I have a lot of empathy for the folks at the Daily News. I’ve been playing Sunday slowpitch with them for more than 10 years and they are a fine bunch.

I think the death of the Daily News is another sign of our digital times. Halifax’s 170 year old store The Book Room is also going under.

And even though he wasn’t digital, The death of former Daily News columnist Harry Flemming yesterday, signals we are truly moving into a new era here.

To say that we have “sunk to more sensationalist spirits” recently and highlighting our “self-made controversy and inserts of party reviews and glorified coverage of the Halifax bar scene” is but another example of the unfair characterization the newspaper has suffered by its detractors. The bar scene coverage is a one-page photo spread that appears once a week. Hardly our raison d’etre. As for the self-made controversy. We never believed Rene Angelil when he said we were to blame. We just thought it utterly preposterous that he would say it.

When I joined the paper after my second year of university, I was so eager to get my foot in the door that for my first shift I agreed to answer the phones and file photographs in the library. My ploy worked, and within two months, I had my first byline. By the end of the summer, had full-time work. It was great because I was getting paid to do something that I loved — something that I did for free at the student newspaper where I was working when I realized I wanted to get into journalism.

I poured so much heart and soul into that paper. Unpaid overtime was my middle name. I would take calls late at night from people who hadn’t got their paper. On my way home, I would go out of may and hand deliver a newspaper to their door. I wanted so badly for our paper to have a good reputation in the community. It worked, but only so much. In some respects, our style of journalism was not the Nova Scotia style and was never going to be welcomed by a large percentage of the population. We made our biggest inroads by appealing to sports fans and getting more results in the morning paper, but that can only take you so far.

The paper reached its peak in the mid 1990s just before Southam bought us. Within months, there were layoffs and we lost several experienced reporters and editors. While new blood is key a key to maintaining a vibrant newsroom, so, too, is having experience. We were never able to make that breakthrough in circulation numbers, then the recession hit and ad revenue dropped. CanWest bought us and things got worse. We were initially optimistic when Transcontinental bought us, but it soon became evident that they were merely a printing company. Despite the new “Media” division and the professed wish to make The Daily News a “leader” in Halifax, Transcontinental never invested the money in what we really needed to make us a leader. They put us in a fancy waterfront office (nice, but not really necessary) to raise our profile, but we didn’t have enough reporters and resources to start attract the number of readers that we needed. Having a publisher with no newspaper experience and a managing editor despised by the newsroom staff, torpedoed morale. Their reign at the paper coincided with the biggest drop in circulation and ad revenue in the paper’s history. Yes, it was in the same direction as an industry trend, but their decisions exacerbated the damage.

Transcontinental says that Halifax is “over-mediatized”. Well, I can’t disagree more. We couldn’t survive under Transcon, but we survived for 24 years before they got here. Perhaps Transcon is the problem.

I’m so disappointed that the little paper that could is no more. I hope that the legacy of our our paper, and all the hard work by dedicated journalists, will be a lasting one.

While I couldn’t bear to read ONE MORE TIME that The Daily News was responsible for Celine Dion not coming to Halifax, there were some great writers that worked there until its very last day. I certainly hope that those journalists get scooped up onto bigger and better things.