Make that 12.
Twelve Sun Media newspapers shuttered since last fall. The latest casualty this week - the Dresden-Bothwell Leader-Spirit in Southern Ontario.
Not a large newspaper, but community to the hilt with solid advertising support as we discovered in this online copy of a printed issue from April:
http://issuu.com/sunmediachatham/docs/leader_spirit_apr._13
Twenty pages. Solid community effort. Sad that effort is not worthy of Sun Media's stable of newspapers.
If this is a Sun Media link, it might soon be deleted, as was the link to the newspaper's website.
The Leader-Spirit doesn't have a history of 100 or so years, as many of the Sun Media casualties had, but it did have devoted readers and advertisers.
Internet sources say The Dresden Leader, originally known as the North Kent Leader, was founded in 1965 by Ted Misselbrook and Gord Clauws. The Spirit of Bothwell was launched in 1992 by Jim Kish. They merged in 2008.
As we've suggested before, independent dailies and weeklies owned and managed by many of the hundreds of laid off media employees could be the answer for journalists, advertisers and readers.
Print is where the money is and not all advertisers and readers have abandoned the format. To appease generations young and old, quality community print/online newspapers out of the grasps of out-of-touch conglomerates make sense.
That is why we are rooting for the Chatham Voice, recently launched and sounding like a keeper.
Sitting here thinking of the very talented Sun people pink-slipped over the past two decades leaves us wondering why more of the men and women haven't launched independent newspapers.
We'd subscribe to any community newspaper offering the talents of Mark Bonokoski (Bancfoft), John Downing (Toronto), Gary Dunford (wherever he hangs his hat), Moira MacDonald (Toronto), Bill Brioux (Brampton) etc.
The writers, photographers, editors and execs out there wondering what to do next would do justice to communities abandoned, or neglected, by the conglomerates.
All you have to do is commit to the "community" 100%, working there, living there, eating there, playing there.