Jim Middlemiss is a Dalhousie Law alumnus who served as the editor of The Weldon Times from 1987-1988. After graduation, Jim worked as a writer and editor for a number of publications, including The Lawyers Weekly, Law Times (where he was the founding editor), Canadian Lawyer, and the National Post (where he ran the Legal Post section). He currently works as a writer, editor, and communications consultant. Jim was gracious enough to talk to me about what The Weldon Times looked like when he was involved with the publication 38 years ago.
EL: How did you get involved with The Weldon Times?
JM: Before law school, I did my journalism degree at the University of North Dakota and I ran the student newspaper down there. I’d also worked in some media before as well. For me, law school was—well, at worst I’d be a better journalist, and who knows? Maybe I’d like to practice law and be a lawyer. I knew absolutely nobody when I arrived in Halifax. I drove from Alberta and I didn’t even have a place to live. So when I got to campus and saw the Weldon Times, I saw a place for me that would be a comfortable environment.
I went to a meeting in my first year, September 1986, to talk about the launch of the next issue. It was mostly third-year students and one of them looked around, and said: “Does anybody know anything about putting out a newspaper?” And I made the mistake of putting up my hand and they said “OK, I guess you’re in charge, what do we do?” The third years didn’t appoint an editor, it was more of a collective. I just made sure that deadlines got met and the paper got out the door.
The next year, I was the editor.
EL: What did the Weldon Times as a society look like?
JM: Like any volunteer organization, there were people at the centre that did more, and people on the edges that just wanted to do one thing—just wanted to write, or just wanted to edit. We’d meet and people would say, “let’s do a story on XYZ,” or as a group we’d say: “We need to cover this thing, anybody want to do it?” And people would step up.
I remember in an articling interview, someone once told me that journalists were “lone wolves” and couldn’t work with other people. And I thought, if you’d ever been in a newsroom, you’d understand that’s the farthest thing from true! It is a real team effort.
EL: What was the process for putting out a Weldon Times issue 38 years ago?
JM: We tried to come out monthly, but I think we really put out about four issues a year. We were a tabloid-style newspaper between four and twelve pages. Now, you’re producing a gloriously coloured publication. But for us to put color in the publication would cost thousands and thousands of dollars at the time because of the way the printing presses worked.
You have to remember, this was before pagination. We still did typesetting! Someone handwrote an article or sat at a typewriter and tapped an article out, handed it to the editor who marked up the copy, and the editor then sent it out to a typesetter who typed it into a machine and printed the copy out on special photographic paper. We would wax and cut and paste the copy down on flats to form the pages and the Daily News printed us. That production was a process, a real lost art. At that time in the newspaper business there was a whole industry of craftspeople that dealt with the typography and the actual production of putting out the newspaper. That’s all gone now.
EL: And what was in the Weldon Times? What type of content did you feature?
JM: We really followed the flow. What’s relevant? What do the law students need to know? You have to remember, computers were still in their infancy, there were no cell phones. No internet. Weldon Times was the gatekeeper of what was going on, as a lot of media were back then. You didn’t have the luxury of clicking a button and finding out everything, so we would cover what was going on at school, guest speakers, law games, those sorts of things. We also didn’t want to be stuffy. We wanted to be a little irreverent. Our staff box said:
JM: It was a bit of a party atmosphere at times, which maybe wouldn’t be accepted today, but at the time it was. We weren’t trying to be a learning tool or a critical legal thinking journal—there were other venues for that. The Weldon Times was a place to let off some steam, to vent, and to have a bit of fun along the way. A chance to step away from the drudgery of reading the law to something that might give you a moment of distraction.
EL: I love that. I also think, as much as student life stuff is distraction or escapism, it’s also a good reminder that everyone else is going through the same kinds of things you are. You’re all humans with lives and personalities that are more than just studying law.
JM: Exactly. You know that first day of school you look around at all the people sitting next to you, and you have that moment where you’re feeling—how should I put it? Resume inadequate. You think, look at what this person’s done. But someone else is looking at you and thinking the same thing. But you don’t realize that until you talk to them.
You have to build your community, find your people. I was just talking with one of my friends from law school, and we were looking at each other and we said: we’ve known each other for almost 40 years now. That’s a legacy of friendship. There’s still people that I haven’t talked to in many years, but I could pick up a phone and start a conversation like it was yesterday.
EL: Are there any particular articles that you published in The Weldon Times that stick out to you?
JM: I remember, we were one of the first years of law school that had to do ethics. Some people didn’t like that, so we wrote about this fight some students had trying to stop the administration from imposing this mandatory ethics course. Here’s one of the quotes: “The faculty are trying to ram ethics down our throats.” I’m sure the administration preferred we didn’t write about that, but we covered it. I look back at that and I laugh now because ethics is an underlying course, and it should be mandatory, because I’ve written about a lot of lawyers that have been disbarred!
I’m not surprised it’s still around. I’m surprised that it’s grown the way it has, but I think that’s a good thing. It’s funny to see, thirty-eight years later, that the type of stories are still similar. That makes me feel good. The desire for the information, the desire to know more about the topic is still there. It tells me that we got it right.
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