who the heck are you?

I'm Paul Henderson. Not the one that scored that goal in 1972.

I am a writer, an editor, a plate-spinning overthinker with ADHD, a pathologial curiosity and an urge to find out stuff and tell people what’s going on and how things work.

I’ve won two dozen provincial and national awards over two decades while on the front lines of community newspaper journalism with a focus on crime and the justice system, local and provincial politics, advocacy journalism and human interest features.

I’ve been rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic since 1999. 

Most recently I worked as an editor in the government of British Columbia’s communications department in Victoria, our office being the last stop before the dissemination of all government news releases.

I also do technical writing and editing for a local architectural firm helping with marketing and business development, and I do freelance editing for other customers. (Interested? Visit my Editorial Services page.)

For three years I was editor of The Chilliwack Progress, the oldest community newspaper in B.C., a job I was nudged into from being a reporter just three days after Dr. Bonnie Henry declared a public health emergency in British Columbia on March 17, 2020. 

From 2017 to 2020 I was a reporter for The Progress. Before that I worked for the Chilliwack Times from 2006 until ownership "merged" the paper with The Progress at the end of 2016.

Prior to my time in Chilliwack I did freelance journalism and worked as an editor at an alternative health magazine in Toronto where we also put on a large annual natural health trade show. I was also a reporter for one year at the little ol’ Grand Forks Gazette in the Boundary area of B.C.

I went to journalism school at Langara College. I graduated from the University of Western Ontario in 1994 where I finished an honours B.A. with a major in philosophy.

A brief and incomplete history of community newspaper ownership locally and across B.C.

• 2006 – I moved from Toronto to the Fraser Valley to work for the Chilliwack Times. Over the following decade we reported to four different masters starting with Canwest Global.
• 2008 – "Hey buddy, looking for a subprime mortgage?" Um, no. "How about a credit default swap?" What the heck is that? "No one knows but they pay really..." Aaand the biggest economic crash since 1929 hits the world. Canwest died after which, Zombie-like, Postmedia crawled out of the grave to stumble on, searching for brains.
• 2012 – Postmedia sold most of their community newspaper properties to industry stalwart Glacier Media and new suits with painted on smiles cracked the front door of The Times on Railway Avenue to buoy our spirits in a rosy future for ink on paper on doorsteps.
• 2014 – "Got 'em. Got 'em. Need 'em!" Like bubble-gum popping boys with hockey cards, Glacier and Black Press Media traded newspapers creating monopolies in the local news sector in every community from Hope to Richmond to Victoria to Haida Gwaii. The simple version is that Glacier was left with every community newspaper in Metro Vancouver on the west side of the Port Mann from Coquitlam to Richmond. Black Press then owned every paper on Vancouver Island and in the Lower Mainland from Surrey and Maple Ridge in the west out to the easternmost community of Hope. Guess what happened next in communities such as Surrey and Langley and Abbotsford where there were now two newspapers both owned by Black Press? Ya, they started shuttering 'em (although "merging" was the preferred vernacular) and laying off staff.
• 2016 – For two years at The Chilliwack Times we continued doing our jobs with our heads in the guillotine assuming the executioner fell asleep. Rustled from his slumber noticing we were forgotten about, on life support with a mostly-absent publisher shared with The Progress, one editor, one full-time reporter (me) and just one sales rep, Black Press put us out of our misery. They didn't "close" or "shutter" The Chilliwack Times. As mentioned above, we merged with The Progress. Black Press killed The Chilliwack Times website however, thereby deleting several important decades of community history.
• 2017 – On Monday, January 2, 2017, I parked my car, walked in the front door and up the stairs to The Progress newsroom with editor Greg Knill and four reporters, Jennifer Feinberg, Jenna Hauck, Jessica Peters and Eric Welsh. They were the competition for a decade so I joined that team with the trepidation of a new reporter, but I was actually entering their gates as a Trojan horse.
• 2024 – The newspapers in Chilliwack survived with B.C.-based ownership for the first 17-and-a-half years I was in Chilliwack. Seven months after I was fired as editor (see below for more on this) and 12 months before the writing of this, Black Press emerged from creditor protection with a sale to new owners. As of January 2024, Black Press was owned by institutional investors Canso Investment Counsel Ltd., Deans Knight Capital Management Ltd. and Carpenter Media Group, the latter of which is the day-to-day operator of the company.
Black Press was founded by David Black who created the company when he purchased the Williams Lake Tribune in 1975. Over four decades the Victoria-based Black grew the company's portfolio to 170 newspapers and 14 regional websites. David Black's retirement was announced by the company on Jan. 15, 2024.
That empire mostly built on community newspaper advertising and journalism in British Columbia is now owned and managed by a company based out of, wait for it, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

What do you think you're going to do about it?

Good question. Short answer: Whatever I can.

Working in the media and mostly in community newspapers feels, as I've said above, a little like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. (I mean, after my first eight years in Chilliwack the Times literally ran into a Glacier.)

But there was a time in Chilliwack in the late 2000s to the early 2010s when the city was as well-served as it could have been by way of media coverage. At its peak, there was the Chilliwack Times and our newsroom of four, the Chilliwack Progress and their group of five. When a new radio station came to town they announced they had a news bureau. Then the other radio station decided they should create one too. For a short period of time there were four reporters at city council or school board meetings and covering major news events and high-profile crimes or a visits from the the premier.  

What else happened in 2008 as the global economic system crashed down? Facebook started taking hold as the dominant social media platform. Its algorithms formed part of the demise of traditional media and the start of the post-truth era. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari puts it in his seminal 2024 book Nexus, the history of human civilization involved the sharing of stories, which brought humans together in larger groups. Books and writing spread our collective mythologies ever wider. The internet promised knowledge and proximity to truth. But it was all a lie. The algorithms learned our secrets and turned us against one another such that we live in a world as divisive as ever in human history.

So what am I going to do about that? Probably nothing but I can’t sit around and not point all of this out to anyone who will listen.

Reading is hard, what else you got?

With the good folks at ChillTV and my occasionally shit-disturbing anti-hero of a friend Peter Lang, I’m working on Objects in the Mirror: The Peter Paul Podcast where we dive into all kinds of subjects with insight and irreverence. Stay tuned.

I’ve always said I have a face for radio but a voice for print (I sound a little like Kermit the Frog in a garbage can) yet I still agreed to do a eight-episode video podcast with former Chilliwack mayor Clint Hames where we interviewed experts, politicians and pundits on topics ranging from housing to COVID to public safety to inclusion to inflation. 

All eight episodes available here: Chilliwack Now! With Hames and Henderson.

If you read this far, I hope you stay tuned. We are going to tell some truths. We are going to stir up some shit. We are going to have some fun.

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Paul J. Henderson
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