What happens when a local newspaper dies?
Communities feel the loss in many ways
The phone call came in from an elderly man on the other side of town. He was concerned about a black flag flying on a houseboat near his home. It looked, he thought, like the ISIL flag.
It was my first full-time job as a reporter, and I walked over to investigate. The flag wasn't ISIL, it was a pirate flag, but we chatted before I returned to the newspaper office. The story about the suspected terrorist flag in Wakefield, Que., didn't get written.
Most newspaper reporters start their careers in a similar way, at a small paper, covering the kinds of stories that never make it onto the pages of a national newspaper, but are the lifeblood of towns across the country.
One of the big stories in Wakefield at that time was a road sign on the highway that didn't have the name of the town — Wakefield — on it. Another big story: A loon was stranded in a frozen lake, rescued in an early morning operation featuring one of the municipal councillors. (The loon, alas, didn't make it.)
Across Canada, local newspapers have been dying or fading fast. A report from News Media Canada says publishers are expecting a 40 per cent decline in advertising revenue by the end of 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. That will, of course, lead to more closures.
The losses can be hard to quantify. And the loss to readers — of local news that connects them to their communities.
“Credible news is essential to inform the citizenry of a democracy about developments in government, business and other important matters affecting daily life, such as the environment, health care, education, law and criminal justice,” says the News Media Canada report, The Sustainability of Journalism in Canada.
But there are other tangible impacts of declining local news. A research paper in the Journal of Financial Economics, published in 2018, draws a direct correlation between newspaper closures and increased government costs to taxpayers — as the watchdog function of local media deteriorates. The paper argues “local newspapers hold their governments accountable, keeping municipal borrowing costs low and ultimately saving local taxpayers money.”
I THINK THAT REALITY WILL SETTLE IN FAIRLY QUICKLY.
When the Kamloops Daily News closed in 2014, after 80 years of publication, Bob Dieno, president of the local chamber of commerce, said reading the paper was part of his morning routine, and that people would notice they've lost things local newspaper do beyond printing the news — like the Christmas Cheer Fund or charity runs that would need new organizers.
“I think the community will definitely lose a little bit of touch with itself,” said Dieno. “I think that reality will settle in fairly quickly. The other thing that will sink in hard is the first day or the first week they don't have a newspaper.”
Ryerson University's Local News Research Project found there have been 121 local news launches since 2008, but 300 newspapers, websites and broadcasters have shuttered.
That doesn't account for the thousands of lost jobs that have hit the news industry over the past decade. A House of Commons report on the state of the media estimate the job losses at 16,500 since 2008.
Some of the papers that have closed or scaled back in recent years were institutions:
❚ The Pembroke Daily Observer went to weekly publication in 2018 after 163 years publishing.
❚ The Moose Jaw Times-Herald started publishing in 1889, and closed in 2017.
❚ The Guelph Mercury, which started in 1853, was one of the largest local papers to close. It shut its doors in 2016, citing declining revenue, with just 9,000 home-delivery subscriptions in a city of some 135,000 people.
Cam Guthrie, the mayor of Guelph, said the closure of the paper was “quite a shock” when it happened, although some newer media outlets have cropped up in the intervening years. Before he spoke with the National Post on Tuesday, he'd been doing an interview with a local online media outlet.