General Business Updates and News

[nms]

Looping back to the comments about the Record (and I don't know if this merits a full topic elsewhere), it has been shrinking its labour pool for a long time.  If you count the number of unique names for reporters in the daily paper, you would likely be hard pressed to fill a minibus. Local journalism relies on "boots on the ground" to tell our stories. Good journalism is expensive to maintain but important to the functioning of our society. Without it, we risk living blind in our own community.

Social Media platforms are not good at presenting heterogenous community narratives.  Nor are they interested in your local stories. They are also prone to printing non-fact checked stories that destabilize communities.

Refusing to pay for local news is not good community stewardship. Holding out for a local version of the New York Times, the Washington Post etc is just not going to work.  You can subscribe to the Record for $60/year and demonstrate that local news is important to you. (that's only $10 less and than an Elite WRConnected membership)

Things that we'll lose when we lose local journalism:
- a local "paper of record" that provides the first draft of history in this area
- local human interest stories about who lives here
- local amateur sports (either leagues or school competitions)
- local politics (not everyone reads WRConnected like we do)
- local arts (either visiting artists or up and coming local artists in any medium visual, singing etc)
- local community support (The Record supports the Kids to Camp Fund, and two literacy funds as well as raising the profile of other worthy causes in the Region)
- local obituaries (relying on social networks to spread this news misses large portion of the connections that may have faded over time but that are none-the-less important for creating community)