"Brilliant - and surprisingly funny.… Ego and Ink is a
Canadian adventure story, a business case study, and a thriller
peopled with familiar bylines.… It's also a devastating look at the
egos that thrive in the newspaper business. … It doesn't take many
pages before even the casual reader is intrigued by the nasty,
vicious, no-holds-barred fight.… [Cobb] is unsparing - but fair -
in his characterization. This is an amazingly compelling
book."
-Catherine Ford, Calgary Herald
"Ego and Ink covers virtually all of the high and low
points of the five-year battle between the two national
nmewspapers, and then some.… The dispassionate reporting is often
just what is needed considering how outrageously colourful the
leading characters are.… Chris Cobb deserves our thanks."
-John Fraser, Literary review of Canada
"Chatty, insider accounts dovetailed with hard-nosed business
reporting."
-Chronicle-Herald (Halifax)
"The genesis of Canada's rightist national newspaper is every bit
as back-room and old-boys' club as you believed it to be.… Chris
Cobb's broadsheet bio, Ego and Ink, gets behind the scenes
to deliver a gripping Post - mortem. It has all the
conspiring, double-dealing, secret meetings and gossiping a
newshound can handle.… But beyond simply prurient interest, one of
the delightful aspects of Cobb's writing is his ability to satirize
the profession by exposing newsroom foibles in all their
glory."
-Press Gallery website
"This is a fast, breezy read. Chris Cobb… knows the pressures of
daily journalism, the forces acting on newspapers and more
important, perhaps, who journalists are and how they think.… And in
this story, from Conrad Black to the late Israel (Izzy) Asper, the
egos are writ large.… [Cobb's] reflections on the effects the
National Post had on newspaper people and what they report
on, are the best kind of reporting."
-Nicholas Hirst, Winnipeg Free Press
"A dishy, fast-paced account of the feud that fired up Canadian
journalism.… The narrative shines when Cobb deals with the
bloody-minded culture of newsrooms and their fraught relationships
with the ego-driven characters who pay their salaries. His portrait
of Richard Addis, the editor brought in from Fleet Street to save
The Globe from itself is deliciously bitchy."
-John Lorinc, Report on Business
"Chris Cobb's gossipy Ego and Ink - based on interviews
with dozens of players - provides a compelling post-fight wrap-up
of the action, packed with replays of all the choice eye gouges,
hair pulls, and vicious kicks to the crotch.… [It] beautifully
captures the flavour of the newspaper war and the personalities of
its players, from the press barons to the cub reporters.… Ego
and Ink is required reading for serious students of Canadian
journalism."
-Quill & Quire
"A sensational… tell-all.… It's the story of Conrad Black's
ambition to create the National Post and the ripple
effects it caused across the country's mediascape. The book, filled
with enough characters to people a Hanna Barbera theme park, comes
out at the end of the month, but already the scramble is on in
newsrooms for the precious few advance copies."
-Shinan Govani, National Post
"It's the Darwinian struggle of the two 'national' papers, the
Globe versus the Post, that Cobb has sagely
adopted as his principle narrative.… His most entertaining stuff is
full of chatterbox details."
-Toronto Star
"Love it or loathe it, when the National Post appeared in
1998 it provoked dramatic power struggles that transformed the
Canadian media landscape, as veteran journalist Chris Cobb recounts
in his aptly titled Ego and Ink.… Cobb does an excellent
job of covering the private and public battles fought within and
between the Post, its parent Southam chain, and rivals the
Globe and Mail, Torstar Corporation, and Sun Media. Using
extensive interviews with key characters to tell the tale… he
leaves the editorializing to them and focuses on facts and plot.…
Cobb succeeds at revealing the often larger-than-life characters
behind the headlines."
-Georgia Straight
"There was once-in-a-lifetime magic to [the National
Post's] creation. Cobb turns a sympathetic and sophisticated
ear to the adventure.… From cover to cover, the story is reported
well and fairly.… Media books typically interest only the media,
but Cobb has found drama in the rivalry and renaissance of national
newspapers.… Ego and Ink is a strong narrative, worth
reading."
-Kirk LaPointe, Vancouver Sun
"A costly, irrational, perfectly wonderful newspaper war. And Black
would finally serve himself up as a most spectacular desert
course.…Cobb has interviewed the major combatants at length. His
story is carried along on generous swaths of direct quotation,
enough that the voices of the main editors and publishers become
familiar. They are quite a bunch."
-John Geddes, Ottawa Citizen