — well, wouldn't your readers be interested in Mulroney's or Campbell's thoughts on some local issues? Yes — they would be. But they are also just as interested in the PM's opinions on the same 'national' issues that voters and readers in Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver are interested in. And, besides, you've always got your local MP to talk about local issues.
So, if the current PMO wants to go around the Parliamentary Press Gallery and straight to the local media, I say, good luck and have fun! The PM will get different questions than the Ottawa press corps would put to him but I suspect the reporters who cover the PM's visit to their town will, like I was, be keen to prove their worth as serious journalists who believe that the mission of their craft is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.