The Dalai Lama's reign as guest editor of Vancouver Sun a success

Canwest News Service

An edition of The Vancouver Sun guest-edited by the Dalai Lama and the paper’s coverage leading up to the Vancouver Peace Summit helped boost awareness of the summit in Vancouver, the centre’s founding director said Friday.

The Saturday edition appeared the day the Dalai Lama arrived in Vancouver for last month’s three-day peace summit, which featured Nobel winners and international leaders in education, arts, business, politics and social transformation. The summit focused on peace, education and women, and peace-building.

Victor Chan, who co-founded the centre with the Dalai Lama, said the special edition of The Sun “is something that is very much tied together with the peace summit as a whole.”

The edition, the paper’s fourth edition that was guest-edited, was themed “Educating the Heart” and focused on permeating kindness, compassion and peacefulness in society.

Stories showed the link between poverty, violence and suppression and showed readers how to bring about positive changes.

The edition also raised $4,200 for the centre, generated from 10 per cent of newsstand sales.
“It will certainly be used to sustain the operation of the Dalai Lama Centre,” helping cover the cost of salaries, overhead, the office and programming, Chan said.

Sun Editor-in-chief Patricia Graham said the public’s praise for the edition will help change the newspaper.

“Working on this edition was among the most positive experiences I’ve had as an editor: The participants at the Peace Summit and We Day were inspiring, their stories were fascinating and the edition gave us a chance to focus on the positive,” Graham said. “We had to put up with smirks and jabs from journalists at other organizations, but we got plenty of kudos from readers,” she said. “It’s the last that matters to me and I intend to incorporate that positive feedback into how we do our work in future.”