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Making Headlines: 100 Years of the Vancouver Sun Shelley Fralic with Kate Bird Vancouver: The Vancouver Sun, 2012. 183 pp. Illus. $36.70 cloth.
The Vancouver Sun turned one hundred in 2012. To mark this event, reporter Shelley Fralic compiled a (roughly) chronological account of goings-on in the city and at the paper itself. It is not so much a life-and-times approach as a run-and-gun account of the town rag and the ink-stained wretches who produce it. There are critical assessments of the newspaper business in Vancouver: this is not one of them. Making Headlines is a selfdescribed "celebration," a souvenir that will find a place on many BC shelves because of the memories it evokes. There are some very good photos, some of which are gratifyingly unfamiliar. The writing is tight enough and suitably journalistic. Fralic has a natural nerdly understanding of the way technology (re) shapes process and product over a century.
As accounts of the past go, however, this one is extremely problematic. Some warts are revealed and some of the underlying assumptions of the newspaper are laid bare, but Making Headlines reinforces rather than challenges many outdated notions about news, journalism, and society. The title of this volume is...