Southern Saskatchewan was surprised to hear that the Moose Jaw Times Herald will be winding down its operations. Its last edition will come out in early December. The news is all the more sad because the Time Herald has been a stable news source in Moose Jaw and the region for over 100 years. No one likes to hear about business closures and about 24 staff will lose their jobs before the new year.
Reaction to the shut down is mixed. Some have commented that the Herald is a victim of the modern age and its failure to thrive is blamed on not keeping up with modern innovations. They claim that, by the time the newspaper is printed, the stories are outdated. Others bemoan the newspaper’s historical value and view it as another victim of globalization. Many of those wonder how they will keep up with local events. And for those in the newspaper business, it is another sign that media has not made the smooth transition to the modern age as claimed.
The fate of Moose Jaw’s major newspaper hints at what kind of future awaits small town independent newspapers throughout the province. Saskatchewan does not have the population to sustain a large newspaper industry, even a digital one. Notably, the largest cities of Saskatoon and Regina also only have one major newspaper.
Moose Jaw is still a fairly large city in Saskatchewan, so what does the collapse of its mainstream media say about all of the newspapers in much smaller towns and villages peppering the province?
Looking more closely at the arguments, one may say that, yes, the old newspaper wasn’t keeping up. Most of the critics think that a simple switch from print to digital will do the financial trick. This is rather a simplistic view. The newspaper business has changed dramatically over the last century. Saskatchewan newspapers have kept up by adapting first to new printing techniques, then to new ways to distribute. The advent of photography allowed photographs to be added. The rising costs of technology led to new ways to fund newspapers through advertising and other campaigns.
The computer age gave rise to yet more sophisticated technologies to create print copy. Contrary to public belief, newspapers in Saskatchewan have adapted to all of the modern technologies. Perhaps the word “paper” has them confused. More or less every newspaper has a website or provides a digital version of the paper. They have set up Facebook pages and other social media accounts. At the same time, they have drastically cut the number of print copies and reduced staff to skeleton crews. Few can say that the newspaper industry hasn’t tried to adapt.
More troubling is what one Moose Jaw newspaper reader lamented — the demise of local news. One of the biggest changes that any small town newspaper has to make is the way it does its reporting. The international, national and even provincial news to some extent are no longer essential to report. World events change by the minute these day and the public has gotten used to watching television, listening to the radio and checking online for updates.
Falling by the wayside is local news. The public may have 20 news bureaus reporting the latest announcement from Ottawa, but there really is usually only one newspaper reporting at the local level whether it is in Moose Jaw or Regina or Assiniboia. One can be sure that major news bureaus are not going to be reporting on the latest decisions by small town councils or local ribbon-cuttings. Even the local weather no longer gets reported.
For local events, the choices are slim. The public is forced to do its own reporting by combing through Facebook pages and websites to find out the happenings in their community or even heading down to coffee row. For bigger happenings, the public either gets carefully controlled reports from an organization’s communications department designed to make them look their best and hide flaws, or they get an informational overload from social media which may be inaccurate. The rise of “fake news” demonstrates just how tenuous social media can be.
In the last 100 years the job of the reporter has not changed. Sure, their tools look different — pen and paper are now computers and smart phones — but journalists continue to be impartial observers and witnesses of news and they relay this to the public. They have to follow industry standards developed over the years.
The demise of a local paper, either in print or digital form, means that communities lose this collective voice on a larger stage. It also means that precious historical documentation and community remembrance has been lost. Historians rely heavily on old newspaper coverage of events to help them piece together history. Critics of the newspaper industry should consider where they plan to get their news and information in the future.
