Stand by me - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Huron East Mayor Bernie MacLellan, relaying sentiments from Huron-Bruce MPP Lisa Thompson, said something that couldn’t help but perk my ears up at last week’s Huron County Council meeting. It was about the status of media coverage in Huron County and beyond in recent years.

 

Bernie told the rest of council that Lisa made a comment along the lines of that she’s just not seeing the level of local media coverage she once did. That’s hard to argue, I suppose.

 

Now, this isn’t to castigate Bernie or Lisa who, for their part, have been more supportive of The Citizen than most. In recent years, the provincial government, under the direction of Premier Doug Ford, has instructed its ministries to beef up their advertising in Ontario-based media outlets to get their word out, as opposed to internationally-owned news outlets or social media giants, and Huron East has remained steadfast in its commitment to support its local newspaper. However, it just so happens that it was what Lisa said, which Bernie amplified, that put the wheels of my mind into motion on this important topic.
We here at The Citizen are, of course, much more in touch with which businesses, people, municipalities and service groups continue to support the traditional media landscape and who has jumped ship to social media giants, handing their money over not to locals, but to billionaires with, almost exclusively, black hearts and sociopathic tendencies, at best.

 

Every shop, restaurant, politician, township, service group or car dealership that now relies on Facebook, Instagram, e-mail newsletters, etc. to get its message out has played a role in the media-killing exercise being carried out by social media giants (and others) whose lives would be easier without journalists sniffing around their nefarious, abhorrent actions. As a result, proper news-collecting companies like newspapers, magazines and television stations are now left scrounging for crumbs of a cake that, a few short decades ago, was all theirs.

 

This is not news to most people, but what does seem to be news is how this redirection of support and funding has affected news organizations’ ability to do a good job.

 

So - going back to the top - there is indeed a lower level of media coverage and engagement in Huron County and beyond, but let’s stop pretending that why that’s the case is some great mystery. The Citizen and its ilk are local businesses just like any other hardware store, supermarket, insurance provider, theatre, pizza parlour or electrician. If locals made every effort to not spend money in businesses within their community, but consistently made a point to solicit those same businesses for donations or free services (the services, in the case of The Citizen, being covering this or that - pictures taken and stories written by paid professionals) I don’t think you need an economics degree or crystal ball to determine their future. 

 

The next time you walk into a store whose door you’ve not darkened in years - if it’s even still open at all - or a restaurant running on a skeleton staff with subpar food and decide its offerings have really gone downhill, think about the role you’ve played in the process. If you don’t feed a pet for a year or two or water a plant for seven or eight months, what do you think will happen? So don’t then act surprised when you’re flushing a dead fish or dumping a dead plant. Things flourish through support.

 

If you want something to stay strong or regain the glory it once embodied, you need to put your money where your mouth is. Support is the only avenue to success; there are no shortcuts and people have bills to pay.