Big tech killed, then revived, local paper
Markdale is one of at least 259 Canadian communities to lose news outlet since 2008
When Elaine Smyth came across a stack of newspapers spanning 40 years, they were bound for the trash.
The issues of the Markdale Standard dating back to 1953 were not only old news by definition, but the paper itself had been out of print for two years by the time Smyth rescued them from a moving purge in 2014. They had belonged to a neighbour who moved into a retirement home.
“I took the papers home, put them in chronological order and then thought it might be fun to scan articles and post them to Facebook,” Smyth said.
It was fun, she said. But to her surprise, it quickly evolved beyond a personal project. The people of Markdale — current and former residents alike — flocked to the group, hungry for the memories she posted, and for the community discussion unique to seeing your name or the names of your neighbours and friends in print.
Smyth’s Facebook group is a living memorial to a newspaper lost to an economic plague that has seen hundreds of newspapers in Canada — some
more than 100 years old — closed for good, as well as an ironic manifestation of the way massive social-media companies have tried, and in many ways failed, to fill the void.
Sharp declines in print advertising revenue, driven by the media dominance of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, are the No. 1 reason why newspapers, especially community newspapers such as the Markdale Standard, have closed their doors over the past decade or so, costing many journalists their jobs.
Now, communities are left to try to
use tools offered by those very companies, such as Smyth’s Facebook group, to fill in the gaps.
Only 1,200 people live in Markdale now, in the rural community half an hour south of Owen Sound. Almost 1,000 people are members — not all of them town residents — of Smyth’s group.
“I had no idea,” she said, “once those people started sharing the group and its posts, just how many people were interested and how appreciative they would be that I was doing this.”
But in Markdale, there’s still something missing.
The Standard, which stopped printing in 2012, was an enduring paper that first appeared in 1880.
Although it was always small, it carried some important historic stories throughout the years, including a regular column by Agnes MacPhail, Canada’s first female member of Parliament, who represented the area.
But the real use of the paper, as any resident of the town is quick to confirm, was not delivering hard news. No lofty slogans like “Democracy dies in darkness,” that of the Washington Post, here.
It was where town residents turned to find out who got married, had a baby, or died — so they knew to call one another or send a note. It was where they learned what was happening at town council without having to pore over thick meeting minutes. It was where honours such as the “nurse of the month” at the Markdale hospital were bestowed, and where town residents who broke the law were named — the trusty cycles of celebration and shame that form the foundation of community trust.
Adele Goldsmith, who grew up in Markdale and returned in 1995 after a stint in Toronto, said the town residents have done their best to spread that kind of community information through Facebook, and of course word of mouth.
“But I still really miss having our own little local paper,” she said.
Goldsmith recalled a quote she heard from one of her neighbours: “If you live in the city and you talk about your neighbours it sounds like gossip,” she said.
“If you live in Markdale and you talk about your neighbours, it’s caring.”
The loss of this kind of reporting means more than the collective sadness and nostalgia of community members. Researchers at the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy in the United States named community information “as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets, good schools, and public health.” The Canadian Local News Project, led by Ryerson University’s April Lindgren, is tracking how and where this information is getting lost.
The project’s crowd sourced Local News Map has found 367 news outlets in 259 communities have closed since 2008. Of those, the lion’s share have been community newspapers: 271. Twenty-three of the newspapers were owned by Torstar, the research project found.
By contrast, 55 community newspapers were launched over the same time frame.
A blog post by Lindgren in May on the Local News Research Project site said the pandemic has done even more damage to advertising revenues, once a consistent source of income for community newspapers that could expect a captive audience.
“Facebook and Google have decimated advertising revenues,” Lindgren wrote. “A recent report by Carleton University’s Canadian Media Concentration Research Project, for instance, shows that annual newspaper revenues at the end of 2018 were $2.6 billion lower than a decade earlier.”
There were tangible ways the newspaper changed the community, too.
Goldsmith, who works for the town library, remembers the all-out fundraising effort 20 years ago to build a new library. The chair of the new library committee submitted weekly editorials to the Markdale Standard.
It worked so well in the small community, that hundreds of town members showed up on Easter weekend, with bunny costumes and children’s wagons, to help move the books from the old library to the new.
Lori Ledingham, the Standard’s last editor-reporter-photographer (2000 to 2012), remembers another fundraising campaign for something even more important to the community: a new hospital.
While the ground breaking for the hospital won’t happen until this spring, fundraising was completed while the Markdale Standard was still alive. Ledingham keenly remembers the many articles she ran promoting the effort.
“The campaign — would it have been as successful had the paper been closed? I think maybe not,” she said.
She worries that the next big community project won’t get the same exposure.
Ledingham wasn’t shocked when she found out the Markdale Standard would be closed. There were meetings with the paper’s parent company to come up with a way — any way — to remain financially viable. Among the ideas was sending out the newspaper as a wrap to the weekly flyers, which struck Ledingham as sad, even if it was necessary.
“The thing that saddened me was as the internet began to encroach (it was) not bringing out all these lovely small stories that I’m bringing out,” she said. “Like these kids who are taking their heifers to the Royal Winter Fair and bringing home the blue ribbon.”
It’s not hard news, she knows, and for that reason maybe not everyone would mourn its loss. But still, she thinks it matters. “It’s about intimacy and sharing,” she said. “You know that is not happening at any level of the big newspapers.”