August 16th, 1973 — Bob Gainer was the last independent newsie selling newspapers from a street kiosk in Vancouver. At one time there were hundreds around the city but television killed late breaking news extras and then newspapers switched to one edition a day; it was the end of the newsies. Gainer’s kiosk was at the corner of Hastings and Cambie.
A few days ago the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province along with other CanWest newspapers announced they would be centralizing much of their production in Hamilton, Ontario almost 4500 km’s away. The newsroom will be gutted. It’s the end for the people we called “deskers”, the editors who actually placed stories on pages, wrote headlines and the captions for pictures. They were the backbone of the newspaper and soon they will be gone, like typesetters and newsies.