I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY
TWO SMALL ALBERTA WEEKLIES THE LATEST MEDIA CASUALTIES, AND LOSING THE LOCAL RAG LEAVES A BIG HOLE IN SMALL COMMUNITIES
On March 11, 2009 the Town and Country Examiner (in Morinville, north of Edmonton) and the 46-year-old Jasper Booster, closed. Unlike Nanton (whose news office closed but the paper continues to print) the Examiner and the Booster ceased operations altogether. Like Nanton, however, Craig Martin, executive vice-president operations Western Canada for Sun Media similarly claimed their, "economic model in today's challenging environment no longer made business sense." This should come as worrisome for any Sun Media newspaper - even, like Nanton, if it IS 100-years-old.
Below are excerpts from Jan Buterman's article in Edmonton's Vue magazine. I'm partial to the last one. Enjoy:
"The blogosphere is thick with pixels either lamenting or celebrating the death of traditional news media ... Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found the common people blogging the news in the places I haunt: rural towns, villages and hamlets north of the city of Edmonton. How can these communities overcome pressures that threaten to take away their voices, their identity, and possibly their very existence? "
"The loss of a community paper is particularly tragic when it is the only source of local news in the community. If we want to know what’s going on provincially or federally, we have a multitude of print, audio and video sources to enlighten us on the issues of the day, but the issues important to the towns and villages in rural Alberta are not going to be covered by the larger media outlets unless the story has a larger appeal,” [author and former reporter, Stephen] Dafoe writes."
"Nearly a third of the province’s weeklies ... are also owned by Sun Media/Quebecor. Great West, which runs Edmonton’s See Magazine, owns many others, leaving only a handful of truly independently owned papers covering their respective communities, a level of concentration which becomes more troubling as these corporations look at ways to cut back to weather the recession."
"Freedom from national corporate ownership could be another nail in the coffin of sustainable rural communities, or it could be the opportunity to create something new, something local, the freedom to take back the chronicle of the community’s life for the community itself."
To read the article in its entirety, please visit:
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