These Reporters Aren’t Giving Up on Local News

When a local newspaper dies, it takes a while for everyone in the community to find out, and that can be a little heartbreaking for the reporters who worked there.

Nearly two months ago, Glacier Media (now Lodestar) shuttered the Burnaby Now, New Westminster Record and Tri-City News.

For a couple of weeks after the closure, however, I and my fellow reporters kept getting texts and DMs and emails and phone calls from readers who hadn’t yet heard but who had a great story that needed telling or a pressing problem that needed attention.

For decades, my colleagues and I have gotten these calls: a senior celebrating a 100th birthday, a local high school student winning a big scholarship, bedbugs in the rental apartment, traffic problems at a local school, a giant pumpkin, wait times at the hospital, restaurant openings, property crime in the neighbourhood, safety problems at the job site, trees cut at the local park, a development that threatens to blot out the sun.

For us as local reporters, each of these calls or messages has been a thread connecting us to our communities. And for years our stories connected those communities to themselves in turn.

So, it was tough in those first two weeks to have to tell them there was no more paper, and we weren’t sure who would tell their stories now.

Because that’s the thing about local news. It’s really only local newspapers that publish it.

That’s what makes it so important — and it’s not just local reporters who think so.

A flurry of reports by public policy experts in recent years has pointed to the critical importance of quality local news and raised the alarm about its rapid disappearance.

A report by the Public Policy Forum called local news the place where “the rubber meets the road.”

Done well, it “delivers accountability to the very foundation of healthy, functioning democracies — school board meetings, courtroom trials, municipal councils,” the report states.

Citizens who lose their community paper tend to retreat into partisan corners as reliable local information is replaced by typically more divisive national news and social media, “where truth and falsehood compete on equal terms,” according to the report.

Yet local news is disappearing at an alarming rate.

Since 2008, the loss of local news outlets has left 2.5 million Canadians with almost no source of local news, according to a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report.

That report found that communities with the worst news deprivation are the suburbs.

“Metro Vancouver populations have grown quickly but local news hasn’t kept pace or has declined,” the report states.

And that was before Glacier pulled the plug on the Burnaby Now, New Westminster Record and Tri-City News this spring, leaving roughly 600,000 residents in a local news “desert” just weeks before the most consequential federal election in recent memory.

The bottom line is the demise of local news is only speeding up, and Canada’s corporate media owners haven’t come up with a way to stop it.

“I am most afraid we won’t know what it is we lost until no one knows anymore what it meant,” New Westminster Mayor Patrick Johnstone said in an emotional social media post when Glacier announced the closures.

New models for local news are needed — and three of my colleagues and I are working to build one right here in Metro Vancouver.

We are four veteran local journalists, with a combined 100 years of experience covering the communities of Burnaby, New Westminster and the Tri-Cities: Mario Bartel (Tri-City News), Janis Cleugh (Tri-City News), Theresa McManus (New Westminster Record) and Cornelia Naylor (Burnaby Now).

With support from the Union Co-operative Initiative and Unifor, the union that helped us through the recent closures, we are laying the groundwork for an independent, non-profit news co-operative serving Burnaby, New Westminster and the Tri-Cities (Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody).

Our print publication, which will launch this fall, will be worker-run and supported by the communities we serve through subscriptions, local advertisers and other community partnerships.

Why do we believe this will work when local papers across the country are shutting down?

We believe local residents are hungry for a reliable local news source committed to serving their needs — one that does not extract value from their communities in part to service corporate debt or generate profits for shareholders who don’t live in them.

Our news co-op will be the first of its kind in Western Canada, but the model has already proven successful elsewhere.

In 2019, six daily newspapers in Quebec were saved from closure when a newly formed co-op (Coopérative nationale de l’information indépendante) took over the operations from their corporate owner, which had filed for bankruptcy.

The response to our own endeavour here in B.C. has been overwhelming so far.

The first phase of our Save Our Local News fundraising campaign, launched earlier this month, has already generated more than $25,000.

Over the coming months, we will be taking our message to the community, engaging residents, local business owners, community leaders and politicians at every level in an effort to secure the support we’ll need to save local news in Burnaby, New West and the Tri-Cities — and maybe even build a model to save local news across the country.

To find out more about out the news co-operative or the Save Our Local News campaign, visit saveourlocalnews.ca.