Carnegie’s Voice of the Downtown Eastside Muted by Pandemic

For 34 years, editor Paul Taylor and a team of volunteers have produced the Carnegie Newsletter, a twice-monthly source of news, views, poetry and comics for the Downtown Eastside community.

The newsletter was among the first to publish stories about women who had gone missing from the neighbourhood in the 1990s and on early plans to develop the Woodward’s site into condos.

The publication has helped fundraise for the Heart of the City festival, and published early poems by Bud Osborn, a longtime Downtown Eastside resident who became a community organizer and activist devoted to reforming drug policy.

“He wrote some poetry on the 25th anniversary of the newsletter, of what [the newsletter] had done for him, as a venue, and a community,” said Taylor.

But the newsletter is suspending its printed version — at least for now. While the Carnegie Newsletter published throughout the spring, the current issue is just one sheet of paper and it will now only be available online.

With the Carnegie closed for a time and fewer people able to come to the community centre to help, Taylor says he can no longer keep up the publishing schedule on his own. To keep going with the printed version, which requires photocopying and collating, Taylor said he would need four or five volunteers to step up to help. He encouraged anyone who is interested in volunteering to email the newsletter here.

It’s also become a bit harder to find stories during the pandemic, he said. “Most of the places we talk about are closed.”

The newsletter’s struggles mirror, to some extent, the pressures on community newspapers across Canada during the pandemic: with advertising revenue falling, many have reduced publishing schedules or have shuttered entire publications at a time when communities desperately need a reliable source of information.

The Carnegie Newsletter doesn’t rely on advertising, but it does need people power, and that’s in short supply right now.

In the Aug. 15 edition, Taylor explained what makes the newsletter different from other media.

“Most of the writers and poets give themselves in very personal and revealing pieces, what life has done to make certain experiences visceral and necessary to share,” he wrote. “Basic guidelines include, to this day, no racism, sexism, personal attacks or libel, with the balance insisted on in Journalism 101 somewhat modified. If the corporate media wants to provide a token comment from ‘the left’ it is usually presented in a way to diminish such views. The newsletter has never made much effort to include the views of the 1 per cent.”

Taylor knows the newsletter is well-read. The 1,200 copies, distributed to shelters, community centres and drop-in centres, are quickly snapped up over three or four days, and read by around 2,000 people, Taylor estimates.* The newsletter’s barebones budget is covered through funding from a local family foundation, and a recent grant from the Vancouver Foundation provided money to pay a student to create a website and digitize the newsletter’s archive.

Taylor is persevering with the fifth annual Sandy Cameron Memorial Writing Contest, which offers cash prizes for poetry and non-fiction essays. Normally, the awards are given out at the Heart of the City Festival in November.

Taylor hopes the newsletter will be back in some print form by then so that others can read “what their hopes and dreams are.”

In the meantime, Taylor promises in his most recent editorial that the publication will continue, “as life in the Downtown Eastside continues — with perseverance and gusto!”

*Story updated on Aug. 19 at 11:54 a.m. to correct the number of print copies produced for each issue of the Carnegie Newsletter from 2,000 to 1,200.