The student newspaper serves as journalism school for many undergraduates — a place and time in a young scribe’s life that teaches them writing and editing skills, brings home the importance of accountability, and drills a profound love-hate relationship with deadlines into them.
“It isn’t true that McGill has no journalism program; it’s just that you can’t identify a single class, professor or theory,” wrote Marc-Antoine Godin, BA’96, MA’99, in the pages of last week’s Le Délit, the French-language student newspaper that he edited at McGill 20 years ago.
The newspaper celebrated its 40th anniversary on April 8, welcoming back generations of Délit alumni to reunite and reminisce about the time they’ve collectively spent within the walls of the shared McGill Daily/Délit office.
Le Délit was founded in 1977 by Daniel Boyer, BA’79, MLIS’88, who promised a French-language newspaper while campaigning for the position of editor-in-chief of the McGill Daily. When Boyer won the job, he promptly appointed a francophone editor. The Daily put out five editions a week back then and one of those issues began to be published in French.
Over its history, the paper’s name has transitioned from Le McGill Daily édition française, to Le McGill Daily français, to Le Délit, a cheeky name adopted in 2001 that can be translated to “offence” or “violation” in English.
“The rationale wasn’t so much an assertion of the French language in as much as there were some francophones on campus who were interested in student journalism,” says Boyer, who is now the head librarian at McGill’s Nahum Gelber Law Library. But those French-speaking students — despite making up about a fifth of McGill’s student population at the time — just weren’t knocking on the Daily’s door.
“I thought if we published in French, it would attract people, and this turned out to be true.”
Daniel Weinstock, BA’83, MA’88, who served as the paper’s editor during the mid-eighties and who is now a McGill law professor and the director of the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy, says Le Délit eventually grew into its larger purpose.
“I think we saw our role as bringing issues of Quebec politics to the fore, giving a voice to [certain] views of Quebec politics… that may not have been dominant among the student body.”
Le Délit’s birth wasn’t met with universal praise, however. An early letter to the editor from “an irate mother,” republished in Le Délit’s April 7th edition, read: “What right have you, whoever you are who run the Daily, to decide to use the funds of all those English students to print a newspaper they won’t be able to read?” (The Daily Publications Society was, and continues to be, funded in part by a student levy.)
The newspaper found its footing in its unique cultural milieu — in a minority francophone community, inside of a larger mostly English institution, inside of a largely bilingual city, situated in a majority French province.
“It’s like a matryoshka,” says Eric Abitbol, BA’92, who worked as a contributor and news editor in the early nineties. “The layers of complexity were part of… what we were creating with.”
Abitbol, who is now an environmental peacebuilding consultant, says working at Le Délit helped him and his colleagues develop a nuanced understanding of their community, the world and their place in both.
Working as an editorial team was a valuable lesson, too; putting what you think you know out there into the public sphere to be critiqued and deconstructed by your peers helps to challenge and build a person’s convictions, he says.
For many student newspaper alums, that kind of discourse and solidarity has led to unbreakable bonds. Several of the attendees who took part in Le Délit’s reunion event mentioned the long-lasting friendships they formed while toiling for hours over the newspaper’s production.
“I met my first love and my best friend there,” said a visibly moved Julia Denis, BA’17, Le Délit’s editor-in-chief in 2015–2016. “It was an extraordinary experience.”
An impressive roster of people who’ve gone on to work as journalists, lawyers, professors and other professionals have served on the staff of Le Délit. The list of names includes TVA’s White House correspondent Richard Latendresse, BA’85, Radio-Canada TV host Emmanuelle Latraverse, BA’97, Court of Quebec judge Jeffrey Edwards, BCL’86, LLB’86, and Sophie Durocher, BA’88, a high-profile columnist with Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec.
“I remember this energy we had when we were 20 and young and crazy,” says Durocher.
For many who’ve passed through the revolving doors of a student publication, memories of that formative time are seen as snapshots of past eras. But for Boris Shedov and Letty Matteo, BCom’92, CertPRMgmt’99, running the Daily Publications Society is still very much a current reality. As the business and ad managers, Shedov and Matteo are integral to the Daily and Délit’s institutional memory.
Shedov, who has worked for the two publications since 1984, still vividly remembers the pre-desktop publishing days of cutting up ads with a scalpel and pasting them into the newspaper manually before the pages could be shipped off to the printer in a taxi.
Shedov says student journalists should treasure the fleeting moments when they have the freedom to publish tomes on the social and cultural issues near to their hearts. That freedom attracts young talent to the Daily and Le Délit year in and year out, he says.
“For me, Le Délit is more than a newspaper,” says outgoing editor Ikram Mecheri, BA’16. “C’est l’âme même de la francophonie à McGill (It’s the very soul of McGill’s francophone community).”
