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 Gerrard, 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 Gerrard.

In Halifax today, only Atlantic News remains.

"It is strange to be in a landscape where we are the only ones," said Gerrard. "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."