The paNOW Family Expands … to the Northeast!
Karl Johnston, Publisher
We have some ‘good’ news to share with you, our valued readers and advertisers! Today, the paNOW family launched a sister site in the ‘northeast’: serving Melfort, Tisdale, Nipawin and surrounding areas. This community information portal has taken a page out of the paNOW, battlefordsNOW, meadowlakeNOW and saskNOW playbook and can be found online at northeastNOW.com. We invite you to share the news with your friends and family on social media. The good news doesn’t stop there. Having noted the success of paNOW, our new owner, The Jim Pattison Broadcast Group continues to take the format across western Canada. Today you will find similar sites in Kamloops, Lethbridge, Nanaimo, Red Deer, Medicine Hat and soon Prince George!
All this is happening against a backdrop of bad news for the media industry. Community newspapers continue to close in Canada. In the past two years, the big media companies like Post Media and Bell have slashed hundreds of jobs nation-wide. We’re not immune from this trend here at home. In our own neighborhood, the community newspaper in Hudson Bay and La Ronge have suddenly closed and you can expect more as community newspapers ‘right size’. The Prince Albert CTV station has quietly eliminated jobs, shuttered its studios, moved production of the noon news cast from Prince Albert to Saskatoon and relocated to a strip mall. PA’s daily print paper limps along – a shell of its former self with fewer staff and even fewer pages. A year ago, it was sold and the new owner has publicly stated he can’t seem to figure out how to make a printed paper work so they’ve cut back more and reduced distribution to rural communities to cut costs. If that wasn’t bad enough, the community newspaper in North Battleford ran a front-page headline stating there was no news worth reporting that week so ran nothing!
The expansion of the NOW brand across western Canada is one example why we shouldn’t give up hope for the survival of local journalism. Over the past 5 years paNOW has proven an audience still exists for local reporting and community information. We’ve also demonstrated that local advertisers are more than willing to join with us and follow readers from the printed paper to a new platform. The fact is readers don’t care any less now than they did before about what’s happening in their community. What has changed is the way readers choose to consume that information. We still want to know what’s going on, we just don’t want to wait to ‘read all about it ‘tomorrow’ or ‘next week’. It’s the same reason we now order up recent release movies from our living room versus trudging down to the local video store on a winter night (remember that?). We’re not watching fewer movies (we’re watching more) we’re just watching them differently. Today’s consumers have a choice and most want it now. More accurately, they want to consume information on their schedule and when they need it, not on the media company’s production schedule.