An outsider shows us our gift - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston
As The Citizen celebrated its 40th anniversary of the first publication of the paper back on Oct. 23, a letter was received from a first-time reader in Mitchell that showed what a unique newspaper it is.
The man wouldn’t be a usual reader of the paper but his wife was in Seaforth for a medical appointment and decided to do some shopping. On her way out, she picked up a copy of The Citizen and the letter’s author said he read the paper from cover to cover.
“To say the least,” he wrote, “I was very, very impressed with the scope of your various community articles, all of which were quite informative and designed to build community self-image and pride. The editorial pages were also so relevant to daily living, besides being quite thought-provoking. The feature articles were well written and varied. To top everything else off, you still feature classified and events advertising and business ads. In short, The Citizen contains something for everyone, a rare but valuable quality in contemporary weekly publications.”
The letter shows how much things have changed in weekly newspaper publishing. Once, The Mitchell Advocate, Huron Expositor, Seaforth, Clinton News-Record and Goderich Signal-Star were all popular and essential newspapers for people who lived in and around those centres. Over the years they went from local ownership to group ownership by Signal-Star Publishing to being sold to a larger publisher who reduced staffing and, when readership fell, cut back even further.
The Citizen was begun in 1985 when local people became tired of getting very little to read in the single-page Brussels Post in The Expositor or the single-page Blyth Standard in the News-Record.
It was the late Sheila Richards who brought about The Citizen. She approached me in the summer of 1985 about her concern about how Brussels could get better coverage. I suggested Brussels was too small to support a paper on its own but could share a newspaper with Blyth. Sheila approached Brussels-area residents and friends about buying shares in a community-owned newspaper and I approached Blyth leaders. We raised the money and the first newspaper was published.
Our effort must have caused chuckles among the staff at the Signal-Star where the paper was then printed. The 1980s were the prime years of the community newspaper industry and how would a little, community-owned newspaper survive? But we did, and slowly grew our staff. Meanwhile the Signal-Star chain was shrinking. The papers were getting smaller. When we needed a second reporter, we hired Denny Scott who was being laid off as the Signal-Star’s fourth reporter.
Today the Signal-Star has no reporters. The printing plant was closed nearly 15 years ago and we needed to find a new printer.
It has taken hard work and creativity for Deb Sholdice to keep The Citizen and its sister publications Rural Voice farm magazine and Stops Along the Way quarterly tourist publication strong. We still have two full-time editorial staff at The Citizen plus a half-time editor at The Rural Voice, along with advertising sales people and people who pull it all together.
Can Deb’s success continue? She has a hard job ahead of her as readers, who were young when The Citizen started, age. Those people knew what a community newspaper meant (as our letter writer said). But many younger residents don’t understand the importance of a professional staff reporting on local councils and listening for, and writing about, interesting happenings in the community around them. Rather than trust a community newspaper, these people think they can get the news they need from Facebook and other internet sources. Not having been without a newspaper for 40 years, they don’t know what they’d be missing and they fail to see that some of the news they now get on the internet came first from Citizen reporters.
People in towns like Seaforth, Clinton and Goderich know what they’re missing. Deb has been expanding The Citizen’s coverage so it has become a northern Huron newspaper.
Who would have thought, back in 1985 when the first issue of The Citizen came out, that newspapers would become such rare commodities. Nearly 50 people in the two communities wanted a newspaper enough that they invested their dollars to make it possible. There have been good years and bad since then. In the good years shareholders have been paid dividends.
This year, I understand, has been a strong year. Despite battling hindrances like a postal strike, the staff at The Citizen and The Rural Voice have created lively news and special sections. We should thank the staff, as that Mitchell reader did, for their efforts.