No News is Bad News

This is the full-version content of a miniature (4.5x3") newspaper, The Nanton News Experiment, which debuted yesterday in Nanton, AB. 

Nanton, a town of 2,600 south of Calgary whose tagline is: Where History Lives, bid farewell to its downtown news office on April 6 this year. Staff of the hundred-year-old newspaper will now compile their newspaper from home offices, sparing the Sun Media newspaper chain the expense of upkeep on a historic building.

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DEAR READER,

You hold in your hands right now (OK maybe just hand) history.

This is not your average newspaper. Not at all. For one, it is only one-sixteenth the size. And two, it exudes enormous optimism during a time when the small-town newspaper – what you might familiarly call “the paper” – is being scaled back and closed altogether in towns just like Nanton all across Alberta. This tiny paper you are perhaps straining to read is likewise straining to be read. It’s trying to grow.

Right now as I write this at exactly 7:15 p.m. April 24, 2009 there is something happening in Lloydminster that should be of relative concern to Nanton-folk.

The Lloydminster Booster, a Sun Media-owned tri-weekly newspaper employing more than 40 workers is hosting a party. The party is an old fashioned drinkin’ send-off for the 17 workers laid-off since January this year. It will be hosted beside the Booster’s mammoth blue 1960s press, which, as of this moment is now forcedly retired, too. The Booster will be pressed 240 clicks away in Edmonton because it makes better business sense (read cents) to have 15,000 copies of the “local” newspaper trucked in thrice-weekly. We will rejoin this party in a moment – first, however, a word on history.

I said earlier you are holding history in your hand. I understand this might sound a little overblown. Nanton, after all, already has a newspaper: the proudly-Sun-Media-owned Nanton News. And it is more than a whole century old. Now that is ‘history’. Surely some gimmicky playing card-sized chapterette does not deserve the distinction of ‘history.’

Look – it can’t even fit a paragraph on its page! It’s hardly any kind of newspaper at all!

I concluded that history is more than just sustaining the past. It implies sustaining the past, too, yes – the physical, even the metaphysical, etc – but the ephemeral ideal in beginning a quality newspaper is as historic as the downtown brick building where that paper exists. Like most workplaces the newsroom is a collaborative atmosphere; one of sharing and purpose. When that building closes, as the Nanton News office did April 6, it takes with it that sense of purpose. Maybe not right away, but it does.

Lately I’ve been giving this a lot of thought.

I badly wanted to see the Nanton News office stay open. I wanted to see something more profound than human-less economics trump the “conditions currently prevailing in both the local and global economies,” as Craig Martin, Sun Media Executive Vice-President Operations, Western Canada cited. I wanted to see something momentous happen in Nanton, a town whose Lancaster bomber and welcome sign tagline happily exclaim: Right here! Look! This is where history lives!

Luckily for you and I, dear reader, history does not only mean staving off death. History needs to be made.

The Nanton News Experiment is just that. It is an experiment to see if the perfect newspaper can exist in Nanton. Who I am is a 24-year-old writer with a stupid, almost cosmological faith in the newspaper. I have no money – and I’m not asking for any. I just want that canopied downtown building with the cream-coloured sign that once read Nanton News to re-open. If it means I have to start my own tiny newspaper and buy the building some day, well, OK.

My plan is this:

Pending feedback, I want this little newspaper to grow weekly, monthly, from the four-inch black-and-white paper you’re holding to a colour version, then an 8.5x11 layout, then real newsprint, then Nanton-willing, a full newspaper – innovative, enlightening, humorous, and locally shared with no sloganeering, no Toronto-based corporate b.s., and best of all, the downtown news office not only re-opened but refurbished with a great big garden in front.

The symbolism, I hope, is obvious. The petunias you most likely plucked this paper off of were grown in an Alberta greenhouse from seed. It’s my peace offering to local shop owners for letting me promote this idea in their business. As a reward, the petunias can be planted in two week’s time. It’s a reminder for everyone who comes in contact with this little paper, myself included, that the most beautiful gardens, the biggest trees and the best ideas start out as seed.

If you’ve read this paper, I thank you. There is no cost, no donation tin and no advertising department to contact. The finest form of payment you could give me is to pass this miniature newspaper on to someone else or simply relay the gist of it. The greatest compliment you can give me is feedback. If you’ve taken the time to read this essay in its entirety, please take five minutes over the next week to say how you feel about it. In fact, if you care to see another issue (or even if you don’t) I need to hear from you.

There are two ways.

Email me at: nantonnewsx@live.ca

Or, write on this very newspaper (pages A14,  A15)  and return it from whence you picked it up. 

Oh, I almost forgot – the party in Lloydminster.

It’s after midnight now the press, having run its last run now quietly sits in the mercury lights. Employees and former employees have gone home. Some of the Booster’s lay-offees have young families and a few were mere months away from a coveted full-pension. One just bought a new house. There’s some resentment towards Sun Media but mostly everyone understands that for a company that laid-off 600 workers in 2009 alone, it’s business as usual. No doubt one or two jokes floated about the irony of Quebecor World (owner of Sun Media) currently in a bidding match with others like Celine Dion to buy the Montreal Canadiens hockey team in the midst of a crippling recession. 

Sun Media’s bloodletting is understandable and there’s nothing inherently wrong with being cost-conscious. (Hence my tiny newspaper being all I could afford.) But when a company grows so large, so impersonal and uninventive as to downsize without trying any alternative, innovative tactics to boost revenue, this is when to worry. The closure of the Nanton News office is the first step towards the newspaper’s  obsolescence – not just in Nanton but everywhere. 

Help me make history where history lives.