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Working with weathered pencils

Two months, 13 emails, at least that many phone calls and conversations and an unanswered, drawn-out last message I describe as going nuclear.

Two months, 13 emails, at least that many phone calls and conversations and an unanswered, drawn-out last message I describe as going nuclear.

That is how much effort I have tried to expend to figure out: what exactly is the situation with recreation and programming at Calling Lake?

The Municipal District of Opportunity, after all, made cuts across the municipality to come into balance this year. That should have traceable impacts on programming everywhere. But unfortunately, my request for more information has been repeatedly pushed aside or ignored. By a councillor’s own admission, recent staff turnovers make my questions difficult to answer.

Sadly, the issues evident at the Municipal District of Opportunity are just one more story I will be unable to tackle as I depart.

In an era of local news downsizing, our newsrooms are often stretched thin. In rural locales, like other services, we might be the only newspaper in a significant geographic area. Covering everything with appropriate depth with a two or three person editorial staff becomes impossible.

There is no newspaper in Calling Lake. We’re the closest shot and with three other municipalities, a school board and more to cover, holding the MD to account and digging into its problems is difficult. Unless the province feels the need to step in, their problems can remain buried.

This and many other stories are something I wanted to address, but could not as I depart the Athabasca Advocate. In my final weeks, things could not align to make everything I wanted to do happen.

In Whitecourt, where I used to work, the town and neighbouring county were charged this month with 18 offences under the Environmental Protection Act for issues with the landfill stemming from 2016. Small whispers of issues at the landfill came through our newsroom. Downsizing and limited newsroom resources meant we had little chance of bringing their alleged crimes to light sooner.

Issues like these are why local news matters so much. We are an easy thing to take for granted or to let wither and die in a rapidly evolving media landscape. But we serve a vital role in telling the stories of our communities and holding the locally powerful to account. It’s something news outlets in big cities could never hope to accomplish in our towns with near the same degree of accuracy, depth and understanding.

With our challenges, we cannot hope to cover everything. But the local news will always try to cover as much as we can and address what injustices we can manage.

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