Long May You Run - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Perhaps it is fitting that I’m writing this final column in my little series reflecting on my 20-year milestone just an hour before the end of the day and past deadline.

 

As you know by now, there are five Fridays in this October, meaning that we get five columns instead of four. The first four were easy to plot out. This one, I’m not so sure. To my procrastination point, that is a shadow that has followed me my whole life. As a kid, it was not uncommon for me to leave a project or an essay until the night before it was due, work on it through the night and produce it the next morning. My mom will tell this story with pride, saying that I always ended up getting a good grade. Not always, Mom. Not always.

 

So, of course I ended up in journalism - a world in which we are all driven by deadlines and where we all inevitably work to deadline.

 

Reflecting on 20 years with The Citizen has brought to the surface a lot of emotions and, because it’s been discussed so thoroughly in the last month, it has been nice to speak to so many of you about the passage of time and the impact The Citizen has had on your lives during my time here - it all means so much.

 

It is interesting to have this column in the same week that I have a story about Lisa LaFlamme and Keith Roulston having a conversation about the state of the media and the importance of small-town journalism in communities like those served by The Citizen. So much has changed over 20 years. There are things we do here now that are so different than they were 20 years ago and there are others that are done - more or less - exactly the same way. Some things don’t need improving. Faces have come and gone - older folks from my early years have passed on and younger folks from my early years are now all grown up. I remember them as children and now they have children of their own.

 

Trust in the media at large is as low as it’s been in some demographics and how news is being consumed (and understood) is always changing. And, of course, there’s the concept of money being made. A community newspaper was never an invitation to buy a lake house, but dollars are always hard to come by and, these days, that seems especially true.

 

And yet, as a dedicated group of volunteers works on a new history book in advance of next year’s Blyth 150th Homecoming, we are consistently reminded of the importance of the work being done week after week here at The Citizen. Journalism is often referred to as the first rough draft of history. The vast, vast majority of research being done for that book, the stories being included and the pictures being featured, are coming from The Citizen. They are not Tweets, Truth Social posts, Facebook reels, Instagram stories or TikToks. History books cannot be written using memes.

 

It has been a true honour to tell your stories for more than 20 years. Sure, there are days that are long and difficult and no one in this office is getting rich and yet, as someone who grew up in a house of hard-working, blue-collar parents, there are days that I marvel at the fact that I get paid to write for a living. Something I enjoyed doing as a kid and found I was good at as a young adult is now how I spend my days and how I pay my bills.

 

Those stories - and our telling of them - are important and they are worth supporting and worth preserving. Because if we don’t do it - the decline in community news in recent years shows this to be true - no one else will. 

 

Thanks for sticking with The Citizen - and with me - for the last 20 years and for understanding that this work is important.