Small Town Newspaper Survives
last minute rescue by new ownership.
Reading (preferable) or watching news first thing every morning with my first coffee has been a life long habit. My first husband was a cameraman for CTV at the Ottawa affiliate so our life was steeped in news—as it happened! I know it’s better to start the day with meditation or a dawn walk and I have also done those things—but they are efforts and checking headlines is my go-to default! As a kid I read the back of boxes—we didn’t often eat (expensive) cereal so the oatmeal bag had to suffice. Reading was bliss. Knowing was important.
Our weekly rural newspaper has just survived its planned demise. The publisher and owner is my age, in fact we went to high school together, and he wants to retire. Or rather, his health wants him to retire. He reluctantly put the paper up for sale but who in their right mind wants to take over a small town weekly when advertising revenue is going to social media and the tiny reporting staff is aging into their government pension cheques. The Eganville Leader is over a century old, has won countless Ontario Community Newspaper Awards for excellence and is a cherished part of the lives of over 6000 subscribers in a town of 1300. People move away but keep their subscription—mailed to them via second class post. For the past few years it can be read online—a habit that is more difficult for older folk—but older folk are now people like me—in my early seventies, reading the paper on my laptop or phone in sunny Spain. Even if I wasn’t their columnist, I’d be reading it for news from home.
I’m also old enough to have lived through internationally turbulent times before the Orange One inhabited the White House. Some of my earliest ‘news’ memories are of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, of the assassination of JFK, of my parents stories of growing up in Nazi occupied Holland. In my teen years there was the Vietnam War, the deaths of JFK, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Kent State, Woodstock, the Summer of Love, all distant events that shaped my world view while growing up in the pastoral peace of an Ottawa Valley farm. We subscribed to the farm papers—The Family Herald and the Country Guide and I avidly read agricultural news and opinion. I read the pamphlets that came with the dewormer and the teat dip. I read the veterinarian manual which stood me in good stead when I became a sheep farmer and dealt with milk fever and parasites and twisted uteruses. At our one room school house I read the encyclopedias from A to Z. Books opened the world to me and there was no joy greater than something new to read!
There’s plenty to read these days. The Epstein revelations grow daily. Yesterday the Duke of York spent the day in prison, so to speak. Trump. Trump. Trump. What I detest most is that news stories come and go from media prominence—it’s all headlines until something newer replaces it. I remember when the first news ‘pool’ was set up for Ottawa journalists covering a major event. It meant that stories were filed and filtered through fewer eyes—and that has become the norm as media is amalgamated. Radio, tv, the newspapers all owned by the same corporate source. Torstar. Metroland. Bell. Journalists are fed the same press releases, the same POV and expected to regurgitate it. The days of chatting unofficially with an official are over. Unofficial knowledge was an important background component in shaping stories—even if it was off the record. Reporters knew things that they weren’t necessarily in a position to reveal—but it shaped how they went after the stories they would eventually file. Woodward and Bernstein? Stevie Cameron? Charlie Greenwell? Familiar names in the heyday of investigative journalism when reporters scribbled voice overs on steno pads as their cameraman raced back to the newsroom with film or video for the evening newscast.
In the Ottawa Valley, the local news is safe for now—new ownership (under a bigger corporate banner) but under the familiar guiding hand of the same experienced publisher. We’ll have to see how that evolves!