A CONNECTION MADE
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PHOTO: Malcolm Parry
PUBLISHER Maura De Freitas (McCay) with her mother Catholine Butler who handles advertising and promotion for The Celtic Connection.
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By MALCOLM PARRY
A generation has passed since Jack Wallace redesigned The Vancouver Sun in the big-city style he'd polished as a San Francisco Chronicle staffer and Hearst organization trouble-shooter.
Wallace died at age 87 in 2002, a decade after he'd literally breathed life into the smaller but far-reaching Vancouver-based The Celtic Connection.
That's the 10-times-yearly newspaper-format publication (www.celtic-connection.com) that Maura De Freitas (then Maura McCay), and her mother Catholine Butler founded with $40,000 in 1990, after De Freitas relinquished her co-ownership of a small Celtic-arts magazine called The Coracle.
The Celtic Connection's initial 5,000 print run is now double that at city-based Horizon Publications, and its unaudited readership reportedly totals 30,000 in Canada, the U.S. and Celtic pockets elsewhere.
That gentle climb aside, and with comparably modest revenues in the $150,000 range, the paper has the zesty, professional format of a much heavier hitter. In 2005, Ontario Lt.-Gov. James Karl Bartleman handed publisher De Freitas the Ethnomedia Week celebration's Best in Editorial and Information trophy.
De Freitas, 53, recently credited The Celtic Connection's survival and success to "mentor" Wallace. But the dead don't speak. Former administrative assistant to a mining firm vice-president De Freitas does, and in a way that makes the native of Ottawa's Gatineau Valley acceptable to English, Irish, Scots and Welsh readers. "Groups that don't always get on well together," she said with a slight twinkle.
"I think we've crossed a lot of lines, and in a diplomatic way," Butler said. Those lines included the early suspicion that the two were Irish Republican Army (IRA) supporters.
"There was distrust," De Freitas recalled. "Of our politics, our motives, and essentially what was our agenda. But it dissolved. We extended a hand, and made an effort to connect to the community."
The Irish took it first, said Butler, who reviews, reports, handles all advertising sales and "takes no abuse, I never have."
She and De Freitas do take donations, though, from community organizations and individuals like global philanthropist Elinore Detiger, who gave the then-fledgling Celtic Connection $10,000 back in 1992.
In return, they provide a mix of international news and comment, feature articles, culture and sports reports, and regional coverage, including a page headed Seattle Irish News.
Still, it was The Coracle magazine that gave De Freitas bigger ideas. "I'd go to [Celtic] events to set up artwork, and people asked: 'Where are you going next?' I'd tell them, and they would ask: 'How come I don't know about that?'
"I realized that, though they had cousins and were related culturally, they weren't communicating with one another." That turned on her entrepreneurial light. "Since The Celtic Connection was created," she said recently, "they do have a means of communicating, and there's been a lot more of it between the various cultural groups."
She spoke as the harvest season called lughnasadh began. That was also when native Irish contracted the one-year trial marriages that might or might not be formalized the following fall. They and fellow Celts appear to have made their minds up regarding De Freitas and Butler's newspaper.
[We gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint thanks to The Vancouver Sun and Malcolm Parry. The above article was initially published in the August 6 edition of The Vancouver Sun in the B.C. Business Section.]
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