It’s been three-and-a-half years since the Guelph Mercury last published, but for many people in our community, the loss feels as fresh today as it did on January 30, 2016. What a community looks like without a daily paper, and how it gets its news without that baseline has been a frequent topic of discussion, and it was again last week at the Guelph Civic Museum.

The Museum has two exhibits on now called “B&W and Read All Over” and “The Dailies: Front Pages & Frontispieces.” The former is about the Mercury itself, and the later reveals how the Mercury contextualized national and global events for local readers. For decades newspapers have provided this important context for our lives, but what do we do in a world with fewer and fewer newspapers?

This question, and many, many more, was put to a panel of local experts last Wednesday at the Guelph Civic Museum, and Guelph Politico‘s Adam A. Donaldson was one of them. Along with former Mercury and GuelphToday.com reporter Rob O’Flanagan, senior research associate at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and former Mercury journalist Stephanie MacLellan, Waterloo Region Record photojournalist Mathew McCarthy, graphic novelist and cartoonist Seth, there was a conversation about “Newspapers Past, Present and Future?” Former Guelph Mercury managing editor Phil Andrews moderated.

This week’s podcast is the some 90-minute discussion that flowed from that question. The panel covered a wide variety of topics including what we lose with the closure of newspaper offices, the effect of losing community newspapers on our discourse and on our democracy, and what the future of local journalism might look like and how we’re going to pay for it.

So let’s talk about the past, present and future of local media on this week’s edition of the Guelph Politicast!

“B&W and Read All Over“ and “The Dailies: Front Pages & Frontispieces” can be found at the Guelph Civic Museum during business hours – Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm – from now until September.

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