Nearly two months ago, New Westminster lost a newspaper that’s served this community for more than 35 years when Glacier Media closed the New Westminster Record, Burnaby NOW and Tri-City News.
I was a reporter at the Record and NOW for more than a decade.
For years, my colleagues and I told stories about these cities you couldn’t find anywhere else, stories about scholarship winners, new local businesses, the Canada Games Pool replacement, the new high school, traffic problems, giant pumpkins, city budgets, bike lanes, new school programs, and on and on.
The Record is gone, but we don’t want to stop telling these stories.
That’s why we are launching a newspaper to fill the void.
I am joining with veteran Record reporter Theresa McManus and longtime Tri-City News reporters Mario Bartel and Janis Cleugh to form an independent, non-profit news organization serving New Westminster, Burnaby and the Tri-Cities starting this Fall.
Between us we have more than 100 years of community news experience.
Besides just wanting to get back out there and report, we also believe passionately in the importance of local news.
Done well, we believe it’s a cornerstone of Canadian democracy, bringing accountability to the public institutions that most impact our daily lives: local school boards, city councils, local police, the courts.
But local papers are disappearing at an alarming rate, as we have seen here in New West.
When I started at the Record, there were two local papers in this city publishing two times a week each. Now there are none. The corporate model is no longer working for local news.
We need new solutions, and my colleagues and I are working to build one right here in New West.
Our organization will be worker owned and focused on serving the community instead of generating profits to service corporate debt or pay shareholders who don’t live here.
It would be the first of its kind in Western Canada, but the model has already proven successful elsewhere.
In 2019, six daily newspapers in Quebec were saved from when a newly formed co-op (Coopérative nationale de l’information indépendante) took them over from their corporate owner, which had filed for bankruptcy.
The response to our own endeavour here in B.C. has been overwhelming. The first phase of our Save Our Local News fundraising campaign, launched earlier this month, has already generated nearly $27,000.
But launching a newspaper will take more than that, so over the coming months, we will be taking our message to the community, engaging residents, local business owners, community leaders and politicians at every level in an effort to secure the support we’ll need to save local news in Burnaby, New West and the Tri-Cities – and maybe even build a model that could work in other communities across the country.
Do you want to help save local news in New Westminster? There’s lots you can do.
Donate to our campaign, sign up to volunteer, register to become a subscriber, commit to placing ads in our paper if you are a local business owner.
With your help, we can put the community back into community news.
Cornelia Naylor
New Westminster, BC
