How the local press has changed - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Last week, The Citizen moved into its new office - which also happens to be its first office.

 

It was back in the summer of 1985 that my old friend, now the late Sheila Richards, called me one day wondering what could be done about reporting news from Brussels. Several years before the old Brussels Post had been included as a one-page outlet in the Huron Expositor. At the same time, the former Blyth Standard became one page in the Clinton News-Record.

 

Sheila wondered if there was a way to start a new newspaper that would serve Brussels. I said that such was the state of newspapers that I didn’t think that a newspaper that served only the Brussels community could survive. I suggested that a newspaper that served both Brussels and Blyth seemed like a better bet.

 

The problem was how to get the money to start a two-community newspaper. I was flat broke, having started a fledgling touring theatre and lost my shirt. My suggestion was that since people in the two communities wanted a newspaper, we should sell shares. When Sheila, who was a valuable fundraiser for the Blyth Festival, wondered how many shareholders she should seek, ignorant as I was about corporate structure, I suggested the more owners the better.

 

I sold shares to Blyth residents with whom I had built a relationship with over the years. One of those I approached was Mason Bailey who had become a major landlord. He had a vacant space in what used to be Sparling’s Hardware. He offered me a year’s free rent in exchange for shares in the company. I accepted and that’s how we first became tenants in what is our current office.
One of the smartest moves I made was to hire the late Bev Brown as our sales manager. She sold so much advertising for the first edition, and Jill and I and Dianne Josling were so out of practice, that we missed several deadlines at Signal-Star’s printing plant and were hours late getting the paper to press.

 

Meanwhile, I’d come up with the bright idea to invite shareholders to our Blyth office to receive a copy of the first issue of The Citizen. Fortunately, the printed paper came back to Blyth just before people went home.

 

Meanwhile, the idea of a community-owned newspaper intrigued others in the business. The Kitchener-Waterloo Record sent a reporter to talk to me. Their story was picked up by the Canadian Press news agency and the story reprinted in several newspapers. The Associated Press made the story available to American newspapers.

 

All would probably have gone well, but the story was picked up by The Globe and Mail, which was read by people who worked for the agency that enforced business rules. One day, I got a call warning that we had too many shareholders to be listed as a private company and would need to apply - at great cost - to be listed on the stock market.

 

In a panic, I called our lawyer. In the coming weeks, we returned the investments of enough shareholders to get under the limit of 50 for a private company. Officials said they’d forgive, but not forget, us.

 

It’s hard, today, to think how different newspapers were run 40 years ago. For one thing, there was a printing plant in Goderich. It was owned by Signal-Star publishing, which owned newspapers from Owen Sound to Grand Bend.

 

The printing process was a lot more complicated than today. At The Citizen, we had news cameras that shot pictures on film that then had to be developed in a darkroom and printed on paper.

 

The newspaper itself went through a similar process. At first, we put pages together and delivered them to the Signal-Star, where they were photographed with a large camera and negatives were produced, which were then used to make plates, which were put on the huge offset printing press. Later, to save money, we set up our own darkroom in the basement, where we shot page negatives and developed them in trays with the chemicals needed. We took the negatives to the printing plant.

 

But later, things changed. New computers with expensive programs allowed us to put the entire pages together on screen. By the time the Signal-Star printing plant closed 15 years ago, we were able to send copies of our pages electronically to a new printer in Haliburton. Later, after that plant closed, Deb was able to use a printer in southern Ontario, which prints the paper and delivers it.

 

So much has changed, but the paper you get remains the same, except there’s more colour. The Citizen of 1985, something of a laughing stock to larger publishers, has more staff than ever­ while other newspapers have no staff at all. Such is the value of your community-owned newspaper, run by staff who care about news and work so hard collecting it and writing it.