How this magazine store beat the odds to be the last standing in Halifax

When Pat Doherty first opened Atlantic News in Halifax in 1973, print was still king. 

On busy downtown street corners, pedestrians could easily grab a copy of the latest edition of The Chronicle Herald or The Globe and Mail from one of the city's news vending machines. At convenience stores, magazines lined the shelves alongside other necessities like shaving cream, condoms and toothbrushes. 

But inside Doherty's newsstand, there was something for everyone — magazines from all over the world like Time and Saturday Night, scandalous rags like Playboy and others dedicated to almost every conceivable interest, no matter how niche.

Back then, Halifax was still a city modest in its ambitions. A place where, as Doherty suggested in an interview for Don Connelly's Halifax — a 1985 CBC Nova Scotia special — life seemed to glide along.

"Simply put, there's not too much of anything here," Doherty quipped.

"Because of that you don't get tired of it. There are no excesses. If you were living in the middle of the prairies, there'd be too much land. If you're living in Sable Island, there'd be too much sea. Our economy is mixed. Everything is very mixed."

In the years since Doherty died in 1991, after a short battle with illness, the city has changed dramatically, with both the population and the cost of living on a steady incline.

But while few things have remained the same, his legacy at Atlantic News lives on at the corner of Morris and Queen streets, with the current staff and owners celebrating the store's 50th anniversary this weekend.

"When we took over in the 90s … I had a two-week-old baby and we had our two-year-old daughter, and we had to live up to this massive legacy of Pat Doherty," said Michele Gerard, who assumed ownership of the shop with her husband Stephen in 1998.  

By her count, there were 11 major newstands in Halifax when they took over, including two other independents: Paperchase on Blowers Street and The Daily Grind on Spring Garden Road. 

The 90s were perhaps the last golden age for magazines, marked by iconic issues like Kurt Cobain and Nirvana on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, tabloid headlines about the O.J. Simpson trial and Princess Diana's face on what seemed to be every magazine in the world in the months after her death. 

"The idea [was] that this would just continue and continue. Everyone was reading. And then, of course, along came the internet," said Gerard.

In Halifax today, only Atlantic News remains.

"It is strange to be in a landscape where we are the only ones," said Gerard. "To have outlasted the competition, it's a sign of ... a business that's well-run, well-loved, but also that the product is still of value to people." 

Reports of print's demise, said Gerard, have been greatly exaggerated, but the store has had to evolve to reflect a changing climate.

As some newspapers became harder to ship to Halifax, Atlantic News got onboard with PressReader in the early 2000s, a service that allows them to print on-demand copies of thousands of newspapers around the world at the push of a button. 

Likewise, when The Globe and Mail print edition stopped being distributed in Nova Scotia, the company pivoted and made a deal to fly copies in for 400 eager customers each Saturday. 

The store now also carries books, sold next to magazines with similar subject matter, and has increased the amount of work sold by local artists, like holiday cards, games and puzzles. 

According to Gerard, the store's inventory is down from a high of around 5,700 titles to a current roster of about half that amount, driven by a changing marketplace and the ubiquity of smartphones and social media. 

When they first started out, the main threat to the business was leisure time, she said. The more people worked, the less time they had to read.

The bigger challenge now is capturing attention, something that has been decimated by the devices we keep in our pockets. The time many once spent leisurely flipping through a magazine is now monopolized by a sea of distractions, always just a swipe away.

But Gerard said demand from many of her clients has remained strong, and an increasing number of people with screen fatigue are turning back toward print.

"I think we do see a desire to not be on our cell phones all day," she said.

More recently, the store has survived the touch-and-go era of COVID-19 lockdowns.

As proprietors of a newstand for so long, the Gerards have witnessed history unfold, quite literally, in the pages of the magazines on their newsstand. 

They've seen the decline of Playboy, which no longer sells a print edition, and have watched events like 9/11 and, more recently, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, play out right in front of them.

"The impact of [Diana's] death was huge in the store," said Gerard. "I can't even describe the sorrow, the panic, the frenzy, the needing to understand, and the voraciousness of our customers who were trying to find anything and everything [about] what's happened."

On Sunday, staff at the store were taking the time to celebrate, hosting a day of events to commemorate the store's eclectic history. 

In the crowd were longtime customers, family, and friends.

One of them was Michael Doherty, the kid brother of Pat Doherty, who started it all back in 1973.

He can still picture his brother next to the cash register, writing out letters to send to publishers whose magazines he was interested in carrying, and chatting with his customers, many of whom grew to be close friends.

"He would have loved what they've done here and just the fact that they've survived," he said.

"When you think of all the things that came in, technology, books on the internet, and all of that competition, they were very creative. It's wonderful." 

The next 50 years at Atlantic News look to be just as eventful as the last, but whatever happens, the store's current owners won't be the ones to see it through. 

After 25 years, they're planning to move closer to family in Australia, and looking to sell the shop to someone willing to carry its legacy forward. 

"What we're hoping new owners will choose is that they want to continue the ethos of this," she said. "We're not just a magazine store."