A white sign reading "Come get your Gleaner" in English and French points to a stack of newspapers.
A stack of the Sept. 11, 2019 edition of The Gleaner. This was the third edition published by volunteers in the community.

More than 250 media outlets closed across Canada from 2008 to 2019, according to a 2019 study by the Local News Research Project. A small Quebec paper, The Gleaner, nearly joined them.

Established in 1863, The Gleaner serves a string of rural communities in the Chateauguay Valley, west of Montreal, sandwiched by the St. Lawrence River to the north and the U.S. border to the south. The population is approximately 46,000, with about 26,570 French-speaking residents and 13,765 English-speaking residents, according to the 2011 census.

Instead of closing The Gleaner in November 2018, the newspaper’s owner, Gravité Média, reached out to Stéphane Billette, the local National Assembly of Quebec member at the time. Gravité asked if the community once served by The Gleaner would like to own the paper’s rights, says Hugh Maynard, the chairperson of The Gleaner’s steering committee.

The Gleaner steering committee, including Andrew Stairs, left, Gail Elliott, Lorelei Muller, Hugh Maynard, John Ryan, Stacey Pennington, Sarah Rennie, Emily Southwood, and Chantal Hortop formed after a community meeting on the future of the paper in November 2018.

Billette contacted Maynard, who then called a public meeting, inviting the Chateauguay Valley community through email, word of mouth and Facebook. Nearly 40 people attended the meeting and the non-profit organization Chateauguay Valley Community Information Services (CVCIS) was formed with Maynard as the executive director. 

Gravité Média sold the newspaper rights to CVCIS. As a symbolic gesture, CVCIS paid just $1.

“We had a number of people who stepped in due to their value of the newspaper rather than having any experience working in communications or journalism,” Hortop says. “They just felt strongly that The Gleaner had to keep going and if there was a way to do it with community effort, we were going to make it happen.”

Like many publications across Canada, The Gleaner has been passed from media chain to media chain following a series of mergers and acquisitions. Until 1985, the publication was a proudly locally-owned newspaper. But since its sale to Quebec-based media chain Les Hebdos Montérégiens, the publication has been moved between competing companies. The paper was sold to Quebecor in 2011 then Transcontinental in 2013. In 2015, The Gleaner became an eight-page insert in the regional, free-distribution weekly Journal le Saint-François. In 2017, when Journal le Saint-François was sold to the regional media company Gravité Média, The Gleaner’s eight-page insert went with it. 

On June 5, The Gleaner re-launched with the first print edition since it was sold to CVCIS, printing 5,000 copies. Volunteers handed out the revived paper from a booth at the Huntingdon Fair, says Lorelei Muller, committee member and former non-profit executive director.

The reaction to The Gleaner’s re-emergence has been positive, she says.

“I have seen more than one person hug the newspaper,” Muller says. “It is our valley news. It is what connects us. If something big happens in the area, sure CTV or CBC or whoever is going to cover something big, but they don’t have our day to day stuff; our regular community news.”

Coverage of the local candidates running in the federal election was particularly important for the community, Hortop says. The paper ran a two-page election spread in the September edition.  

For Cathy MacFarlane Dunn, 68, The Gleaner has been a part of her life since she could read it, starting at around 6 years old.

A few years ago, after The Gleaner became part of the Journal le Saint-François, Dunn returned from a summer away in Texas. She’d been visiting her daughter and hadn’t kept up with the news at home online or by phone. Soon after she returned, she ran into an acquaintance and asked how her parents were doing.

Dunn says her friend “just went white,” explaining that her parents had been killed in a car crash a month prior. Dunn hadn’t heard the news.

“I just felt terrible,” she says.

The loss of the local paper meant she didn’t hear about deaths, births, weddings or community events.

The Gleaner was the link that kept us all connected. So I am thoroughly over the moon with excitement that it is coming back,” Dunn says.

Three older white women, one standing and two sitting on comfy chairs, read copies of The Gleaner paper outside.
Residents read the August edition of The Gleaner at the Huntingdon Fair.

Since that first edition, the volunteers published in August and September. On October 9, they formalized the non-profit organization and elected a board of directors, Maynard says.

In those first three editions, members of the steering committee took on several roles to get the paper out.

With experience in the non-profit world, Muller took on administrative tasks as well as selling ads and writing stories. She has some experience writing promotional copy but no background in journalism. Volunteers with journalism experience—Sarah Rennie and Emily Southwood—made sure the stories were polished.

“I have a tendency to bury the lede,” Muller says.

The new board of directors will formulate a plan for more serious issues such as complaints or libel, according to Muller. The team also hopes that contributors will be paid for their work going forward.

“It is becoming more clear that this cannot continue as a completely volunteer endeavour,” Muller says. Hortop, for example, spent a week laying out the paper. But advertising and community fundraising has covered printing costs with funds left over, which should make payment possible, Muller says.

There are similar non-profit community news models in Canada, says John Hinds, president of News Media Canada. Employees bought the Prince Albert Daily Herald in Saskatchewan in 2017. La Presse in Quebec is owned by a social trust and operates with a non-profit model, the Montreal Gazette reported in 2018.

“It is certainly a trend we are seeing,” Hinds says. “I think The Gleaner is the most advanced in terms of really getting that community ownership model going.”

The board’s next steps are to facilitate The Gleaner being printed bi-weekly starting in January 2020, as well as publishing weekly updates online. The main challenge will be securing 1,500 paid subscribers to be able to move forward with this plan, Maynard says. Once the paper is up and running, the board will work towards expanding their financial model.

In the past, many small town newspapers ran printing presses and generated revenue from advertising sales, Maynard says. This is no longer the case.

“The golden days of newspapers are gone.”

When asked if he thinks The Gleaner model is sustainable, Maynard is cautiously optimistic.

“Ask me in a year – did we make it?”

Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled Lorelei Muller’s surname. The RRJ regrets this error. 

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About the author

Karen Longwell quit her full-time journalism job in community news in 2018 to pursue a master of journalism. She is the visual editor at the Ryerson Review of Journalism. Her stories have appeared in the Toronto Star, National Post and in community newspapers across the country. Recently, she has been on the cannabis beat and is passionate about climate change, social justice and international issues. She works hard but is easily distracted by online cat videos and chocolate.

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