The Post opens up
Readers share feelings about local daily newspaper
When Omar Tag El-Din left Egypt to attend university in Cape Breton, it was a big cultural shock.
After all, he’d gone from Cairo, a city where the downtown population tops 30 million people on a business day, to the Cape Breton Regional Municipality where less than 95,000 people make their home.
Now, five years later, he’s come to appreciate the slower pace and more relaxed lifestyle where the morning commute takes less than 15 minutes and he can pull into the local coffee shop before going to his job as the program lead for Atlantic immigration pilot project at the Cape Breton Partnership.
He’s also developed a stronger connection with this newspaper, so he was more than happy to share his thoughts with the Cape Breton Post as its new owners, Saltwire Network, hosted a public reception at the Holiday Inn in Sydney on Thursday night to launch the Open Up Project.
“Part of my job is to keep track of all the immigration-related news, demographics, tends, statistics — any news that’s related to immigration, I need to stay on top of it, so this is my relationship with newspapers because I need to get the community-based, fact-checked information,” said El-Din, who was one of about 150 people who came to enjoy some free food, drinks and music while expressing what they like and don’t like about their local daily in an age when people get their news from myriad sources.
El-Din, who knows a thing or to about changes, said while socialmedia is great for lots of things, it’s not always the best source for reliable information — and that makes newspapers as important as ever.
“Changing culture is always very difficult. So in terms of like to switch the whole public opinion on newspapers — I know you have your hard-core fans but I feel like there’s a downward trend — maybe brand it in a way where people don’t look at as a newspaper, people look at it as fact-checked, unbiased, direct information in your hands. We do all the fact-checking for you, we get all the unbiased information for you, we make sure we have people who are paid to do this — not someone sitting behind the laptop just hammering down and posting a story, just slamming opinion and then people see it and go ‘Oh, yeah. OK. I believe that.’”
Shelley Bennett Trifos has been reading the Cape Breton Post for her entire life and still has it delivered to her door every morning and she reads it throughout the day, starting with the obits, then the front page before flipping through it and scanning for anything of interest. She said while the Post offers a good crosssection of news, she’d like to see more local content — particularly stories about some of the great things that are taking place in Cape Breton.
“There’s a lot of bad news. Our world is changing and some of it’s not for the better, but it would be really good to see more celebration, more good news, more coverage of local events that are positive — celebrating our arts, our culture, our community, our people. Our island,” said the lifelong Sydney resident. “We have wonderful festivals here, wonderful events. Lots of things happening with regards to arts and culture. I’d like to see more of it.”
Mark Lever, president and CEO of the Saltwire Network, which purchased the Cape Breton Post and 27 other publications and web brands across Atlantic Canada in April, said he wanted to hear from people in Cape Breton because he believes the Post will play an important role in the future of the community.
“What I heard everywhere today is that the brand of the Cape Breton Post is important to people whether they’re 25, 35 or 85, and this community is not going to be better without it. So we’ve got to do some things to make sure that we’re listening to their needs because their needs are changing as their need for information and their ability to get information from multiple sources is changing.
“We want our readers t get their news from us and information that’s vital to their community from us on whatever platform that suits them.”
Cape Breton Post managing editor Carl Fleming said she appreciated all of the comments he heard from readers Thursday night.
“It‘s always great to get feedback from our readers — we get every day in the office, but to get it in this environment is really special. People feel engaged with the Post. There’s things they like, things they want to see more of — more listings for arts and entertainment, more local news. Somebody tonight told me more international news — they like Gwynne Dyer. So all kinds of different feedback and we’ll take it all back to drawing board and see what we can do to make the paper even better.”