THE BATTLEFORDS — It’s pronounced "Jan," not Jane. Yes, it’s still spelled like Jayne.
But Jayne Foster, former reporter, automotive paint mixer, telephone operator, graphic artist, dance instructor, darkroom technician, editor for the Battlefords News-Optimist, and now editor of SASKTODAY.ca, is used to answering to any variation of Jayne or Jan.
“... as you can imagine, I’ve always answered to Jane,” Foster said, noting her parents wanted to name her Jan, but in order to avoid a possible mix-up with her older brother Ian's name, they chose an unusual spelling after one of the most popular film stars of the day, Jayne Mansfield.
Foster’s love of the written word and her creative spirit developed at an early age, ironically enough, leaning over large sheets of blank newsprint at her family’s kitchen table.
While she waited for her brother and sister to come home from school, Foster said, “I’d draw. I’d sit at the table all day long and draw.” Foster said.
Drawing segued into a desire to write in cursive, and by teaching herself how to write, the preschooler learned to read.
“I thought cursive writing looked really cool, and my mom had beautiful handwriting … you should see, my cursive writing now is horrible. It's illegible,” Foster said, laughing.
“I was really, really lucky with my parents. They encouraged me, especially my mom, encouraged all my artistic things,” Foster said. "And I also take after my dad, who was a voracious reader of fiction and non-fiction,"
Even the neighbours contributed to Foster's creative tendencies. The blank newsprint from the pre-school days was sent out to the farm Alan and Ruth McLeod by the postmistress from the nearby hamlet of Ruthilda.
“It’s a creative thing,” Foster said, noting her love of music. “My mom’s family is extremely musical. There’s hardly a member of the first two or three generations that hasn’t at one time or isn’t still a professional musician, including my mother.”
Following in her mother’s footsteps, Foster even tried playing in a band, first drums and then bass. But decided she'd rather listen. Later in life, however, she would enjoy singing women's barbershop.
A thousand jobs and passions
After graduating from North West Central High School in Plenty, Foster married her first husband, who was planning to move to the Battlefords to train to be a commercial pilot. Foster saw an ad in the paper, searching for a reporter and she applied.
“... and what do you know? I got the job.”
Starting in 1979 working for the Bill Warwick family, Foster worked through several positions at the Advertiser-Post and Battleford Telegraph, including reporter, photographer, news editor and production editor. And during her 40-odd years working in news media, including through a merger with the News-Optimist when one company bought both papers, with a few quasi-retirements sprinkled throughout, Foster has also worked at other jobs. Jobs that range from boiler technician to telephone operator.
“I actually saw a lot of changes in that industry … in the short time I was there,” Foster said, speaking to her three-year stint with SaskTel.
Other than the newspaper business, however, one of the greatest passions of her life has been dancing.
While Foster was working at the paper, she met another like-minded, creative soul, Greg Schneider, who was working at the sales department at the time.
“Greg and I went to watch my friend dance in Saskatoon." It was at a ballroom and Latin dance showcase put on by what was then an Arthur Murray studio. "We were absolutely gobsmacked, and we both said, ‘We have to do this.'"
And it wasn’t just that they were going to learn to dance. They were going to do it well enough to become teachers.
“He right away moved to Saskatoon and started taking lessons, and within a few months, he was teaching. He became my teacher.”
Though she considered moving to Saskatoon to teach there as well, she eventually decided, as a single mother, to stay in the Battlefords in her job in the newsroom. When she remarried, she started her own dance studio with husband Scott, whom she describes as her all-time favourite dance partner.
Foster ended up teaching ballroom, Latin, swing, and country dance to hundreds of adult students in the Battlefords area for close to 20 years. She also became fascinated with belly dancing, teaching it as well.
A shifting landscape for news media
Despite other passions, the news industry always drew her back. She started in 1979 without a journalism degree under the mentorship of Susan Warwick, a summa cum laude graduate of Carleton University, during a time when the News-Optimist building hosted the printing press for several papers and did commercial and novelty printing.
Gone are the days of linotype and typesetters, the original copy and paste and an office filled with a half-dozen reporters. Now, everything has changed.
“I like learning new things … my motto is, ‘if you’ve learned something new, it’s a good day … technology’s the biggest change,” Foster added about the changes she’s seen during her life.
“It’s been exponential. The changes have come faster more recently. But because you go through those changes, you have a background of what the news [world] has come from.”
Foster used the example of the original copy and paste, something with a long history before laptops or the photocopier. Instead, Susan Warwick taught Foster about the news writing pyramid by showing her how to rework her story by cutting up the page it was typed on and taping it back together.
A news pyramid, Foster explained, is where a reporter puts the most crucial information at the top of a story, and the further down you go, add less important information.
“If someone is busy laying out the paper and they have a piece of what was called film, which had the text on it, and they’re cutting it up, and they’re putting wax on it, and they’re laying it out on a page, and it’s too long? They cut the bottom off.”
But even Foster didn't imagine how quickly things would change.
“When I first heard about the World Wide Web, I thought, ‘That’s really interesting, but it’s probably not something that’s ever going to affect me.’”
However, a thirst for knowledge and a willingness to adapt has allowed Foster to thrive in a constantly changing environment and industry, allowing her to stay ahead of the changes.
The birth of SASKTODAY.ca
And everything must change. Before the creation of the News-Optimist’s first website, reporters at the News-Optimist started blogging, knowing the internet was the future years before SASKTODAY.ca was born.
“Because (of) the way we are out here, somebody came up with the bright idea … to get all of the local news into one website, rather than have 14 different websites.”
After striking a group, Glacier Media decided to amalgamate 14 individual newsrooms into one provincial newsgroup to better serve the public under one joint name.
And SASKTODAY.ca was born.
“I don’t really know of anything else quite like us in Canada, where you would take 14 newspapers and put them together in basically one newsroom and have one website that is both local news and provincial news.
“Local news is no longer just local. We’re such a global community now, and Saskatchewan is so big with so few people compared to other places in the country and the world that if we bring it all together, the local news becomes everybody’s news.”
And eventually, Foster was chosen to be the curator of SASKTODAY.ca.
“... that’s the future of the industry,” Foster said about the growth of SASKTODAY.ca in recent years — growth for which she was recently recognized with her acceptance into Glacier Media’s 2023 president’s club, which will see Foster in Mexico for a week in April.
Gord Brewerton, the publisher of the News-Optimist, as well as vice-president and group publisher for Glacier Media's Prairie Newspaper Group feels that her recognition is well deserved.
"I had the opportunity to work with Jayne as she was in the position of editor at the News-Optimist, and I saw the passion she had and the pride she took in growing our online audience," Brewerton said, noting that Foster knew online news was the future.
"...she's just an amazing person. Huge heart. (She) would do anything for anybody.
"...out of all of Glacier Media, she had the largest year-on-year audience growth on the website," Brewerton added.
The Future of News
And Foster doesn’t see an end in sight.
“You can’t get ink out of your blood, once it’s there, it’s there. It pulls you back,” Foster said.
“It’s addicting. So, you tend to be a news person, you don’t just work as a news person,” Foster said as she works as an editor for both SASKTODAY.ca and the News-Optimist.
“And (It’s) because I have the family I do. Scott takes care of all the shopping and all the cooking."
Noting that having gone through various changes in the industry throughout her career has given her a particular skill set, things will have to evolve when that skill set finally does go away.
“If I ever do retire — I’ll probably more likely die — it will change because they’re aren’t very many people left who’ve been in the business as long as I have,” Foster said.
And beyond the changes that have already come, there are many more in the foreseeable future, including a shift toward remote work and artificial intelligence.
“If prompted carefully, generative AI can create content that is unbiased, and that’s what the news world needs,” Foster said, saying that many media outlets are too biased right now, not because of the government or large corporations throwing money at the news industry.
“That isn’t necessarily the case. Nobody tells me what to put on SASKTODAY.ca except my news people when they send it to me. What happens, and it mostly comes out of what’s happening in the States … there are too many people disseminating too much information that isn’t correct.”
Foster feels people don’t necessarily understand what the truth is anymore, which may be where AI could come in. Though no one is sure how AI will affect the industry, Foster keeps an eye on it while she watches the industry.
“I think it’s up to the media to be brave enough to write things as truthfully as they can … It’s going to be really hard to earn the trust back of the public,” Foster said.
“Who would have thought that things would be like they are now?” Foster asked.
Certainly, the answer is no one, but after the vast changes Foster has seen during the span of her career, who knows where we’ll be in another 40.
