Last month SaltWire Network, which owns 23 newspapers out East, including the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, filed for bankruptcy.
That’s 23 cities and towns in Eastern Canada that will no longer get the news and community information from mainstream newspapers, delivered by hardworking, honest journalists.
People in those places will now get their steady diet of vital information from social media sources that cleverly mix half-truths with juicy gossip and undocumented hearsay. The bad guys in those communities, no longer fearing their faces will appear on front pages, just got a lot bolder.
I don’t want to say I told you so but on Jan. 21, 2021, in the midst of the pandemic, I wrote: “This Column and This Newspaper — Now You See Us, Now You …”
Please, humour me. At this moment you’re holding up your local newspaper about to read this column. Now put the paper down but raise your hands to where they were a moment ago. What do you see? The other side of the room, right? Oh yeah, you’re going to miss us when we’re gone.
In 2008, only one newspaper ceased publication in Ontario. By 2018, 68 daily and community newspapers had closed up shop. All told, in the past 12 years more than 245 local newspapers have ceased to exist in this province alone.
As digital media giants like Google and Facebook continue to gut the advertising revenues of newspapers while at the same time ripping off our content with no compensation, COVID-19 may yet be the pallbearer that drops the lid on the coffin of print media. In this unfolding crime — a rape of resources and the theft of intellectual property — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is eagerly watching to see how long we can last.
Not bad enough that Trudeau promised to help Canadian print media 10 months ago and has done nothing, a recent morning’s Toronto Star revealed the feds have spent $15.8 million in advertising with Google and Facebook in 2018-19.
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Once a big bundle of news that barely fit into its plastic sleeve, that day’s skinny Toronto Star totalled 32 pages. It’s much larger on weekends due to 10 or more pages of obituaries.
Please note the bylines attached to the stories in the newspaper you’re now holding. These are the journalists, always on call, who do the slogging and the digging of important events happening in your neighbourhood so you and I don’t have to. About 99 per cent of us are too lazy to attend city council meetings to learn what’s going on in our communities and thanks to reporters, we don’t have to.
How much do you think these enthusiastic messengers of community news earn? The names that are attached to stories about high school sports, curbside library operations, fires, crimes and entrepreneurs — they make about $38,000 a year.
If you’re a local journalist trying to support a family with two kids as taxes and the cost of heat, hydro and groceries consistently rise, your spouse better be making twice as much as you.
Why do they do it? I’ve asked a lot of them and the simple honest answer is — they love their job, they love writing about their towns, they never tire of trying to make the neighbourhoods better. And unlike questionable social media outlets or right-wing propaganda networks, if these reporters mess with the truth they get fired.
If papers start closing down in Niagara do you really think the Star or the Globe or the Hamilton Spectator is going to send reporters and photographers to your town to cover your niece’s soccer game or feature that guy who repairs bikes and gives them to needy kids?
Who then fills the news vacuum when local papers die? Well, if you have a mouth and a microphone you can be an online media source. Even those with good intentions do not have the resources, the experience or the credibility to cover local crimes, house fires, charities, fundraisers and school boards.
The United States has lost 1,800 newspapers since 2004 creating “news deserts” in which readers have no place to get their news except from online outlets, which are crawling with conspiracy theories.
Some online media sources have entirely evil agendas. Your Ward News in Toronto portrays Jews as pigs, glorifies Hitler and frequently uses the “n-word.” Now hugely popular in America and spilling over into Canada, QAnon helped fuel and orchestrate the 2022 domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Surveys both in the U.S. and the U.K. have shown when the local newspaper goes down, bad things in the community go up … like crime and corruption. In the States, media scholar Clay Shirky calls it “an explosion of endemic corruption as more newspapers die.”
Ten years ago after 11 newspapers in the suburbs surrounding Los Angeles closed down, overnight the politicians of Bell City became porkers gorging at the public trough. Everything went up at once — the salaries of city officials, voter fraud to keep them in office and taxes to pay for their scandalous behaviour. By the time the L.A. Times and the law caught up to the crooks, the town administrator, Robert Rizzo, was sentenced to 12 years in prison and ordered to pay $9 million back to the city while his second-in-command, Angela Spaccia got 11 years and an order to pay back $8 million.
Originally hired at a salary of $70,000, Rizzo lavishly compensated his councillors so they, in turn, would not question his annual compensation package that had swelled to $1.5 million or his million-dollar mansion at Huntington Beach or his stable of thoroughbred race horses which included a gelding named Depenserdel’argent, French for “Spend Money.”
All this incredible corruption in a small, impoverished town like Bell City would have been ruthlessly opposed by the local newspaper … had there been one. I’m not saying this could happen in Niagara but as long as we have a bunch of healthy local papers … I’m absolutely sure it won’t. Those contemplating breaking the rules or the law fear the tough, independent scrutiny of your fearless band of local reporters.
This newspaper is the best friend a caring and community-minded citizen of Niagara can have. So please, respect reporters who are keeping your communities honestly informed, buy a subscription for you or a friend and put your advertising dollars where they do the most good, here at home in Niagara.
Ironically, on Sept. 14, 2023, I wrote a column titled “The End is Near! And Nobody is Taking it Seriously but Me.” That column, about the slow slide of our world into hell, never made it to paper print. Days before, Metroland filed for bankruptcy, closing down 70 of its print edition weeklies and laying off 605 employees. Included in the collapse were seven here in Niagara which ceased publishing on paper.
That column and all my columns since can be read online at niagarathisweek.com. The Niagara region is a much more dangerous place without those newspapers being delivered.
Surprisingly, there are still three dailies publishing in print in Niagara: the St. Catharines Standard, the Niagara Falls Review and the Welland Tribune. Are you helping keep them alive and relatively well? You should.
