What It Means to Kill a 121-Year-Old Local Newspaper

I never met Margaret “Ma” Murray, the crusty doyenne of Wet Coast journalism. But I’ve admired her since time before time.

In the mid-1960s, when my own career in print journalism began at a small-town Ontario weekly, she was my lodestar. This former Kansas farmgirl epitomized the ideal weekly newspaper editor. Brash. Feisty. Opinionated as hell.

And totally devoted to her community.

As founder of the Bridge River-Lillooet News in 1934, she carved out a reputation for no-bullshit journalism. She was anything but an elegant writer; her political opinions were shambolic; her spelling was atrocious.

Once, after numerous jibes about her grammatical infelicities, she printed a full page of punctuation marks — commas, semicolons, apostrophes and the like — with instructions to “put the damned things where you want them.”

Ma Murray shuffled off this coil in 1982, as an Officer of the Order of Canada and a beloved media icon. We’ll never see her like again.

What has this to do with the price of rutabagas in 2023, you ask. Just this:

Margaret Lally Murray represented an essential, rapidly-dying, institution in Canadian democratic life — the independently-owned community newspaper.

For big-city readers, this may mean little. For throngs of Canadians who grew up (or still live) in smaller towns and cities, it matters a lot.

I recently crafted the editorial obituary for the Okanagan Advertiser, yet another small Canadian weekly journal that has just bitten the dust.

The last editorial was signed by the publishers, Will and Wilhelmine Hansma, although I wrote it, as I have written all the paper’s editorials since November 2015.

“The value of a small-town newspaper,” I opined, “doesn’t lie in its coverage of Earth-shattering events, or what its owners think about the World Trade Organization. It lies in how it helps people keep abreast of what’s happening in their own communities.

“It serves the same purpose as the old town crier, spreading official proclamations and sharing news of what’s going on at court and in the marketplace.

“It’s an extension of daily coffee shop conversations, or tidbits of chatter shared over the backyard fence. It’s not about the rich and powerful; it’s about the everyday lives of everyday people who share a common space.

“Community journalism is about bylaws and mil rates; watermain breaks and property setbacks. It’s about school plays and baseball tournaments; rodeos, craft fairs, fender-benders, and what’s fresh at the grocery store.

“The weekly newspaper is a bearer of both good news and bad. It records births, deaths, marriages, grad ceremonies, retirement parties, contests and fundraisers.

“It’s about community as family: snapshots in time that live on in the archives for generations to come.

“As an advertising vehicle, it helps merchants, professionals and non-profit groups attract attention to their goods, services and public activities….

“It has done so through two world wars, a space race and major economic upheavals, not to mention astonishing developments in transportation, communications and global interconnectedness.

“It has not just been in the North Okanagan community. It is of that community.

“As much as anything else, though, the Advertiser is also a business. For decades, media businesses in Canada have faced tough decisions: grow, shrink, morph, merge. Sadly, they sometimes close their doors.

“It has been a privilege to serve this remarkable part of British Columbia since 1902.

“On behalf of the whole Advertiser family, past and present, we thank you for your support and loyalty over the years.”

For more than seven years, I’ve written the paper’s editorials, plus a weekly column of whimsy, nostalgia and nonsense entitled “Wasting Away in Geezerville.” I’ve spilled more than 255,500 words over the Armstrong/Enderby/Spallumcheen dam.

I haven’t actually lived in the Okanagan since 2010, but I feel honoured to have chatted with its residents every week. As a pensioner, I’ll miss the modest income. I’ll miss the sense of community much, much more.

The Advertiser’s new corporate owners, David Radler’s private company, recently chose to stop the presses forever. In the context of Canadian media, print or electronic, it’s the same old story. Mid-sized fish devour smaller fish; big fish devour mid-sized fish; giant fish devour each other. Not even King Canute can hold back that tide.

In 1969, the late senator Keith Davey embarked on an earnest mission to address corporate concentration of Canadian media. His report was excellent. And excellently ignored.

A decade later, Tom Kent took another kick at the can. His 1981 report on the growing concentration of media ownership was equally excellent. And equally excellently ignored.

The end result is that the Hollinger Blacks, the other Blacks, the Irvings, Torstar, companies owned by Radler, Glacier Media and others of their ilk keep scooping the minnows, the bait fish, the lunkers and everything else into the corporate maw, while official Canada does jackshit to rein them in.

Meanwhile, you won’t know how town council voted last night. You’ll see no more cute photos of local kids frolicking in the spring sunshine. And your daughter will never see her grad photo in print, unless you can afford an ad in one of the bigs.