Ten years ago this past weekend, our family embarked on a great adventure. We bought a weekly newspaper.
I well remember walking down the main street of our town, wondering what we had done. We bought the paper about the same time that agriculture was going into a slump.
A friend phoned to congratulate us on our purchase. I told her I wasn’t sure that congratulations were in order.
We have a farm, I told her, that is running into tough times. Agriculture on the whole is not in the greatest of shape, and we have just bought a small weekly newspaper in an agricultural community.
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When we bought the paper, we bought land and buildings, too. We were also doing our own books.
Not long after, I attended a conference where the topic was running a business in a small community. Never, we were told, buy property in a small town and never, ever do your own books.
Living in rural Saskatchewan, we have people around us with a multiplicity of talents; we lucked into a chartered accountant who farms with her husband and worked out an arrangement whereby she does our books according to her schedule.
Most of our staff have been with us over the entire 10 years and our whole family has been involved the entire time. The community has given us excellent support from day one and we in turn have tried to repay their trust.
On the weekend, we had a 10th anniversary lunch to honor our staff and our district correspondents who are really the lifeblood of the whole operation.
Friend, Bill Peterson from Saskatoon, who last year started the weekly Saskatoon and Regina Free Press newspapers, came out to talk about his adventure in journalism.
Weekly newspapers are the “emerging communications medium of the ’90s,” he said. People get their national and international news from radio and TV and the internet faster than newspapers can deliver it, he said.
But the only place they can get local news is from their local paper and weeklies do it best.
I’m often asked, mostly by friends in the city, what we find to write about in a small town. We have never found a lack of local news to put in the paper.
Unfortunately, some of the better “news” we hear about we can’t use, and anyway, coffee row sometimes puts a better spin on a story than we ever could.
