A year after employee buyout, Prince Albert newspaper looks to the future of news
In the year since the Prince Albert Daily Herald bucked the trend of newspaper shutdowns across Canada by announcing its staff would by buying it out, its editor has been pondering how local media can survive in modern times.
Right now, the numbers don't look good: Saskatchewan has seen 12 local newspaper closures since 2008 and two newspapers drop their level of service with only two new outlets coming in to help the bigger picture, according to the Local News Research Project.
"You lose a daily voice" when local papers go, said Herald editor Peter Lozinski.
His paper could have become part of those statistics if its staff hadn't, in late 2017, decided they would buy the newspaper from Star News Publishing.
Its owner was getting out of the news business and had previously shut down the daily in Moose Jaw and either sold or shut down seven other papers in Saskatchewan.
"We were on the chopping block. It was find a buyer or close," Lozinski said.
He thought a lot about innovative new ways local journalism is being funded and delivered these days while preparing to make a presentation about the future of journalism at the city's library.
The news industry is losing its traditional ad revenue and a variety of approaches is necessary to adapt, he said.
"I don't think there's one magic bullet that will be all things for all people or save all things," he said.
Crowdfunding and pay-for-use
In bigger centres like Calgary there's The Sprawl, a self-described "pop-up journalism" website that launched ahead of the city's 2017 municipal election that relies on crowd funding.
Pay-only outlets like The Athletic and The Discourse are also examples Lozinski's been looking at.
The federal government recently threw out a life raft for those struggling to adapt to the changing media landscape, offering $600 million in media funding over five years. Only part of that is to subsidize reporter salaries.
Lozinski doesn't think it's the best solution, saying he'd prefer to see follow-through on recommendations from a report on new, democracy and trust in the digital age called The Shattered Mirror.
Most helpful for his industry are ones that would even the playing field between digital and print publications with tax deductions.
Still, Lozinski wouldn't turn down some of the federal money if it came his way.
It'd help in a newsroom like the Herald's, where staff have had to take pay cuts, work more hours, take on extra roles they never saw themselves doing and invest their own money to keep the paper going.
Why do it?
"I think you'll find that in a lot of newsrooms especially today as ad revenues have declined, people are in it because they love to do it and they love what they do," said Lozinski.
He's an Ontario-raised journalist who moved to the prairies to work in Cold Lake, Alta., then Moose Jaw, before settling into Prince Albert when he was hired as editor in 2016.
Lozinski's sticking in Prince Albert because "I needed to keep doing what I was doing."
The paper provides a sense of competition that keeps local media from getting complacent, which the local audience benefits from, he said.
