| Nov 29, 2017


On Monday afternoon, I heard that the Frontenac Gazette/Kingston Heritage had shut down. Soon after, I found out that the entire newspaper landscape in Ontario has been dealt a blow. The two major players in the market had agreed to cease competing with each other in a bid to make both companies profitable, or at least to cut some losses.

I have mixed feelings about losing the Gazette.

On one positive side we have been battling it out with the Gazette for ads and stories for as long as I have been working at the News, both as an employee and an owner, so it’s kind of nice not to have to worry about what they are getting up to. And in business terms we are going to jump on the opportunity to consolidate our standing in the communities we serve with readers and advertisers.

On the negative side I have enjoyed the camaraderie from covering events and meetings with Gazette reporters over the years, and will miss that. Every time their reporters got to a story that we missed, it was motivation for us to do better. The community has been well served by competition and differing takes on local issues.

There have been a number of good, solid reporters at the Gazette, and losing those voices will not help us all as we strive to build and maintain our communities.

I have also been thinking a bit about the years when there was a real battle for survival between us, before the Gazette became swallowed up and eventually spit out by the Ontario corporate news establishment.

When Northern Frontenac Community Services (which is now Rural Frontenac Community Services) sold the Frontenac News to David Brison in June of 2001, there was another bidder.

It was the Cembal family, publishers of the South Frontenac Gazette.

As soon as the Cembals found out the News was not being sold to to them, they dropped the South from the Frontenac Gazette masthead and expanded their circulation to Central Frontenac. A newspaper war in Frontenac County carried on for several years. In 2002, the Frontenac News expanded our distribution, adding Harrowsmith and Sydenham. We started covering South Frontenac Council each week, with Wilma Kenny coming on as a reporter. We also hired one of the Gazette’s ad salesmen that year, which made the competition pretty heated. The Gazette responded by expanding into North Frontenac for a time.

When the Heritage/Gazette was purchased by Performance Printing/EMC of Smiths Falls inn 2009, all of that changed, and when Metroland then bought Performance Printing in 2011, the competition basically fizzled.

For the last few years, the battleground has been in the City of Kingston between the Kingston Heritage and Kingston This Week. That battle was settled on Monday. Post Media, owners of the Whig Standard and Kingston This Week, own Kingston.

All of this represents an opportunity, a sense of obligation for us at the Frontenac News, and we are already taking measures in response to the vacuum that has been created. We are also very aware, that we are not immune to the pressures that are at play in the larger media market. We face the same crunch as the larger papers, and face the same struggles that all print publications face as revenue is harder and harder to come by. We will be addressing that issue with our readers in the coming weeks as we renew out commitment to provide a free paper via Canada Post to our readers and to make it relevant. All of our content is locally based and is devoted to local issues and we cover township and politics. Our mandate, and this goes back to the founding of the paper in 1971, is to be a vehicle that knits the various communities we serve together into one inter-connected region.

Our region is much larger now than it was back then, and this week it is getting larger yet.

We are distributing the paper via Canada Post to Inverary/Sunbury, Battersea, and Perth Road, not just this week but every week going forward. We are seeking volunteer community reporters from those communities to come forward. Anyone who is interested is invited to contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Our goal is, as always, to be a source of information and entertainment, to let people know about the interesting things their neighbours are getting up to, and to foster community engagement.

Oh, and we are in it for the long haul.

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