Do You Care About Community? - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Deb and Shawn recently attended the meeting of the independent owners of Ontario Community Newspapers Association (OCNA). Deb reported that there were fewer newspapers than in the past.

 

It’s a sad commentary on the situation of newspapers in Ontario. Last year I went with Deb to the meeting near Orangeville because, as a long-term publisher, I was being honoured by inclusion in the OCNA Hall of Fame. Even then I saw a huge change.

I once sat on the OCNA board of directors. In those days there were two conventions a year: one in the spring for all of the newspapers, including members of chains, and a fall get-together for independents. I remember sitting at the awards dinner in which the chains brought in editorial staff members who had been nominated for awards. There were hundreds there.

 

Most of the chain newspapers no longer belong to OCNA. They have few staff anymore anyway. Look at the former Signal-Star chain in our area where there are fewer reporters among a half-dozen papers than we have at The Citizen. I remember when we hired Denny Scott, who was the most junior reporter at the Goderich Signal-Star, and they were cutting back to three staffers. Today, the largest town in Huron County has no reporters.

 

Seeing the changes in the community newspaper business makes me feel even older than my age. I have lived through such changes.

 

While a journalism student at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in the summer of 1967, I was employed by A. Y. McLean at the Huron Expositor in Seaforth. That summer, Canada’s Centennial, I got to see the last days of an era when newspapers were owned by the local printing plant. We printed The Expositor two pages at a time on a flat-bed press. It took from Monday to Thursday.

 

One of my jobs was to drive photographs taken and developed by a local professional photographer to the Clinton News-Record where they had a machine that scanned them onto plastic plates that could then be printed on the press in Seaforth.

 

In 1970, after graduation, I was hired to be editor of the News-Record after it had been purchased by Bob Shrier and Howard Aitken of the Signal-Star in Goderich, part of an empire that eventually stretched from Georgian Bay to Grand Bend. They eventually sold to a bigger chain, which sold to an even bigger chain. We went from a whole bunch of small independent publishers, each understanding their importance to their community, to an immense chain that only cared about profit.

When I sat on the OCNA board, that chain  still belonged to the organization. In later years, they stopped joining, saving the expense of all those small papers paying memberships.

 

Of course all the changes weren’t just in newspaper ownership. When I became a publisher in 1971, people still bought their groceries, hardware and clothing in local shops, and merchants still advertised in local newspapers. Since then, larger chains have moved into places like Goderich and Listowel and they seldom advertise in local newspapers. Still, people drive from smaller towns to the chains in larger towns to shop. The magical revolving chain was broken where stores supported newspapers which, in turn, kept the community active by reporting on local activities of the Legion and Lions Clubs. Our communities have broken down as people depend on the internet for their news.

 

I suppose that’s where my age comes in. I’m just not into it. The money that used to go into supporting the salaries of local reporters and advertising sales representatives is now going to internet billionaires in California or even China - people (usually men) who have never even heard of Brussels or Blyth, Ontario.

 

That doesn’t seem to bother younger people who are happy that we have reporters who go to local events that they read about on the internet, but may not subscribe, or read the paper if they do.

 

The Citizen is a rare gem, supported by community owners, who haven’t even been rewarded by financial returns in recent years as Deb has scraped and scrounged to keep the newspaper going under today’s conditions. She’s done such a good job that we have picked up subscribers from nearby communities, making The Citizen not just a Brussels and Blyth newspaper, but a northern Huron paper.

 

Her challenge is to survive day by day and hope younger residents wake up and realize that a newspaper is part of a natural local community that cares what happens locally, and that the alternatives, the internet providers, don’t give a damn about the future of those local communities.

 

You have a chance to matter in a community that matters to you. Do you care?