Ottawa Citizen Closes Its Newsroom
The Ottawa Citizen closed its newsroom this week.
The presses are still in the building along with the employees who man them. However, the newsroom will now be people spread around the city, many of them in their homes.
The last count I heard was that there were 26 employees left in the newsroom. That’s a far cry from the hundreds of people it took two decades ago to put the entire paper out.
What was once the epicentre of Ottawa news coverage is now an empty shell.
The Bad Guys Are Winning The War On Journalism
Hard to say how long it will be before the newspaper and website disappear. I thought it would be about a decade ago so I’m a bad person to speculate on it now.
The Citizen was a newspaper with national aspirations that never achieved them. It was not the first place people on Parliament Hill turned for capital news. Its real audience was Mr. and Mrs. Barrhaven and had it realized that and focused on local, it might have had better long-term success. It would have captured the hearts of its readers rather than trying to be something they didn’t want. So realistically very few people care about the Citizen except the relatives of the dead who must find a place for an obit.
I remember listening to a senior editor say: “The last thing I want to work for is a (bleep) local newspaper.” Well, you got your wish. You’ll get no newspaper at all.
The Citizen had a shot at being a national newspaper when the powers-that-be had a choice of adapting the Citizen to a national stage or creating the National Post. They opted for the Post. A better choice would have been to have taken the “Ottawa” out of the Citizen name and pasted on much national and international news. Instead, the Post was created from scratch at great expense.
It was at that point the paper should have gone mega-local but it continued to be a wishy-washy amalgam that didn’t serve “capital” Ottawa or “local” Ottawa. And thus, it served no one.
None of this matters now of course. Newspapers are yesterday’s news yet nothing has really replaced them. Newsrooms, where I grew up and were fictionalized so many times in the movies, no longer exist. The lack of bonding and culture will hurt what’s left of papers badly. But survival dictates drastic action. That said, papers won’t survive.
The Citizen is a buggy-whip manufacturer after autos took over the highways.
That said, newsrooms were a hell of a great way to spend your life. I wouldn’t trade them for the world. When all else was going wrong around you, there was always the work and it was fascinating. Trying to get the bad guys for the good guys. A noble purpose. I wouldn’t trade that life for anything. Still doing it, in my own little way. Shows you how much I loved it. I’m a very lucky person.
Meanwhile the newspaper floor space is being converted into a roller-skating rink. Nothing left but the memories and even those will disappear over time.
Newspaper Employee Numbers Barely A Blip
When the Citizen stops publishing, it will be with a whimper rather than a bang. It didn’t care enough about its city and now the city doesn’t care about it.
Ken Gray
On the front, the Citizen newsroom in busier times.
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I wonder what people are going to do for their news every day. I do know a few
people who do not understand or refuse to understand how a computer works and they are not interested in learning. They don’t even own a computer. These are people who always looked forward to opening their door every day and bringing their newspaper inside to read.
Annette:
An uninformed public is a threat to democracy.
Already politicians get away with all sorts of stuff. Imagine what it will be like in the future.
cheer and thx
kgray
Another nail in the coffin! I almost wish they’d stop playing games and just get on with it. The chances of the paper surviving without a news ‘team’ are in the slim-to-none range. A scattering of people working off the corner of their kitchen table will never be a real team.
I do feel sympathy for you and others like you who worked there when it was a real paper and know what it had the potential to be had it only had the backing it needed. It would have been easier to lose it in one fell swoop rather than the drip, drip, drip of the whole being diminished bit by bit.
I realize that a newspaper needs advertisement. But when 80% of the printed content is advertisement or inserts, a newspaper become a burden. Online versions of newspapers are a poor substitute sadly… We can only hope that the many community papers around Ottawa can spruce up their game a little in providing real journalistic content, and not only a round up of the new dogs in the ‘hood.