Independent Newspapers Outliving the Chains

Jeff Green | Sep 20, 2023

There is a newspaper in Lanark. There is a newspaper in Westport, and there is a newspaper in Sharbot Lake. They all publish weekly and will continue to publish weekly.

There is, or soon will be, no newspaper in Perth, Smiths Falls, Carleton Place, or Almonte. Carleton Place is the fastest growing City in Ontario, Lanark is not.

The only reason this is happening is that the independent newspapers in the larger towns were attractive to newspaper chains,so they were bought out, and since the chains did not care about the smaller markets, the papers in those towns have remained independent.

Those newspapers; the Perth Courier, the Carleton Place Canadian, the Smiths Falls Record News, all went down hill when they ceased being independent, because they became under-resourced after being swallowed up by newspaper chains. They had less reporting, less news, and more content from outside the community.

The reporters who remained with them, valiantly carried on, but they had little or no support from their corporate overseers. The company at the centre the closure of the Ontario newspapers, Metroland, saw towns like Perth, Carleton Place, Smiths Falls and 67 other towns, as markets, not communities.

The loss of these newspapers, even in their dimnished form, is a loss.

The cost of printing newspapers, speaking from experience, has gone up by 36% since 2021. It is like we are now paying in US dollars but collecting revenue is in Canadian dollars.

So, Metroland was facing a real money crunch in both their printing business (which they closed in March) as well as their newspaper business, but that does not explain everything that has happened to that company.

For people in the communities that no longer have a paper, it is certainly a loss.

Institutions large and small: municipal governments, provincial departments, health units, and many others, have undergone an information revolution in recent years. They have ever-expanding communications departments that put out content on a constant basis though media releases and social media posts.

The content is valuable for the public. It tells people what services are available, and it also puts a human spin on otherwise grey institutions.

While this is all good, that information will never be critical of the institution that pays for its production.

Only an independent news source, that is beholding only to readers, can take a step back and evaluate the information coming from these institutions.

It doesn't matter all the time, but it matters.

Online sources are springing up, but finances remain tight for them, and they are forced to chase clicks in order to survive, which pushes their reporting in certain directions.

At the Frontenac News, we enjoy significant community support, and that is why we continue to survive, and thrive.

There is lesson for us in this, however. That is not to take that support for granted. The best way for newspapers to lose money is to focus only on finances and not on the communities we serve.

We need to remember that.