By David F. Rooney
Meet Peter Worden. The 31-year-old former CBC Radio and TV reporter in Nunavut purchased Reved, our community’s popular local arts and culture publication from its founder, Heather Lea, and is waiting to see the fruit of his labours — the very first edition carrying his distinctive stamp. That first edition is on its way back from the printer in Vancouver and should be available by Friday.
“I Liked its attitude and tone… saw an opportunity and took it,” he said of his decision to purchase Reved from Heather who is, by the way on a round-the-world motorcycle tour.
A graduate of Simon Fraser University, Worden is an Ottawa native with a quirky sense of humour who would like to make the quarterly publication a more interactive publication. You’ll get a sense of that with the first edition he has produced. As he explains it, the tab-sized paper contains a kind of mini-paper inside. It’s a kind of experiment and Peter, you see, is big on ‘experiments,’ especially puzzles or things that are amusing and interactive in one way or another. You can get a sense of that talking with him, especially if begins talking about the last time he dabbled in newspaper publication.
That experience came about when he was in the small rural town of Nanton which is south of Calgary. Nanton, like most country towns, had a small paper called the Nanton News that had been ailing since the early 1990s. The Town of Nanton engaged Worden to produce something he called The Nanton News Experiment, which he modelled after The Eyeopener, a legendary Calgary publication founded by satirist Bob Edwards in the late 19th century. Peter filled it with quirky little stories and items that engaged and amused its purely local readers and even visitors.
It was something of a gimmick but the Nanton News‘ owners, Sun Media (which also owns the Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton Sun papers), was not amused and its army of lawyers wrote him a letter informing him that he was infringing on The Sun’s copyright of the Nanton News name.
I doubt very much that Peter Worden’s about to get sued for copyright infringement by anyone here but he’s obviously a guy who likes to have fun. A publication like Reved is ideal for him and he looks forward to seeing what he can do with it. So far, he has made the rounds and met many of the contributing writers and his advertisers. All told, he likes what he sees and he hopes we’ll like what we see, too.
The latest edition of Reved should be showing up in local shops and cafes on Friday. Pick it up and give it a read, It should be worth a smile.
Welcome to Revelstoke, Peter.
