I started writing for Vancouver's free weekly the Georgia Straight in 2005 when it still had the attention of the city. It was music editor Mike Usinger who championed my work and soon I was contributing on a weekly basis with ever more extravagant assignments. In 2011, I was hired to edit the movies section. By then, the paper had begun a steep decline.
I made some good friends at the Straight and I think I did some good work as a staff member but the dysfunction was shocking and demotivating. Management was remote and unpredictable. In my first few weeks I was slapped down for a blog post criticizing a purported adaptation of the Stephen King novel 11/22/63 by filmmaker Jonathan Demme. I wrote it over breakfast and by the time I got to the office our chief editor had already published a rebuttal. The Straight’s publisher, I was told, considered it an offence that I would go after a “good liberal” like Jonathan Demme.
That was already crazy enough but then I had to join the two of them for lunch at the Cactus Club on some vague mission to save my ass. One is notoriously shy and introverted and the other is a nutcase, but I made some joke about being fat and how my wife didn’t want to fuck me anymore—neither thing was true, thank you—and that raised a laugh out of my autistic superiors. After walking back to the office in silence my editor said, “Well, you dodged a bullet with a free lunch.” Usinger told me he was put through a similar hazing in his first week.
After almost 60-years of family ownership, in 2019, the Vancouver institution known as the Georgia Straight was sold for less than a million dollars to a Toronto-based entity with the promising name Media Central Corporation. By then I was working remotely from an island so I couldn’t attend the meet-and-greets with the new bosses, which sounded dreadful. I was among those who expected to lose my job in some sort of restructure but we limped onward into the “pandemic” in early 2020, at which point everyone was repurposed as an unqualified health reporter, in my case disconsolately pumping out notices of events postponed and theatres closing in-between composing lame-ass articles about diet and immunity.
The hammer finally fell in March 2020 when about a dozen of us woke up to a group email informing us of a “temporary layoff” until the world could rid itself of lung AIDS. We were promised a reassessment of the situation within six weeks or so but that was hard to square with the immediate severing of access to the company network, which cost me years of emails, professional contacts, and work. The “pandemic” dragged on beyond six weeks with only silence from Media Central Corp., except for a single ghastly phonecall from my former editor-in-chief. “Hi Adrian, I suppose you hate me…” is how it started.
I didn't hate this man and I still don’t, although I believe that the Georgia Straight was doomed under his leadership. In any case, I was told that there was no future in film and TV and then was provisionally offered a new position overseeing two sister websites focused on cannabis and e-sports. I answered first that I’d never heard of “e-sports” and second that I was under contract as the movies section editor. That was the last time we spoke.
After six months of silent “temporary layoff” I contacted a lawyer who finally determined that, in the view of Media Central Corp., I had technically “resigned” when I refused to write about marijuana and these mysterious “e-sports”. This was insane nonsense, of course, and about a year later and after a lot of work, I was awarded the severance owed to me upon proving breach of contract through an online civil resolution tribunal (publicly available to peruse here.)
I represented myself through the tribunal because I couldn’t afford a lawyer. Media Central Corp. hired the Toronto law firm of Levitt LLP (now Levitt Sheikh). It cost the company more than I was owed to lose its fight with a drunk amateur, not because I’m especially brilliant, but because the entire case was ass and Levitt’s junior lawyer sucked. At one point she made the argument that termination was justified by my inadequate number of Twitter followers.
More damning than any of this was the situation with Toronto’s NOW Magazine, which had been purchased by Media Central Corp. shortly before it bought the Straight. In my submissions to the tribunal I demonstrated that my work as an editor and writer—contra to the assertion that there was “no future in film and TV”—had been assumed by the staff at NOW, chiefly by its contributors Norm Wilner and Radheyan Simonpillai. In other words, I had been shuffled out in a corporate restructure, replaced, and lied to. It was easy enough to prove.
NOW was unionized (under UNIFOR), the Straight was not, so that likely explains in some part who would receive the big ass-fucking from Media Central Corp. But the entire episode was sleazy and sad, and in my view the NOW contributors who acquiesced to the new regime are scabs. Media Central Corp is now dead, NOW Magazine became an online sinkhole that speaks to no one, and the zombie Straight shuffles on under a succession of new owners, although I notice it still hasn’t found anyone to cover e-sports.
March 2024