Christmas Editorial

Dec 18, 2019

I guess when you do something for long enough it becomes something of a tradition. And so it is with these end of year messages to readers. I believe this is my 17th. They are written in part to thank our readers, volunteers, staff, and advertisers for all their support over the 50 editions that made up volume 19, and also to wish our readers a Happy Christmas and New Year’s season.

I also like to remind everyone that we take two weeks off over Christmas and New Year’s. I don’t think anyone notices that the paper is missing during Christmas week, but when it does not come out on the first week of January people do start asking me if we have closed up shop for good.

It is indeed a tougher slog for a print-based newspaper at the end of 2019 than it was in January of 2002 when I started working for my friends, David Brison and Jule-Koch Brison, and since they both died just before the final paper of the year, David in 2002 and Jule in 2016, I am thinking of them as I write this. Certainly, it has been and continues to be a struggle to get the paper out ever since Jule died on December 15, 2016, and as she was a devout Christian, her commitment to the Christmas edition each year always gave the paper an extra lift.

There are other challenges facing community newspapers these days of course. Our local advertising base has remained solid over the last five years. Local retailers and municipalities are aware that their customers and constituents appreciate a newspaper that is concerned about the joys, sorrows and occasional controversies of life in their own communities. But our national advertising support has dried up completely, including provincial and federal government advertising, and that has made things more difficult. Not only does this result in a financial hit for us, it also results in an information gap for the public. During the most recent federal election, there were no ads from Elections Canada in our paper, explaining the nuts and bolts of the vote, such as who to call if you don’t receive a voting card, how to find the polling stations, etc. I spend as much time online as anyone, and I did not see that information anywhere. Perhaps it was on social media, or on tv which I don’t watch, but I think there were others who never received that information this time around.

Interestingly enough, the federal government claims to be supportive of the newspaper industry. They have supported subscription-based newspapers through a postal rebate for many years, but not the postage costs for free newspapers such as the Frontenac News. This year they unveiled a support package for newspapers and much of the support went to the two large chains, Metroland and Post Media, companies that, in my view, have decimated local coverage in the papers that they have swallowed up over the last 20 years. The only stream of the support package, that was targeted at small market papers, offered subsidies for newspapers who were willing to expand into markets and cover municipal councils that are not being covered. It is about eliminating ‘news deserts’. There is no ‘oasis money’ for papers like ours that keep the news desert at bay by covering five councils in a rural region.

We remain dependent on our advertisers, our ability to develop web services that are useful for the business community, our recreation guides, visitor guide and phone and services directory, and, over the past couple of years, ongoing support from our readers. In the new year, we will make a pitch for that support once again, but for now I would like to thank those who have supported us financially over the past two years.

As the world changes, our role as a news source has to change as well. Our rural communities are attracting new investment as people keep building and renovating houses throughout this readership area, within commuting distance from Kingston and further out as well. At the same time, as climate change becomes a political and lifestyle reality, it is becoming harder to see how we can adjust our lifestyles accordingly. Out of economic necessity we live in a one adult, one vehicle world, which is not the way people live even in small and medium sized cities.

We also have political challenges as the limited capacity of our municipalities squares up against the growing needs of our aging communities. This is only underlined by a growing unease in the relationship between Frontenac County and the City of Kingston, where so many of our services are based.

In 2020 and beyond it will be our job, as a news service, to articulate some of these issues while adjusting our business model to remain financially viable.

But all that is for another day.