REFLECTION: A year of (not really) covering King Township

We’ve been quietly making a difference, 1 story at a time.

Yorkregion.com
Jan. 2, 2020
Sheila Wang

How many reporters do you think should be assigned to cover a community of more than 24,000 people? One? Two?

In King Township, you’ve got one third -- sometimes one fourth -- of me as your local reporter who struggles to squeeze time from my other beats to keep readers informed.

From stories on the council's updating the Official Plan to its declaring climate emergency, I looked through council agendas, spoke with Mayor Steve Pellegrini and talked to residents on a number of major decisions and issues in King over the past year.

But there’s something severely lacking in my reporting.

Beyond the consequential motions and prominent accomplishments touted by the political leaders, I felt I missed out on so many others: the wonderful people who gave back to the community, and the fun community events that locals take pride in and the residents' concerns that need to be heard.

There wasn’t a time I didn’t come back with a good story idea every time I went to King.

There wasn’t a time I wasn’t sidetracked by something bigger and more urgent when I was working on a King story.

I’ve learned, in time, to put my tingle of excitement for King stories at ease and move them down on my priority list, knowing I may never get the satisfaction of finishing some of the stories that I started.

This unfortunately is a daily reality that I and many other local journalists have to deal with in our lean-staffed newsroom amid the decline of the global news industry.

Despite media companies’ best efforts to cope with the rise of social media and the changing reading habits, the news industry has undergone yet another perfect storm of challenges: job cuts, publication closures and shrinking newsrooms.

On Dec. 20, Canadians had their last chance to read a print version of StarMetro, Torstar Corp.’s long-standing free daily newspapers.

The closures of these dailies -- a move to cut costs and a step further to go digital -- resulted in a loss of 73 employees including 30 journalists.

For those of us who stayed, the responsibilities on our shoulders have become that much heavier and the job has become that much harder.

We're all stretched too thin. We're all trying.

Just like it takes time for habitual print readers to get used to consuming news online, it also takes time for a community newsroom like ours to adapt to the new electronic world and deliver the best content possible to readers in the best way possible.

Even with the humble reach of King Connection newspaper, we’ve been quietly making a difference, one story at a time.

I remember visiting the co-operative Old Mill Art Gallery, nestled in the historical Old Feed Mill, in November 2018 when it first opened as a pop-up store in Schomberg.

The superb artwork, the passionate artists and the charming old store itself. What’s not to like?

The story really wrote itself.

To my surprise, it also drew a great number of customers, art lovers and artists from near and afar to the declining Main Street which has kept the temporary gallery live and thriving for more than a year now.

If this is what it did for a local store, imagine how much more it can do for the community.

To help us to get through the turbulent times, you can register on yorkregion.com, share our articles, tell your friends about us, and better yet, tell me a story.

We'll keep trying.