MINER DETAILS (March 09, 1992)

This issue of The Northern Miner marks the beginning of our 78th year of continuous publication. There have been a lot of changes over those years and there are more in store as we respond to our readers’ needs.

Changes to our editorial page are part of that process. We have kept the same space for our weekly editorial, where we give our opinion on key issues facing the mining industry. Other elements on this page, however, have changed.

Perhaps most obvious is the space we have opened for a political cartoon — a chance to save a thousand words by providing a single picture. The content of our “Guest Column,” originally reserved for four spokesmen of the industry, is being broadened to reflect a greater diversity of opinion. That space will also carry our traditional “Odds n’ Sods” column from time to time to provide a glimpse of how mining men and women worked in earlier days.

This column, “Miner Details,” is a space for me and Vivian Danielson, our Western Editor, to reflect on some of the less weighty developments in the industry. As the title of the column indicates, the subjects we’ll look at will be mere details compared with larger developments in the industry but will, we trust, be of interest as a behind-the-scenes look at the mining business.

To round out the page, a space is provided under the heading “Others’ words” for reprints from other current publications and, on occasion, from old issues of the Miner held in our archives.

These changes are not meant simply for change’s sake. Some might say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but we feel these changes, and others we plan to introduce in the next few weeks, will make the Miner easier to read, more useful and more responsive to the changing nature of the mining industry. Over the years, it seems we have had a penchant for flying in the face of conventional wisdom and embarking on new courses at times others might say are inappropriate. We started publishing in Ontario’s hinterland in 1915, the height of the First World War. And when the little paper prospered, we decided to move to the big city of Toronto in 1929, just in time to suffer through the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. Behind all the changes that have occurred over the years, the guiding principle is the same as it was the day the Miner started publishing back in Cobalt in 1915 — to provide full, fair and factual reporting you, our readers, can trust.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.