Canscene (the blog) was preceded by Canadian Scene (in print). Founded in 1951, it provided free, multilingual news and information content to publishers of ethnic media.

Imagine yourself in new country where you barely understand the language, where everything is strange; the currency, the shops, the streets, even the weather.

Then imagine little scraps of news from home, printed crudely on a sheet or two of paper, but in your own language. Imagine it tells you where you can shop locally for familiar foods and products and where to meet others like yourself. What a life line! What a comfort!

That’s the core appeal of ethnic news and it is powerful stuff. Such “newspapers” have often started as typewritten, mimeographed pages held together with staples. Their strength is in their usefulness.

— BA

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 9:05 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.