About a month ago, I received an email from the editor of At Home On the North Shore magazine (where my Field Notes column has appeared for the past two and a half years), letting me know that, despite the bottom dropping out of print media because of the pandemic-related shutdown, she was not shouting “Stop the presses!” There would be a summer issue.
But it won’t happen without some juggling.
“A lot of the stories we already had in the works because we shoot a year in advance for our cover stories,” Crystal said over the phone from her home in Pictou County. “We’re mindful of the stories we have in production for all of our magazines because a lot of them are no longer relevant. We’ve pulled content because they were stories about all the wonderful things to do in Atlantic Canada during the summer.”
Despite the recent opening of trails and the expansion of gatherings to ten people, Crystal said the summer issue couldn’t tell people to go to the beach, make reservations at a B&B or attend a music festival.
“Many of the things we celebrate in our communities and are the fodder for our editorial content, we can’t promote right now,” she said.
Not only that, some of the people interviewed and photographed a year ago for cover stories decided they’re no longer comfortable with the subject matter in light of the current situation, and also as a result of the tragedy in April.
“We are putting stories out that we collected pre-pandemic,” Crystal said. “We’re prefacing some of them and letting people know when the story was curated. And now the stories in the front of the magazine are about turning your shelter into a sanctuary, homes into havens.”
Along with being the editor of At Home, Crystal is also the President of Advocate Media, one of Atlantic Canada’s oldest and largest media companies. It publishes six community newspapers and 26 magazines, including East Coast Living and Saltscapes (for which I also write).
She said the pandemic has had a significant impact on the company since newspapers and magazines are revenue-based, and advertising dropped away almost immediately.
“One of the first things we knew we were going to have to do was downsize our organization. That was a really tough thing for us to do because even though six newspapers and 26 magazines sounds like a big organization, from a human capital perspective, it’s really not,” she said. “We’re a very tight-knit media family. It hurt to have to lay off staff we consider family.”
But Advocate Media decided to keep publishing, particularly the community newspapers (which cover Tatamagouche, Truro, Pictou, the South Shore, a wide area around Port Hawkesbury including Antigonish, and Saint John, NB) even with reduced staff.
“Some other media organizations decided to stop most of their print publications and shift to digital-only properties but because we feel so connected to our communities, we wanted to do everything possible to maintain our print products in as many markets as we are able.”
Crystal said in times of crisis, community journalism is needed even more to tell the stories of those communities.
“It’s one thing to be able to turn on a national broadcast and get statistics and understand what the Prime Minister is saying about the current situation, but how it’s affecting your neighbour, how it’s affecting your local businesses? Those are the stories we’re focused on in our communities.”
She admitted the decision to keep publishing means the company is struggling.
“When we made the decision to continue with our print products, we really made ourselves more vulnerable from a sustainability perspective because the advertising just isn’t there.”
There is an advertising-to-editorial ratio for publishing (for example, every page needs an ad on it to pay for the page) so with ads almost non-existent, there are fewer pages being printed.
“But where our newspapers are weekly community newspapers, and because of our digital platforms, we can still be daily, if not hourly,” Crystal explained. “Technology has given us more to work with but we still felt our historic presence in these communities is our print products. It’s getting tougher every day to do this but we want to continue to make those products available to our readers.”
She’s hoping when everything returns to “some sort of normal”, the readers and advertisers will remember that their local newspapers continued to be there for them.
I asked Crystal how, as a journalist and editor of a magazine focusing on the north shore of Nova Scotia, she sees the impact of the pandemic on her community where she lives and works.
She paused for a long time before she answered.
“I think the answer you’ll get from anybody right now is that it’s tough,” she told me. “The pandemic has consumed almost every part of our daily lives.”
She went on to say, “For me, as a journalist, I’m curious about how we are going to emerge from this, how we are going to land on our feet. The stories I really love to tell are the stories about the opportunities rather than the stories about the crisis – the stories of the ways people have come together and supported each other.”
She wondered how we, as communities, as businesses and industries, and as humans, are going to find the right new balance after the pandemic passes.
“I’m really hoping that, in our part of the world, we’re going to be mindful of the sustainability we need but still find a way to engage in business, build our communities, and have our citizens live with dignity,” she said. “I hope we emerge from this as decent human beings, as people who are mindful of the way we do business, and the way we take of each other and take care of our planet.”
~ By Sara Jewell
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