Two local weeklies to cease publication
Westmount Examiner, West Island Chronicle no longer viable: owner
The West Island Chronicle and the Westmount Examiner are closing. The last day of publication for both English-language weeklies is Oct. 21. Three people will lose their jobs.
“After comprehensive analysis of the market, we came to the conclusion the two papers were no longer financially viable,” TC Transcontinental vice-president of communications Jennifer McCaughey said Thursday. “Local weeklies have experienced a steady erosion of advertising revenue. Our analysis showed that the markets (for the two weeklies) were being well served by other news sources.”
Along with its printing and marketing operations, TC Transcontinental has a publishing branch that includes the ownership of around 175 community newspapers across the country, including The West Island Chronicle and the Westmount Examiner. (TC Transcontinental prints the Montreal Gazette.)
Wayne Larsen was not surprised when he heard the news.
Larsen was editor at the Westmount Examiner from 2000 to 2012. He wrote his master's thesis on the decline of the paper and is now a teacher with the journalism department at Concordia University.
“For a community newspaper to survive, you have to love the community, be plugged in,” Larsen said. “Transcontinental had one full-time reporter covering both Westmount and the West Island. That's an impossible task to do well. People lose interest and stop reading. Advertisers stop buying ads.”
Community newspapers have launched the career of many wetbehind-the-ears reporters over the years. Hours are long and the pay is poor, but the learning curve is invaluable.
Montreal Gazette sports columnist Dave Stubbs has no shortage of fond memories of The Chronicle, which first began publishing in 1924. (The Westmount Examiner began publishing in 1935.)
“It was my first newspaper job,” Stubbs said. “I was hired in January 1976 when I was 18 years old. It was called The News and Chronicle back then.”
Stubbs had zero experience in newspapers, but somehow managed to get hired as the paper's sports editor.
“I was thrown into the deep end,” he said. “I did everything — budget, layout, news writing, column writing. The job taught me everything about the business.”
One memory in particular will get Stubbs laughing every time. It was November 1978 and an earlywinter blizzard was blanketing the city, so a photographer was sent out to capture the snowy scene. It had been a long day and night and everyone was feeling a little punchdrunk from fatigue. As a joke, they wrote a caption for the photo which included a naughty reference to the photographer's private parts.
No one thought the joke would get by the printers. It did.
“It's the only issue of the News and Chronicle that ever sold out,” Stubbs said. “When the publisher saw it the next morning, we were all fired on the spot. But he hired us all back before noon.”
To this day, Stubbs keeps the first feature story he wrote for the News and Chronicle tucked in a pneumatic tube on a shelf in his office. (The story was about the late George Gate, then aquatics director of the Pointe-Claire Swim Club. The International Swimming Hall of Fame coach passed away in 2014 at age 89.)
“I was saddened to see that (The Chronicle) was closing,” Stubbs said. “But I wasn't surprised. It had become a small paper shoved inside a Publisac (owned by TC Transcontinental). The consumption of news is so different today. There are more platforms than at a diving meet.”
Larsen said the appeal of community newspapers is the smallnews story.
“That new stop sign at the end of the street is important to readers who live on that street,” he said. “I interned at the Westmount Examiner when I was in high school. John Sancton was the publisher and editor at the time. He called those little stories ‘broken arms' because if you wrote a short brief about a little boy down the street who fell and broke his arm, people would read it. Those small stories build to become a mosaic, the voice for the neighbourhood.”
TC Transcontinental launched Rendezvous, an entertainment and community life monthly, in September and will launch Ambience, a home/design monthly in December. The publications will be distributed in Côte-StLuc, Hampstead, Montreal West, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and Westmount.
For a community newspaper to survive, you have to love the community, be plugged in. WAYNE LARSEN