A MILESTONE FOR THE CITIZEN DURING A YEAR NO ONE WILL EVER FORGET
Roughly a month before I began my tenure as editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen, a senior editor at the paper sent an email with the subject line “The Citizen at 175,” asking how we planned to celebrate an auspicious milestone.
Eager to recognize an institution I had long admired and was now fortunate enough to lead, I began planning. I asked the newsroom for story ideas, started investigating speakers for an event series and plotted a year's worth of community engagement to spread the word about how critical this storied local news organization is to Ottawa — and to set the table for the future.
A few weeks after occupying my new office on Baxter Road, I received a call from Mayor Jim Watson's office, informing me he intended to bestow the key to the city on our organization. It seemed a fitting way for Ottawa to honour the many journalists who have told its stories for so many years.
Then coronavirus found its way to Canada, and life as we knew it changed. A celebration felt wrong amid so much uncertainty, illness and loss.
We turned our efforts to covering COVID-19, bringing the community timely, accurate, critical information, all while working from our homes and trying to keep safe when we were out in public.
It's been a year since I received that first email and I've come to realize that local news — and the institutions that report it — are more important than ever.
We are in the grips of a second wave of this pandemic, and while uncertainty still exists, we are, as Ottawa's Medical Officer of Health Dr. Vera Etches said, “learning to live with COVID, to coexist with COVID.”
Given that, the time feels right for a much smaller, scaled-down celebration of the Citizen's 175th anniversary. We've been providing a sneak peek with weekly features by Bruce Deachman, exploring some of the odder stories from our past and revisiting some of the paper's biggest page one headlines.
This week's Observer carries a story by Andrew Duffy about influential Citizen editor Charles Bowman, as well as some reminiscences from editors past. Online, you'll find a touching video produced by Elizabeth Mavor, who spoke with a number of Citizen journalists, past and present.
It is my profound hope that the Ottawa Citizen has been a source of useful local news, information, insight and, occasionally, comfort through the past 10 months and beyond. I hope it has allowed you to feel connected to your community, even though we remain physically distant.
Whatever lies ahead, the Citizen will be here to report and explain it.
Thanks for reading.