Let’s Work Together To Build A Fair, Fearless And Independent News Voice In Our Greater Niagara Region – And Niagara At Large May Be Just The Place To Do It!

A Message from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

To echo the words of the late Gerry Garcia;’ What a long, strange trip it’s been.’

As Bob Dylan once sang; ‘Ah but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.’ A young and naive Doug Draper at a desk at the St. Catharines Standard – an environment reporter at the time still stupid enough to believe that daily newspapers like this one would – free and independent – might last forever. Boy, was I ever wrong.

It was 15 years ago this August that I left the newsroom at the St. Catharines Standard for the last time. I made my departure almost 19 years to the day that I began my first job as a reporter there – a job I once loved so much that for many of those years, I spent more of my waking hours buzzing back and forth between that newsroom and stories I covered than I did at home with my wife and family.

I was one of the last of many reporters, editors and photographers from The Standard, when it was still owned by the local Burgoyne family and before it fell into the clutches of Lord Conrad Black and his corporate chain machine, to leave the paper (in my case, I took a voluntary buyout following an ugly, three-week strike in the spring of 1998.

Most of us who flew the coop, including many reporters that had one many more national and provincial awards for their investigative work than I did when The Standard was still in the loving hands of a Burgoyne clan that lived in and cared about this Niagara community, knew, as I did, that the ability to do good journalistic work would never be the same under the ownership of an out-of-region chain, beholden to out-of-region shareholders.

In the years since, Niagara has unfortunately seen most of what was left of independent local daily, weekly and monthly print publications like The Downtowner, the old Thorold News under the management of Doug Youmans and the old Port Colborne Leader, another local, award-winning paper managed by Gail and Doug Todd, not to mention the St. Catharines Standard, Niagara Falls Review and Welland Tribune, gobbled up and gutted by out-of-region corporate chains.

Of course, much of what I have heard since is complaining from Niagara residents about how thin and poor these once decent sources of news for our communities have become. And I am getting sick and tired of hearing the complaints because there is something we can do about that.

For the past few years a handful of true believers in renewing quality media in this region – a few like me, if you don’t mind me saying so – have tried pilot news and commentary venues like this one, Niagara At Large, to see if we can build back what we have lost in this region when it comes to locally based, independent sources of news. And it isn’t easy.

In the next few days and weeks, I will talking to you more about what you can do to help since we can’t keep this up for free. We are going to need advertising revenue from local businesses (certainly not chain owned) and we may very well need donations or grants from people out there who understand why a local, independent news organization is important to democracy at the local, regional and national level.

So please stay tune. We will be back to you with more of what we can all do as a community of communities across this Greater Niagara Region to rebuild a fair and fearless independent media venue in the days and weeks ahead.

In the meantime, Niagara At Large invites all of you to share your views on what we can do in the comment area below. Please remember that NAL, unlike what you might call “blogs”, does not post comments by anonymous or pseudonym sources. We only post views from individuals who care and dare to share their real first and last names.