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 This item appeared in the February, 2009 edition of The Publisher.

When Gerhard Derksen came to Saskatchewan from Russia in the early 1930s, he expected to work as a grain farmer. He could not have known he would wind up sowing an entirely different type of seed.

After abandoning his acreage in 1932 and working for a German newspaper in Steinbach, Man., until 1946, he founded an English-language weekly called the Carillon. Three generations later, the Carillon remains a Derksen publication. Gerhard’s grandson, Rick, carries the family mantle with pride.

“My grandfather saw an English newspaper as a way to develop a community in southeastern Manitoba,” says Derksen the younger.

With a loyal following of 10,500 subscribers, each paying $35 a year for the paper, the Carillon is a thriving family-owned newspaper. But Derksen says the paper has had to fight to remain competitive. “You’ve got to be a real newspaper. Gone are the days of living off the ad revenue alone. Content matters,” he says.

For most Canadian newspapers, the days of family ownership are long gone. Over the past 20 years, large media companies have consolidated almost all of the country’s daily newspapers, though the trend has been slower among weeklies. Today, about 40 per cent of weeklies and a mere handful of dailies are published independently.

Tucked away in smaller markets or dominating whole regions, these papers often have in common a sense that they owe their existence wholly to the communities where they serve, and in many cases, to the pioneering work of an intrepid founder.

Few newspaper founders embody this spirit more than Jim MacNeill, who began publishing the Eastern Graphic on a shoestring budget on Prince Edward Island in 1963. Two fires, dozens of lawsuits
and 45 years later, his son, Paul, runs Island Press Inc., which publishes four major weeklies: the
Eastern Graphic, the West Prince Graphic, the Island Farmer and the Island Classifieds. Paul’s sister
Jan handles advertising for the papers.

Like his father before him, MacNeill strives to serve the tourism- and agriculture-based communities where his newspapers are published. “We’re a reflection of the community. We’re at the hockey games, we’re in the high schools, we’re at the council meetings. We’re rocking the boat when it needs to be rocked,” he says. “If we’re doing our job properly, we’re a full-fledged partner in the community.”

Today, MacNeill still keeps his father’s name on the office door as editor and publisher of the Graphic. He says his parents are an enormous inspiration. “They had every opportunity to give up, and they should have
on a whole bunch of different occasions,” MacNeill says. “But they didn’t.”

Imbued as they often are with the spirit of a single, indomitable owner, independent newspapers have a history of intervening aggressively in public affairs. In 2007, when the Nova Scotia Workers Compensation Board balked at releasing the names of the 25 most dangerous workplaces in the province, the Halifax Chronicle Herald stepped in and eventually brought the issue to the Supreme Court.

Publisher Sarah Dennis credits the paper’s success to the intimate relationships her reporters have developed in and around Halifax. But it also helps, she jokes, inheriting four generations of Dennis family publishing.

”Over four generations, that’s a lot of time to gain trust,” she says. “We’ve been at people’s kitchen tables for many, many years.”

There may be something to that notion of trust. In the past few years, the Chronicle Herald has actually experienced an increase in readership, leading Dennis to raise daily distribution by six per cent to 112,000 copies a day in 2008. “We help take the agenda for Nova Scotians, and push to make sure they get the information they need to know,” says Dennis.

Despite being the largest independent daily in Canada, the Chronicle Herald is still a family-run shop. “I take calls at home about people that haven’t got my paper. My number’s listed in the phonebook,” laughs Dennis.

But being independent and family-run also means being doubly diligent to keep up with the times. Dennis says the paper has put a great deal of effort into building an effective and user-friendly website. “More and more people are coming to us, and we want them to use us even if we come to their house or not,” she says. “We’ve started web alerts, distributing news over e-mails, to Blackberries. Different people in different demographics get their news in different ways, so we have to have our feet in many ponds.”

Weekly independents are doing the same thing. In last year’s Better Newspapers Competition, several winners in the Best Website category were independents, including the Bridgewater Bulletin, the Fort
Frances Times, the Elmira-Woolwich Observer and the Sudbury Northern Life.

MacNeill says his company’s website, Peicanada.com, is essential to the success of his newspapers. “We’re in the news business, not the paper business,” he says. “Paper’s just a medium.”

Perhaps even more acutely than corporate-owned newspapers, many independent, family-run papers today face a heady mix of challenges, including declining advertising revenues, readership and subscription rates. Rick Derksen, for example, has watched Manitoba’s retail landscape transform over the decades.

“Years ago,” he says, “we had four hardware stores in Steinbach, 10 car dealerships and four or five grocery stores.” Now, large national chains dominate the highway exits: a single Canadian Tire, a super-grocery store and a Wal-Mart. Many of these chains have centralized contracts with major national and continental publishers. Big companies do business with other big companies, Derksen says. A reduction in retail diversity could have an impact on advertising client diversity.

But for the time being, the Derksen family heirloom is safe in Rick’s hands, and will stay there as long as the local market remain strong enough to support him.

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