Just A Gal From Glidden: Still moving things a hair to the left

By Kate Winquist

In May, we did something that doesn't sound like good business.

We stopped asking people in our core market to pay for a subscription and started putting Your West Central Voice into every household we could reach.

Our circulation went from 1,600 to 4,000. Two and a half times more homes.

Giving away more newspapers when printing and delivery costs keep climbing isn't exactly what they teach at Harvard Business School.

But I could see where things were headed. We could keep asking people to pay for their local paper and watch readership slide a little more every year, or we could change the model.

So I chose more readers.

More households. More people seeing the stories, the photos, the anniversaries, the fundraisers, the rodeos, the businesses and the ordinary people doing extraordinary little things that would never make the evening news.

And yes, more potential customers seeing the advertisements that pay for all of it.

That's the part I sometimes wonder if people understand.

Local journalism isn't free. Someone has to pay Stu and Ian to decipher the council meetings. Someone has to drive to the event. Someone has to take the photograph. Someone has to write the story, edit it, lay it out, print the paper and get it into your mailbox.

And that someone is ultimately supported by the businesses that advertise with us.

It's a funny little ecosystem we've built over the past hundred-and-some years. Local businesses support their local newspaper. The local newspaper promotes those businesses. Together we tell the story of the place all of us are trying to make a living in.

I don't expect anyone to advertise with us out of sympathy. I don't want them to.

We have a responsibility to earn every advertising dollar entrusted to us. That's why the circulation number mattered so much to me. If a business spends $300 with us, I want that ad in front of as many people as I can possibly put it in front of.

I'd also like it to look like it was made for this town.

That's the old graphic designer talking. Actually, there's no "old" about it, and no "maybe" either.

I spent three years in college training to be a visual communicator and more than 36 years trying to make a living at it. I've pasted up newspapers, developed negatives, done colour separations by hand, designed ads, sold ads, taken photos, written stories, answered phones, delivered papers and learned more computer programs than I care to remember. PageMaker to Creative Cloud, with a lot of stops in between.

I've adapted. Boy, have I adapted.

And I'm adapting again. I use AI most days. It sorts spreadsheets for me, helps me dig through research, and saves me an hour here and there on the parts of this business nobody sees. It's a good tool in trained hands, the way a camera is a good tool in trained hands. I'm not interested in pretending otherwise.

What worries me isn't the technology. It's the template.

Scroll Facebook for ten minutes and you'll see the same smiling strangers, the same perfect lighting, the same words floating in little bubbles. The same ad for a business in Kindersley and a business in Kamloops. Nothing in it is from here. Nobody in it is from here.

That's not our local business owners doing that. They're the ones getting sold the template. They're running the store, doing the books, coaching the team and trying to squeeze a Facebook post in somewhere before ten o'clock at night. I have nothing but respect for that.

The template comes from somewhere else. It always has.

And a tool can produce something in five minutes. What it can't do is know that the family in the photo lost their barn last spring, or that the name on the sign is spelled Reimer and not Reimar, or that the ad should feel like harvest around here and not harvest anywhere.

That takes a person who knows the place.

Thirty-six years later, I still move something a hair to the left because it bothers me.

Nobody else will notice. I know that. But I will.

And maybe that's what I'm really afraid of losing. Not newspapers. Not graphic designers. Not even the old ways of doing things, because I've watched plenty of those disappear already.

I'm afraid we're starting to lose our appreciation for the human being behind the work. The person who learned the craft. The person who knows the community. The person who cares whether the name is spelled right, whether the photo tells the story, and whether something should move that hair to the left.

Technology will keep changing. So will newspapers. And apparently, so will I.

I just hope there's still room in all that progress for people who care enough to fuss over the details.

Because I'm not quite ready to let AI have all the fun.