It’s weird to write an ending when, from your own perspective, not much is changing. Tomorrow, I will come to work in the same building, sit in the same chair and do roughly the same job I have been doing for the past several years. The words I pound together will show up in a different place, sure, but they’ll be the same words they would have been had this particular publication stayed alive. So from my perspective, the ending is not really an ending but a shift, a slight change in location but roughly the same idea.
Let’s not dwell on the path that lead us to this point, but instead talk about what this means overall. The News Review is not the only newspaper which will cease publication this year. It’s not exclusive to publications large or small, Postmedia is in the midst of cutting its staff, for example. It’s increasingly difficult to figure out how to face the overwhelming influence of online information and stay profitable, and that’s a problem. It’s not merely a problem for the people who work here, but for the people in a community, one served by a newspaper, and one which needs a reliable source of information about what is going on in their town.
I grew up in a town that lost its paper. The Watson Witness went out of business when I was a child. In a community of under a thousand people, it’s only natural that there were not a huge number of events to witness, but it was an important link in the chain to get information out to people. Before it closed, every little thing our school did was covered extensively, for example, and anything important that happened – and several things that weren’t important that happened – were a big part of every week’s coverage.
Without a witness, Watson didn’t have the same level of information shared with people in the town. Post-closure, it became extremely rare to see anyone actually show up at the school to see what we were up to, the majority of events in the town went unreported on, and it was increasingly difficult to get a sense of what was going on. The immense archive of the Witness, which chronicled the history of Watson for 100 years, has an abrupt endpoint, and it’s more difficult to get a sense of the town’s life now that the Witness itself has disappeared. The rumors and misinformation of coffee row was a poor substitute.
Take this year’s municipal election. In Yorkton This Week there were questions posed to the multitude of candidates for council and for mayor. It was not the only way to get an impression of the candidates and what they stood for, but it was an important link in the chain. We, as citizens of the city, need a way to figure out who to vote for, and just having every candidate answer a question is a valuable way to sort out who we can support. That’s something a local newspaper can give you. In Watson, because there’s not a local paper, there’s not a good way to do the same job. As a result, there’s not the same amount of coverage for their municipal election, less of a clear indication about who their two mayoral candidates are, less coverage altogether. Unless something big happens, you’re not going to get much clue as to what Watson is experiencing at any given moment. It’s harder for a Watson resident to select who to vote for than it would have been back in the old days, it’s harder for a resident to know what’s going on in their community as well.
There is social media, sure, but social media is not exactly the bastion of accurate information. Going by social media, Yorkton has had about 100 new theatres, big businesses setting up shop in what is effectively a lake, and every single dog in the city has been kidnapped. While social media has definitely become a big part of our lives, it’s also clear that when anyone can say anything you find out that a lot of what people say has no basis in reality. Sources that aren’t local can’t respond to local needs. For example, construction delays on local roads are incredibly important to the people who use those roads, but aren’t going to be a big deal to outsiders who don’t. The local paper needs to stay local, to report on what matters to local people.
Let’s take this as an opportunity to keep local news alive. The News Review might be leaving, but next week what I write is going to be found in Yorkton This Week and we need to support it so we still have a source to learn what is happening in our community. Those of us behind the desk need to do what we can to keep our paper worth reading, finding relevant local news and events to keep people interested. We need each other so we know what people want to see and what’s happening that we might not know about – though naturally we are constantly trying to keep on top of what’s happening around the city, it’s valuable to have input from readers. This is a collaboration, we can’t keep going without each other.
