The Sentinel Courier
Pilot Mound, Manitoba
“For about 70 years, residents of the Clearwater catchment area have been paying a levy which supports their community hall,” reports newspaper publisher Susan Peterson in the February 27, 2018 edition of the Sentinel Courier.
“Council felt it was time that the residents of Pilot Mound also supported [their community hall] by way of a small levy.”
If you’re a property owner in Pilot Mound, Manitoba, who missed the recent council hearing, you might not know the levy applies to you—unless you subscribe to your weekly newspaper.
The Sentinel Courier in Pilot Mound has printed local news for nearly 140 years, and Peterson plans to keep it that way. Deliberately eschewing a major online presence, the Sentinel Courier is one of the few remaining news outlets in Canada that circulate all their news stories offline.
People love seeing the cut lines, says Peterson, who marks her tenth year as owner this fall.
“They love seeing themselves in their paper,” she laughed. “If it’s their kids that are in the paper, [it] gets cut out and put in the baby book. You can’t cut that out of Facebook, you know? It’s more permanent.”
Like most local print publications, the paper’s advertising revenue and classifieds section suffered with the rise of Facebook and Google. Manitoban winters also slow sales.
“In January and February on the Prairies, there’s not a lot—the farmers can’t advertise anything and it’s not a big time of year for real estate.”
Fortunately, its loyal subscriber base of about 1,100 ensures the newspaper goes out each and every Tuesday. Peterson says the small-town paper has subscribers throughout North America—and even one in France.
“They leave here and they want their hometown news,” explains Peterson of her dedicated readers. “And as they age, they may be considering retiring back here, so they want to know what’s going on.”
As the only full-time staff member of the paper, Peterson says she’s been “training” community members to “submit news tips, little stories, and photos” for publication.
Neither she nor her two part-time staff members has formal journalism training. In fact, Peterson had never planned on being a newspaper publisher until she was approached to buy the Courier before a corporate publisher could snatch it up.
“It wasn’t something I really wanted to do, but I felt like the community was going to lose it if I didn’t, so I took the plunge and bought it.”
A decade later, Peterson still enjoys seeing people line up at the post office every Tuesday to get their copies.
“They sit outside the post office and read this paper. It’s awesome.”
While Peterson believes “small Canadian newspapers are very powerful,” she does worry about the impact of misinformation online.
“People take for granted that what they see on Facebook is the truth,” she says. There is fake news, she says, and it lives online.
“In a newspaper, my reputation is on the line if I print something that could hurt somebody.”
From eroding advertising revenue to altering reading habits, the impact that the internet has had on most print publishers is cause for pessimism, but Peterson is convinced that community papers are here to stay.
“We are trusted,” she says, by virtue of what it means to be a small-town paper.
“The Winnipeg Free Press has its credibility because of its size and its number of subscribers, but we have a different kind of credibility because the people who read our paper know us as individuals.”
While she concedes it may take some time “for the younger generation” to see things her way, she says she strongly believes that people will rely on newspapers for advertising and news stories and content that they know they can trust.
“They’ll come to that realization,” she says, “unless Facebook becomes more accountable for the stuff that is on there—which it won’t.”
- Cara Sabatini
