Forty years?!? - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

This week, at The Citizen, we mark the 40th anniversary of the first issue of the paper. Like an iceberg, so much work and planning had gone into the newspaper you’re now reading before its first issue, but, it was in October of 1985 - the same month and year my wife was born - happy birthday Jess! - that The Citizen first made it to readers.

 

The stories are now legendary, at least around this office and with community members who are old enough to remember them. Founder Keith Roulston teamed up with dynamo community fundraisers - most notably Sheila Richards - to create a newspaper that would serve not just one, but two towns. It’s normal now to have a regional newspaper, but they were unheard of back then. 

 

Richards, Roulston and the team then went out and sold shares to people who wanted a newspaper back in their community. This, again, was rare then, but now, between Patreon and crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter that connect fans directly with creators they want to support, this would be no big deal. (The story goes that it was so unique that it caught the attention of a bigger newspaper and was then syndicated to others in Toronto and beyond - the bad news was that Richards and co. had sold so many shares that it exceeded a certain threshold, meaning that the company would then have to be listed on the stock exchange and Richards have to give some money back, which would have stung.)

 

Now, all these years later, the landscape of the media world has changed drastically, the community is always evolving, and yet The Citizen remains steadfast in its commitment to its readers (in an ever-growing readership area that now really takes in the northern half of the county and not just a defined coverage area).

 

This Thanksgiving weekend marked my 19th year of working with The Citizen. Next year it will be 20 years. Hard to imagine.
I still remember having a very nervous interview with Roulston and Bonnie Gropp, the editor at the time. In the end, I got the job (obviously) and, after a few short years, I was serving as the editor of The Citizen, learning on the job as I inherited a new reporter, Denny Scott, who was also learning on the job (he had worked for the Goderich paper for a bit). We very much grew into the roles at the same time, making decisions together in those early days.

 

There have since been some great milestones to being part of The Citizen. Investigating the shooting at the Hullett Wildlife Area (listening to a police scanner through the night for tips), the extensive, intensive coverage of the 2017 International Plowing Match and the lead-up to it we were able to provide, all the while winning awards along the way. I still remember Denny busting into what was then the Queens Bakery as I interviewed Mark Royall, a former pastor here, to tell me that we had built upon our second-best-newspaper-in-Canada win the previous year with a gold.

 

The last two or three years have been very special for me. As I’ve alluded to in recent columns, my daughter (and soon enough my son) has been an active participant in events throughout the community that I’ve now been covering for the better part of two decades. She’s out there as part of Brussels skating showcases, playing Brussels soccer, having her art on the walls of the Blyth Festival Art Gallery and now taking part in events like the Terry Fox Run and Christmas concert at her school. Watching kids from 19 years ago now have their own families, it shows me just how quick time goes and how precious it is.

 

And that’s all thanks to The Citizen.