With a little luck and know-how, you can do a lot with a shoelace.
In a pinch, a shoelace can help you start a fire, tie a tourniquet, even climb a tree.
Thanks to our growing list of subscribers, donors and advertisers, the Haida Gwaii News has a fine shoelace budget shaping up.
Last week, both the Globe and Mail and CBC Business spoke with Stacey, Vince, and me about why we started a print newspaper and how it’s going to work.
It’s a sign of how rare local news is that our tiny paper got national attention.
Between Stacey and me, I’m usually the half-empty half in this outfit, so let me point out the grisly details.
According to a recent tally by the Local News Research Project, a study run by the journalism department at Toronto Metropolitan University, 521 local news outlets closed across Canada between 2008 and June of this year. Falling ad rates are mainly to blame, and higher inflation can’t help.
But we are not the only ones crazy enough to think newspapers have some life left.
Over in the Robson Valley, some wonderfully stubborn people started The Rocky Mountain Goat News in 2010, and their weekly paper covers a population similar to Haida Gwaii’s. Their office now has a small photo studio and bookshop, too.
In Saskatchewan, the publisher of the Moosomin World-Spectator says business is the best it’s been in 20 years, and not because they are hosting dance parties or mining Bitcoin on the side — they have more subscribers signing up and local business ads brightening the pages.
True to its ambitious name, the World-Spectator has gone well outside the 2,500-strong town of Moosomin in recent years, with the publisher filing stories home from Afghanistan, the Philippines and Vietnam.
There are other examples, many of them former chain-owned newspapers that were on the brink of folding before their reporters bought them out.
Maybe the only secret is that reporters will work on a shoestring. But a shoestring is pretty handy for keeping you on your feet.