The Toronto Raptors’ incredible season could end tonight with the first-ever NBA championship for the team—and the country. And in the city where the Raps played their first-ever game, Jurassic Park Halifax will be the centre of the action. “People are coming from Moncton, from PEI,” says Gab LeVert, one of the people making JPH […]
Kyle Shaw
Loving the arrival of this mysterious climate event people are calling "spring".
Kyle was a founding member of the newspaper in 1993 and was the paper’s first publisher. Kyle occasionally teaches creative nonfiction writing (think magazine-style #longreads) and copy editing at the University of King’s College School of Journalism.
Posted inNews + Opinion
7 things to know about Turo car-sharing service’s arrival in Nova Scotia
Turo is a big deal in the sharing economy, serving as the Airbnb of car rentals for about 10 million people around the world. But you can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it, because Turo hasn’t been available in Nova Scotia—until today. To drive attention for the local launch, Turo Canada’s managing director, […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Speaking for The Coast: Fame for the messenger
People don’t go into journalism to be universally admired—the idea of killing the messenger has apparently been part of pop culture since a Sophocles play in 442BC. But as Facebook and Google tighten their grip on the world’s attention and advertising, and public officials are increasingly emboldened to slander the fourth estate as the enemy […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Speaking for The Coast: Foreign correspondence
It’s a funny thing about alternative newsmedia organizations like The Coast. More than 100 of us across the US and Canada have banded together as members of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, and we have great meetings where people who do the specialized work of producing an urban weekly newspaper discover their peers. But because […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Speaking for The Coast: The Coast goes daily
On our office bulletin board, somebody posted this description of journalism: “It’s a tough job with insane pressure and pretty crappy pay. On the other hand, everybody hates you.” That was pinned up years ago, but it’s still there, ringing true into the new year. Producing a newspaper on a weekly deadline is a special […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Halifax council got burned by cannabis legalization
The drug cartel machinations that make for such great binge-watching played out in real life around the legalization of cannabis. Kingpin Justin Trudeau, a glamorous jet-setter protected by armed guards, issues the game-changing orders: Weed is legal now, and for my tribute, I’m taking a dollar-per-gram “excise tax” kickback. On a rung below him, the provinces […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Speaking for The Coast: 25 years in review
Halfway through The Coast’s 25th anniversary year, with six months to go until birthday number 26 in June, I can only look back in awe. The Coast has always been a small business that, thanks to the hard work and outsize ambitions of its talented staff and freelancers, has a big influence. It was true […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Legal weed’s roll-out
So, no big deal or anything, but cannabis becomes legal in Canada on Wednesday. This October 17 date has been a real, albeit still somewhat surreal, target for a while, giving lawmakers, producers and retailers a serious deadline to get a lot of shit figured out. And as that deadline gets ever closer, putting increasing […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Drink in the memories with the Drink Atlantic highlight video
Was the inaugural Drink Atlantic Cocktail Festival a great way to kick off the summer? We’d definitely like to think so, because it was a Coast co-production with The Clever Barkeep. But you should take this one-minute video trip down memory lane and decide for yourself. Related Stories
Posted inNews + Opinion
NRA’s recipe for moose donair meat takes a shot at Maritimers
The National Rifle Association’s ongoing efforts to make guns a totally normal lifestyle choice in the USA have now taken aim at Halifax’s official totally normal lifestyle choice, the donair. An NRA magazine called American Hunter published a recipe for Wild Game Donair on its website this weekend. Apparently meat from moose, deer and elk […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Coast 25: Ahead by a quarter-century
Media has always been sensitive to technological advances. The printing press changed things. The telegraph changed things. Television changed things. The internet seems to be changing everything. When we started The Coast, in pre-internet June 1993, we were six friends from the University of King’s College—the two of us, plus Andy Lamey, Andy Pedersen, Aran […]
Posted inLifestyle
HFX Wanderers unveiled as Canada’s newest professional soccer club
A new professional soccer league starts playing in Canada next year, and Halifax just became the third city to sign on. At this afternoon’s announcement, the Canadian Premier League introduced HFX Wanderers as the third member of the nascent men’s pro league, joining Calgary’s Cavalry FC and Toronto-area York 9 FC as founding CPL clubs. […]