Missing the personal touch

BY RAYMOND MAHER

As a writer of a weekly newspaper column, I’ve gone from being a member of the newspaper family to the coolly tolerated relative at a funeral. I was so excited to speak with my first editors over a decade ago. Then, editors had time to talk with anyone who wanted to speak to them. They believed in my column, and I needed to be part of their commitment to readers. The weekly or daily newspaper was the heart of a community.

It was a golden age for a weekly columnist like me. Many towns had a weekly newspaper, and the editor had the power to run my column or reject it. The price I charged for the column was a low, flat rate. I was able to establish a personal rapport with several editors, so the readership of my column grew. In fact, I still offer it for a small, flat fee.

Independent newspapers in Saskatchewan, where I lived at the time, began to reinvent themselves in the last decade, a practice which continues to this day. Independently owned papers were sold and became part of larger newspaper groups. Local news in these newspaper groups is now integrated with the news of other papers so that the articles are broader in scope but less centred on individual communities.

In my humble opinion, going bigger with newspaper groups such as has been done here in BC with news organizations like the Black Press Media Group is not necessarily better. In my city of Chilliwack, although the breaking, localized news is still there in the Friday paper, human interest stories and community-building articles might get squeezed out for marketing ads. It seems to me the personal touch is gone. For example, I had to call Abbotsford to place an advertisement in the Chilliwack Advance Classified Section. This is just my experience; remember, what I feel, or my opinion, is not necessarily a fact or the facts of the situation.

The future suggests that newspaper audiences will read online, and the actual newspaper in our hands will be no more. They also say that about books. No one can predict the future accurately, but one must wonder whether the control of our local press by a large company, one concerned with marketing solutions more than with localized news, bodes well for our community paper. The controversy about real and fake news during the pandemic may reflect a lack of trust in newspapers that are part of a media chain. The debate could also be that there is too much information full of feelings and not enough explicit, hard facts.

How will columnists need to change in the future? No doubt, journalism and photography credentials will be paramount. There will be louder cries for facts, but if the future turns out like the present, many readers will believe whatever they want, no matter what the facts say. In the future, reporters must report real stories that matter to their audiences because newspapers are the heart of any community.

Raymond is a spiritual/ religious columnist for several weekly newspapers. So far, both his novels are Historical Fiction set in the Fraser River Gold Rush of 1858 in BC. He is a retired school teacher and minister of religion who lives in Chilliwack, BC. (raymondmaher.com)