It was a journey of about 15 metres, but it had the potential to cast a long shadow over David Cadogan’s career as a newspaper publisher and columnist in Miramichi, N.B.

He and his son-in-law Allen Irving had been drinking at a nightclub in Fredericton. “I’d had too much to drink and just intended to crawl into my car and wait for Allen,” Cadogan recalls. “Auto pilot kicked in when I got to the car. As soon as it moved, I remembered that I wasn’t going to drive and wasn’t going anywhere. I pulled over but the police were already there.”

The police booked Cadogan for driving under the influence. He planned to plead guilty. His lawyer told him he could just take the conviction in Fredericton and no one in Miramichi would know about it.

But Cadogan refused. He asked for a change of venue to Chatham, now part of the city of Miramichi, where he knew the court would sit on Tuesday. When his newspaper, the Miramichi Leader, hit the street the next day, readers saw the headline, “Publisher Impaired.”

Cadogan insisted editor Rick MacLean run the story on the front page.

“I’ve always believed that if you have a skeleton in your closet, it’s going to jump out and bite you on the ass at the absolute worst time,” Cadogan says today.

MacLean, who is now a journalism instructor at Holland College in Charlottetown, P.E.I., agrees the  story was newsworthy, but at the time didn’t think it warranted front-page treatment.

“But he was right,” MacLean says. “He’s not an average citizen. And he had to make the point.” Tough editorial decisions like this earned Cadogan the grudging respect of the community.

So how would MacLean describe his former boss?

“He was the guy who jumped in front of the fan, every time the manure hit the fan, without fail.”

Driven by community
Cadogan’s daughter, Joanne, followed him into the business and worked as a reporter and editor. She says what set him apart from many other publishers she met was his interest in more than the business side.

“He was driven by the idea of what the paper could do for the community, how it could reflect the community, how it could lead the community.”

Those who have worked with Cadogan (full disclosure: the author of this article is one of them) note his insatiable curiosity, the diversity of views in his papers, and his ability to recognize talent. “He did not want to stifle any voices in the community,”

Joanne Cadogan says. He was also keen to embrace new technology; his papers were using cutting-edge photo typesetting by the early 1970s and went online in 1997, among the first in the country to do so. The approach guided Cadogan during a lifetime in journalism, most of it in small towns in the Maritimes.

He got his start as a child, helping out in the composing room of a weekly newspaper in Southern Ontario that his father George Cadogan published. After finishing high school, the younger Cadogan worked several years for business magazines in Toronto and Montreal. Then he followed his father to Nova Scotia, where George had moved to publish a paper in Pictou. 

David agreed to take over a failing print shop in nearby Stellarton, and turned it into a moneymaker. In 1970, he bought a weekly newspaper in the Upper Saint John River Valley in New Brunswick, the Woodstock Bugle. That’s where Cadogan honed his skills as a publisher, a community booster, and occasional rabble-rouser.

By his own definition, he’s “a little rough around the edges.” In his younger years he had shaggy hair and a beard, weighed up to 300 pounds, listened to rock music, and liked to relax with a smoke, a drink, and spirited debate.

It made him a pretty good fit in the Miramichi, a place where, Cadogan found, people are more direct. “It was not unusual for somebody to brief me in the Wing (bar) on Friday night and give me 16 different reasons why I was the worst thing that ever happened and should never be allowed to own a newspaper, much less write for one,” he says.

When Rick MacLean first applied for a job at the Miramichi Leader, he was told he might find Cadogan in a bar. He left messages at every pub in town and finally got a call back from Cadogan,  who demanded to know, “Who the f*** are you?”

But in the early 1970s when he was in Woodstock, a conservative community in New Brunswick’s Bible Belt, that wouldn’t have been a good opening line.

It’s a place where even the licensing of a beer parlour provoked a strong backlash. Cadogan, meanwhile, campaigned for legalization of marijuana long before it was a popular cause. Under his guidance, the Bugle covered court stories that had little exposure before.

Growing local news
From Woodstock, Cadogan began branching out. He launched a paper in Oromocto with his father but lost a bruising-head-to-head competition with the Irvings. Then he bought newspapers in Dalhousie, on the North Shore, and the neighbouring communities of Newcastle and Chatham on the Miramichi, later merging those two papers and selling the Dalhousie News.

He moved to the Miramichi in 1976. In the mid-1980s, he also bought the Kings County Record in Sussex, and launched a paper in Doaktown that didn’t last.

One thing Cadogan learned from his father was the importance of community news: “I’ve got a deal with Time magazine,” he often says. “I promised them I won’t cover the world and they promised me they won’t cover the Miramichi.”

As he speaks, Cadogan is relaxing in the living room of his home overlooking the Miramichi River. He’s now 81, has shed 100 pounds and quit smoking and drinking. He has been retired 21 years; he finally sold his papers to Irving in 2002. Last year, Irving sold them to PostMedia. But he’s still writing and his philosophy hasn’t changed.

“One of the things about being a newspaper publisher is that your best friends have to realize that if they get caught, or if you catch them doing something offensive, morally, legally offensive, your friendship is not going to count,” Cadogan says. “And I had several instances of that. I lost a lot of friends.”

Cadogan’s house is on a 1.2-hectare waterfront property that seems ideal for one who always takes the long view.

On the lawn, there’s a cannon — a relic his son-in-law salvaged.

It is, Cadogan says, a functional cannon, and perfectly legal. On a few occasions he’s packed it with gunpowder and fired off a plastic pop bottle filled with sand.

“He’s fired a few shots over the  bow over the years,” former editor Rick MacLean laughs.

Clashing with the Monster of the Miramichi
But it was no laughing matter when, back in the late 1980s, Cadogan found himself in the crosshairs of a serial killer, the notorious Allan Legere, the “Monster of the Miramichi.” For years, Legere had been known as someone to avoid, a guy who would pick bar fights and threaten people. He and Cadogan sometimes clashed on the pages of the Leader, with Legere writing angry letters and Cadogan firing back.

In 1986, Legere and two teenage accomplices robbed a small store and beat the elderly couple who ran it. They killed the man and raped the woman, but she still managed to call police.

They eventually caught and jailed Legere, but in May 1989, he escaped custody and went on a campaign of terror, lurking in the shadows, breaking into homes, and killing four more people in communities around the Miramichi.

People told Cadogan he was on Legere’s hit list. “I did feel scared for myself but not too scared to do my job,” he recalls. He installed a security system his house but never armed himself with anything more than a knife.

Then, in late November 1989, MacLean got a call at home at 5 a.m. that police had caught Legere in Saint John. MacLean threw on his clothes, jumped into his car, and drove to the Crown Attorney’s office to confirm the story. “Then I dashed to the newsroom thinking I’ve got to call all the news staff, and everybody was already in place.”

He tracked down Cadogan in Woodstock. “And he authorized a special edition on the phone on the fly, 20 pages that day, a 20-page tabloid…. The thing actually made money. And we won a national award.”

Brickbats and bouquets
It was one of many awards the Leader won during Cadogan’s tenure. “When I retired, I was pretty proud of the network of papers that I built,” he says. “We’d won the best all-around newspaper in the top circulation category in the Atlantic competition for more years than all the rest of the papers in the region put together.”

Others have taken note. Twenty years ago, the University of King’s College in Halifax awarded Cadogan an honourary doctorate of civil laws.

Kim Kierans, former vice-president and director of the journalism school, worked for the Leader in the 1970s.

She says she admires independent publishers such as Cadogan and the late Jim McNeill of the Eastern Graphic in Montague, P.E.I., “because they fought for keeping schools local, they fought for post offices, they fought for all kinds of things that were all related to the health of their community.”

Cadogan is a past president and honourary life member of the both the Canadian Community Newspapers Association and the Atlantic Community Newspapers Association. In 2020, the Atlantic Journalism Awards inducted him into its hall of fame.

Paul McNeill, who succeeded his father Jim at the Eastern Graphic, says Cadogan is the “gold standard” for community newspaper publishers: someone who achieved a rare balance — journalist and publisher as well as a community activist, heading such bodies as the local chamber of commerce.

McNeill says it’s that balance of boosterism and head-bashing that sticks with him. “I sort of had this vision of what it’s supposed to be, or what I thought people want, to hammer  somebody over the head every single week. And he just quietly told me, ‘Sometimes you’ve just got to show them you love them.’”

These days, Cadogan continues to hand out bouquets and brickbats in his social media posts. In particular, he laments the state of the community press, faulting publishers for failing to capitalize on the digital revolution and allowing advertising and readers to slip away. The Miramichi Leader has become what Cadogan calls a “wrapper,” a thin paper handed out free and packed full of advertising flyers.

There’s no editorial office and just one reporter. In Cadogan’s days, there was an editorial staff of six.

Twenty-one years ago, he could see the writing on the wall. Twice he rebuffed the Irvings’ offers to buy his newspapers. He says the rule of thumb in the industry is that the Irvings never ask a fourth time. “They start competing newspapers,” he says. “They don’t have to kill you. All they’ve got to do is take your profit, and they make your business worthless.”

Cadogan wanted his papers to be a lasting legacy. It didn’t work out that way. But he still takes pride in his success at spotting talent and encouraging aspiring journalists.

“And they’re scattered all over the place now. But you know, they’re all still good friends, yeah."