I recently completed the judging of the Manitoba Community Newspaper competition for the best overall community newspaper in the province. The best part of judging the competition was that old friends who are now publishers in the province continued to have the same feel for community journalism that I do. Whether it was the Flin Flon “The Reminder” or Winkler Morden “Voice” the community’s news was front and center. The papers contained stories of people and the contributions they make to their communities with features on the life and happenings around their communities.
There have been thousands of changes in the industry since I first started. Many have been for the benefit of workers who toiled with hot lead in their careers. Many of those practices from the fifties and sixties are totally banned today. But modernization changed the industry. I remember seeing the first digital camera that was being touted as the future of photography. About the size of a 35mm film camera, it was deemed to be the future of photography. No one had yet attached a camera to a cell phone.
The future of that piece of equipment would do away with processing black and white film, printing pictures in poorly vented dark rooms around the world. Black and white film would disappear and not too much later Kodachrome and Fujichrome would all be found in the barrels of history.
We sacrificed typewriters for computers. We traded in our Xacto knives for volumes of images stored on computers in New York and Las Angelas that could be retrieved through the marvelous invention of the Internet. Instead of working on large flat stones with lead type and blocks of metal, we moved to light tables that we polished and glued with wax columns of type and advertisements that had been created on photographic paper.
That too disappeared in almost the blink of an eye as the paper was put together on computer screens and dispatched to the press. We were still putting ink to paper and that continues today.
But times were changing. Subscribers were looking in the winter months to have their Fort Frances Times in their hands in Florida, Texas, Arizona and on cruise ships. The paper became available on the web. It became not only printed paper, but also digital paper. The methods of delivery of the paper have changed.
But the emphasis on community papers remains the stories of the people and events that shape the lives of the people in the communities we serve. The reporters are the first recorders of history. Technology has changed the way they work. Over the course of my 50 plus years in the newspaper industry old skills were abandoned and new skills were learned
The reporters work not only at the office on First Street, but from their apartments in Toronto and Ottawa. They interview people by phone and Zoom. The focus remains on the community just as those Manitoba papers do.
