Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
Five years on
In the summer of 2005, I spent a lot of hours in my big green van, trolling up and down the dusty concession roads of Uxbridge township, my trusty canine companion in the shotgun seat, making sure I knew every inch of road, the location of every business. I stopped every couple of hundred yards, to write down names, story ideas, to take pictures for future reference.
I’d got it into my head, you see, that Uxbridge was missing the kind of community newspaper that it used to have, the kind a close-knit community deserved. I’d found quite a few friends who agreed with me, and we decided to give it a go. After a summer getting to know the community as well as I possibly could, we put an excellent team together - designer and layout guy Lee Ursel, ad salesman Fred Bendell, office expert Linda Fraser, columnist and adviser Ted Barris - and launched the Cosmos on September 1, 2005, with a beautiful 24-page issue that I still read fondly every now and again.
Although we gradually down-sized to a full-time staff of one - yours truly - the Cosmos is still very much the legacy of that original team. The design is still fundamentally Lee’s, including three elements that very much set us apart from the rest of the competition: our stunning and unique masthead, with the logo of Uxbridge’s official flower; the abundance of colour; and the five-column page (instead of the usual six), which gives us wider gutters and makes it so much easier for the reader to breathe. The foundation of our advertising base is Fred’s; indeed, many of the advertisers he attracted to us in those first months have been in our pages ever since, some of them every single week. Fred remains a valued member of our Board, always available if I have an advertising question. I still use many of the book-keeping systems that Linda set up, and the office doesn’t look a whole lot different than when she occupied it; she somehow knew how a newspaper office should work, and it continues to work very well.
As for Mr. Barris, his presence in our editorial pages gave the Cosmos instant legitimacy, and he is the only writer to have contributed to every single one of our 252 issues (including this one). Because he was here, other recognized journalists like Roger Varley and Harry Stemp were eager to join us, and we now have more than 30 regular contributors - columnists, reporters, photographers and cartoonists - who combine to make the Cosmos the ‘cover-to-cover’ read that so many of you tell us you enjoy over the breakfast table on Saturday mornings. More than being our leading writer, though, Ted was also one of our founding shareholders, and has been a guiding presence on our Board of Directors. Through the ups and downs of our first five years, he has been the Cosmos’ best friend. I constantly bounce ideas off him, and there is no better person I could rely on for that advice.
About the 30-so contributors... there have been a lot of their particular pieces I’ve been very proud of in these first five years - a particular column of Lisha’s I’ve spilled a tear over, a photograph of Lezley’s I’ve marvelled at, a drawing of John’s I’ve chuckled at every time I looked at it - but it’s the collective that represents our biggest achievement. We discovered in the first weeks that in addition to its double meaning of the flower and “Your Universe”, the word “cosmos” also derived from a Greek word meaning “the people”. And so we wanted this newspaper to be the voice of “the people”, your voice. Rather than having a reporter cover an event (third-person), we preferred the first-person approach (as when a group of medical professionals each provided their perspective on the Uxbridge mission to Ghana). And that more than anything has made this publication a joy to read (and in turn attracted advertisers, keeping us alive!).
Despite the success of some of its initial features, however, the Cosmos has hardly remained static over these five years. You will discover, for instance, if you were to look back at Volume 2 or 3, that I’ve become a little more proficient at laying out the pages. And there aren’t as many typos, even though my editor’s eyes are five years older. And the printing is crisper (we’ve changed printers four times already).
Some things about us, however, you can count on. Our ad rates haven’t gone up a penny since day one. We still don’t have any advertising on page one. And you’ll never see a photo of a car crash in our pages (we think the role of a community newspaper is to heal, not inflict further injury).
And on Wednesday afternoons for sure, and often on other days, you’ll see the Cosmobile trolling the dusty concession roads of Uxbridge Township, my canine companion in the shotgun seat, delivering the paper, taking pictures, watching for next week’s cover story.
Five years on, I still think this community needs the Cosmos.
