Location, location, location

Last week, Nordstar Capital LP announced Metroland Media Group was being put into bankruptcy protection, 605 jobs were being eliminated, 70 weekly newspapers were converting to digital only, and — by the way — no one is getting severance pay.

This is another in a long string of hits to local journalism — that Globe article quotes the Canadian Media Directors’ Council as saying 448 news operations in 323 communities shut down across the country between 2008 and 2021.

In this CBC article, the Mayor of Perth, ON says she doesn’t think it’s that big of a deal, and a Carleton journalism professor agrees. A journalism professor thinks that local journalism isn’t substantial — I ask you.

The point is that we’re not losing publications that focus on the major news — you can find those articles anywhere. Often the same article, because most papers have cut their own staffs and print the same Canadian Press story. The point of local journalism is that its local.

The point is also that local people aren’t going to see all of that local news in any one place anywhere else.

We are very lucky in our small town to have two local publications — one digital and one printed — who share what’s going on. Without these two sources, I would have missed a lot of things because our local Facebook group often descends into the madness of picking up dog poop and the teens that occasionally egg houses. Oh, and there’s the ongoing debate about the city-folk who are ruining everything.

Your local news is the most important to your day to day life. You should know what’s going on with your municipal council. You should know when there are decisions being made that will effect your day to day life, and those are the local government decisions.

It’s all well and good to have what this Carleton professor calls a “major paper” telling you what the federal government did today, but that doesn’t tell you that the local fire department is having its funding cut, or that a local school might be closing.

There are also major issues at the national news level that local journalism can help combat, and local stories can become national news, but not if the local reporters don’t exist to ask the questions.

I worked on three community papers in my short journalism career. There is much to be said about living in a community, knowing the people, and finding the stories that matter to them.

The loss of local journalism is detrimental to communities, and the loss of working journalists is detrimental to democracy.