As the second-generation owner of a community newspaper in Ontario, I care deeply about the future of local news in Canada. My late father Bill Adsett founded the Wellington Advertiser back in 1968. He once had the option to save money by removing delivery to a small portion of Wellington County. He refused to do so out of principle, to ensure that every citizen in Wellington County had access to the news and information contained in his paper.
Local newspapers in communities like mine have been challenged by several factors. The internet has democratized information and made it much more abundant, but that can make it hard for consumers of information to separate real news from fake news. Where local papers, like ours, and radio stations competed and reaped a pretty good profit, today companies like Google, Meta and Amazon dominate, and the economics of the news business is challenged.
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