2018 Newsfaker, em, Newsmaker, of the Year

Okay, sabbatical's over. Time to get back to work.

The first order of business is some overdue unfinished business, namely the annual recognition of the Black Rod Newsmaker of the Year for 2018.

It was a bit of a headscratcher as the year's end approached closer and closer. No name jumped out from the sad pack of also-rans--- Pallister, Bowman, some overpaid hockey player... Yikes, was there nobody?

But then just before the stroke of midnight on the last day of the year (and too late to publish) it came. Of course. A dark horse. Someone everybody knows but nobody knows. The man who influenced more Manitobans, more Winnipegers, more Liberals than anyone else in the province...

The Black Rod ~~Newsfaker~~ Newsmaker of the Year for 2018 -- Bob Cox, publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press.

For years Box Cox (as he's affectionately known) has travelled the country far and wide preaching, threatening, lobbying, pleading for somebody to step up and save the newspaper industry in Canada.

Advertising dollars, the life's blood of the industry, are being drained away by digital media. Newspapers will die out, he bellowed, unless someone levels the playing field, not with subsidies (ptui, curse the word), but with tax breaks, changes to charitable status for privately raised funds, and, okay, maybe some levelling cheques here and there.

Cox never flagged. As one year passed into the next he just redoubled his efforts until he was insisting that the only thing standing between us and Hitler was the daily newspaper. If that falls, then its the end of democracy and the freedom we have come to love, he cried.

And then, finally, success in year '18. The federal government has promised $565 million to buoy the print media across Canada.

(Details to be rolled out through the year.)

Atta boy, Bob. You did it. We're safe. You hear that, Martha, we're safe. And we owe it all to that Bob Cox in Winnipeg.

And a federal election in 2019.

(more to come. Lots)

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