The Chatham Voice just lost a competitor and the community just lost another platform of fact-based journalism.
For our nearly 13 years of existence, we’ve looked at Chatham-Kent This Week as our prime competition. We’re both community newspapers and we served a similar market.
Several years back, they went from just delivering in Chatham to throwing newspapers at the end of driveways across Chatham-Kent. It replaced the Pennysaver as that corporation’s flyer carrier.
More recently, they closed their local offices during the Covid pandemic and never reopened them. Then they laid off all their advertising staff. Their page count shrank as the corporate decisions made somewhere up Highway 401 set off a slow death spiral.
And that spiral has apparently come to its end. Thankfully, at first glance, it appears no news-gathering jobs will be lost.
We aren’t here to gloat. We’ve worked hard to be an important part of the news and information market in Chatham-Kent. The Voice came about in no small part because we didn’t like the direction that corporate print media was headed. Heck, many of us had lived in it.
We’re old school. We believe in a commitment to our readers and advertisers. We have local ownership and a local office that’s open to the public. And we still answer the phone.
Is the printed newspaper dead? Not by a long shot. We believe in delivering local news and information that matters to our readers. And our readers have strongly supported us since Day One here at The Voice. A number of advertisers quickly realized our commitment to local content meant strong readership and lots of eyeballs on their ads. We’ve slowly grown over the years into what we are today.
Our readers are not just members of some knitting club (and we’re proud to say we’ve been chided by quilters and knitters alike, as they are great people), as some off-base corporate radio ad claims. When you offer local news and opinion, and aren’t under any corporate marching orders, you can gain the respect of the citizens.
The Chatham Voice has never been in more demand, never printed more papers, than we are today. The newspaper industry is not dead; independent community newspapers are alive and well across the province and across Canada.
We thank everyone for their support through the years and just want to say we have no plans on going anywhere anytime soon.
