- by Pat Kelly
Everybody understands the power of the Globe and Mail or the National Post but less recognized and appreciated is the power of the Owen Sound Hub and the dozens of other small, community newspapers just like it across Ontario.
There are clear reasons why the Hub and others continue to thrive - because the smaller the community, the more important its newspaper.
Small towns and cities in rural Ontario face a litany of challenges: increasing crisis in affordable housing and homelessness, substance abuse and mental health, access to family doctors, nurses and hospitals, climate crisis, out-migration of youth, demographic trends, and political marginalization. Local insights about these issues would be lost in large national news outlets like the G&M or the Post. And in the face of these serious problems, you might wonder what it is that holds small rural communities together when larger urban areas, with greater resources and media attention, struggle to find answers.
Why are many small rural Ontario communities like Owen Sound that are facing these complex issues still seen as great places to live and of high value and importance to their residents? What is it that solidly roots us in our communities?
In Owen Sound, the Hub is making a major contribution to the bonding and bridging of the social capital of our local community.
The Hub has earned a reputation for trustworthiness as an unbiased newspaper that consistently raises local issues and follows them over time, offering evidence-informed consideration of alternative solutions, and helping to set a climate of public civil discourse that encourages public engagement and ideas to support innovation.
The Hub reporting provides a mirror for the local community to see our values and norms reflected in its reporting of numerous local community-led events regarding Reconciliation, housing and homelessness, economic development, opioid overdoses, hospital closures, doctor recruitment, and municipal government policies and spending. It offers affordable advertising space for local businesses and volunteer community organizations and promotes options for reimaging our communities' future.
They provide an important space for local private citizens to publish editorials, letters to the editor and opinion pieces that provide significant platforms for public debate and comment about local issues, as well as being a space for expatriates who wish to keep up with their home communities.
With the pervasive dominance of the national and regional print and electronic media, the local focus for the Owen Sound Hub ensures there is oversight of the municipal government and local health and school boards – which otherwise have no opposition critics. The Hub puts issues into the public arena in a way that enables our local community to retain a sense of separate identity and to help ensure public policy and decision-making reflect local goals and values.
There’s a fishbowl effect in small towns, and its newspaper is often its lightning rod. It may be praised one week and demonized the next. The editor and staff are not living at arms-length from their reporting. They are also our neighbours. They go to the fishing derby and the local coffee shop, they buy and eat at local shops, they stop to chat in the grocery store and are always there to volunteer at community functions or stop to shake hands or just wave in passing.
What’s important is that our local newspaper and its staff are respected, and it is even more important that they are trusted.
The Owen Sound Hub is at the heart of our small rural area, providing an essential service and connecting readers with the information we need about what is happening in our neighbourhoods and our community.
They are helping to build and maintain the connections of trust necessary to create a more equitable, healthy, and thriving Owen Sound.
