In My Opinion: Beach Metro Community News is worth fighting for

By MARY BETH DENOMY

BEACH METRO COMMUNITY NEWS BOARD OF DIRECTORS

My first real journalism job in the late 1980s was as a ‘copy person’ on the night shift in the newsroom at the London Free Press. I should have been called ‘coffee person,’ but I was breathing the rarified (and often stuffy) air in a large bustling open-concept newsroom. So exciting!

The news editors sat next to the sports editors who sat across the hall from the men who manually assembled the typeset paper before it was all computerized. A big button on the wall would STOP the monstrous printing press next door (I only remember dramatically stopping the presses once).

My career ultimately took a different communications path but today, I’ve come full circle as president of the volunteer Beach Metro Community News board of directors. Boy, have things changed.

A new report has just been released on the critical state of local news in Canada. It ain’t a pretty picture.

The Rideau Hall Foundation in partnership with the Michener Awards for Public Service Journalism and the Public Policy Forum (PPF) report more than 340 Canadian communities have lost local news providers since 2008.

The “cutbacks, shutdowns and general hollowing out have reached the point where the only thing left in some places is a “ghost paper” – a familiar masthead with little or no local news in the local product.”

At the same time, IPSOs research poll reports local news sources are by far the most trusted sources of news (85 per cent).
In my opinion, local news matters. I could not agree more with the report when they say, “local news is where the rubber hits the road. It knits together communities and speaks to people where they live, quite literally. It builds connection.”

On the flip side, and this is not a time to be flip, the report provides a sobering but not surprising follow up: “…the vacuum created by missing reliable local information is filled by national news, which is typically more divisive, as well as social media, where trust and falsehood compete on equal terms.” Sound familiar?

I am sure everyone has seen our eye-catching O Canada cover, as part of our March Fundraising Drive. We know, and the report supports the fact local news “plays an outsize role in safeguarding our democracy. Without a reliable source of news, communities become more polarized, less trusting of one another, and more disconnected from social institutions.”

The Beach Metro Community News is worth fighting for. Susan, Alan, Mark, Melinda, Carolin, Hope and Matthew all work together to ensure we can keep telling our stories, cover our news and hold our politicians to account in our newspaper and online.

The many co-op students and interns from Centennial College, Malvern Collegiate and Notre Dame Catholic High School learn on the job the principles of good journalism. And hundreds of your neighbours volunteer their time every two weeks to trudge through the snow in the winter and the heat in the summer to put an issue in every Beach mailbox.

Fight for local journalism. Fight for democracy. Fight for the future of our local news source which punches way above its weight. Become a Beach Metro Community News Supporter today. To become a supporter, please go to https://beachmetro.com/support-us/

• Mary Beth Denomy, Volunteer President, Beach Metro Community News.