L-R: Paul MacNeill, Jo-Ann Roberts, Marcel Parker-Gallant, Darrell Cole

Paul MacNeill, publisher of PEI’s Eastern Graphic, says he’s optimistic about the future of local print journalism in spite of newspaper closures everywhere including in Sackville where the Tribune-Post ceased publication after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.

“Our print is still very strong, our advertising is still very strong, and that’s because we’re relevant and have boots on the ground,” MacNeill  told a journalism symposium at Mount Allison University last month.

He mentioned his father Jim, who started the weekly paper in 1963 after emigrating to Canada from Scotland.

“He used to say a good community paper covers its community warts and all,” MacNeill said. “You’re tough when you need to be tough, but you support when you need to support and you’re always there.”

In 1998, Jim MacNeill died of a heart attack on the ferry ride back to PEI after delivering the convocation address to the graduating students at the University of King’s College in Halifax.

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” he told them explaining that the bastards he was referring to are people who hold power. (After Jim MacNeill had been convicted of impaired driving in 1990, he ran the story on the Eastern Graphic’s front page in keeping with his “warts and all” philosophy of holding power to account.)

“Autonomy, accountability, trust, personality,” Paul MacNeill told the symposium. “Those are the keys to local decision-making,” he said referring to his standards for local journalism at the Eastern Graphic and several other papers he publishes on PEI.

He cited research findings that show while local journalism remains the most trusted news source in Canada, 30% of Canadians pay no attention to mainstream news, instead relying on social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube.

Local journalism & social media

Jo-Ann Roberts, who spent decades as a CBC journalist before moving into advocacy and Green Party politics, said people’s reliance on social media makes media literacy education more important than ever.

“I love the idea of citizen journalism, but they should not replace trained journalists. Journalists who make curated decisions, who look for sources, who check whether they got it right,” she said.

“We need to start educating people about what media literacy is. And it’s going to become more important.”

Shrinking newsrooms, vanishing papers

Darrell Cole, who spent 30 years covering local news in Amherst and vicinity, said that journalists who work for small-town papers get to do everything.

“Besides general reporting, we covered politics, courts, sports, even IODE and Rotary meetings. I even wrote obituaries,” he said. “When I joined the industry, the paper was the heartbeat of the community.”

But when the Transcontinental Media chain bought the Amherst Daily News, the weekly Citizen-Record and the weekly Sackville Tribune-Post in 2002, Cole said things started falling apart.

“From 50 to 60 people working in Amherst and Sackville, the papers quickly went down to 20 to 25,” he said.

Eventually a staff of only four was producing the daily and weekly papers in Amherst until, in 2013, Transcontinental turned the 120-year-old Amherst Daily News into a weekly that published only on Fridays.

In 2017, after the Halifax-based Saltwire chain bought the papers, the Amherst staff went down to two and the weekly Citizen-Record was closed. About a year later, the Amherst paper became what’s known in the industry as a “shopper” full of fluffy features and distributed free with advertising flyers.

“The bread and butter of the small papers years ago was the small mom and pop businesses that advertised,” Cole said.  “Those businesses disappeared when the Walmarts and the Superstores came in and the Walmarts and Superstores don’t advertise in local papers.”

Cole joined the Municipality of Cumberland in 2022 to work as a communications officer, but said he misses the news business every day.

Listening to the community

Marcel Parker-Gallant brought a broadcaster’s perspective to the discussion. As assistant general manager of the French-language community station Radio Beauséjour, he said it’s vital to cover local issues that engage listeners who call the phone-in shows.

“Every time a host would go on air and sometimes picked subjects that weren’t related to local, no one was calling in,” he said.

“Why isn’t anybody calling in? It’s because you’re not talking about how certain things are touching their lives.”

Parker-Gallant said people go on Facebook and expose their lives because they want recognition, so it’s important for local media to cover their communities and give recognition to the people they include in their stories.

‘Print’s not dying’

Throughout the panel discussion, Paul MacNeill insisted  that printed newspapers are here to stay.

“Print’s not dying,” he said. “But the print product has to be relevant and it can’t simply be a copy of what’s been on the CBC news the night before or they’ve seen it somewhere else,” he said.

” So we’re going through a transition. I think what may be dying is corporate media, not the independent media who print.”

This is the second in a series on the Local News Matters journalism symposium held on June 14th in the Mt. A. library. For earlier coverage, click here.