Community mourns loss of its Plaindealer

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/09/2020 (1849 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After a 128-year publication run, the Souris Plaindealer will no longer be appearing on local newsstands.

On Sept. 3, Glacier Media permanently shut down four regional papers in Manitoba’s southwest corner, including the Melita New Era, Reston Recorder and Deloraine Times & Star, after months of suspending their publishing schedules due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the shuttering of these papers didn’t come as a surprise to Souris reporter Darci Semeschuk, she told the Sun on Sept. 12 that the Plaindealer’s demise still serves as a big blow to the town of approximately 1,800 people.

“I’ve been with the Plaindealer for 23 years, so it’s kind of the lifeblood for our community,” she said. “Souris is a small town … and a lot of people depend on the paper, something tangible, something in their hand that they can hold and read.”

Souris Mayor Darryl Jackson was similarly disappointed with this turn of events, saying that the Plaindealer has successfully managed to connect local residents, businesses and organizations since he started living there in 1980.

“Whether it’s the Elks Lodge or the Ag Society Farmers’ Market … it was a way to let the local people know what your hours of operation are, what raffle was ongoing at the present time,” he said. “Those things are all gone now. And sure, you can replace them with posters and Facebook postings, but it’s just not the same.”

This announcement at least gave Semeschuk pause to think about all the good times she’s had reporting on various news stories in Souris, especially if that coverage coincided with local sports or school events.

“The people in town, the older folks, they loved to see the kids’ pictures in the paper,” she said. “Parents would scrapbook, and at the beginning of every year in September we would put the kindergarten kids on our front page.”

Even though this kind of content managed to attract a decent amount of readers and advertisers for a time, Semeschuk said the advent of social media ultimately cut into the Plaindealer’s bottom line, with sites like Facebook providing a free method of sharing photos and other information.

“Local advertising just dried up. Things we would depend on like classified ad pages were just gone,” she said. “Obituaries even stopped coming. The funeral home would just put them online.”

As a result, Semeschuk said the Plaindealer increasingly relied on national advertising to keep the paper afloat, even though their content still got whittled down to around eight pages.

Ultimately, the coronavirus pandemic was the final nail in the coffin for the Plaindealer, with Glacier deciding to suspend its publication in early April in the hopes of picking things up in a couple months time.

But since that re-opening will never come, a group of concerned citizens are trying to proactively salvage the decades and decades of Souris history documented in old issues of the newspaper.

This interest took the form of a recent meeting between Semeschuk, Jackson and other community representatives, who all agreed that these old issues should be properly archived for future generations.

Even though they only have access to hard copies going back as far as 1968, with most of the remaining papers being lost in a fire, Jackson thinks housing them at a site like the Glenwood and Souris Regional Library would be an optimal solution.

“We’re wondering if somebody can take that job on … and have that content in the library on a referral basis,” he said. “So if somebody wants to investigate what happened in, say, 1971 or 1979, they would have a place to go.”

Jackson thinks the prospect of reviving a community paper like the Plaindealer in Souris is a long shot without a committed financial backer.

Moving forward, the mayor is hoping that other Westman publications will attempt to fill the void left by the paper’s departure, especially after hearing that the nearby Boissevain Recorder is looking to expand its coverage to include communities like Deloraine.

“The Boissevain Recorder is independently owned and operated,” he said. “So if they saw their way to try and come up with a Deloraine section or a Souris section, I think that would be a pretty healthy alternative.”

And while Semeschuk is content with gracefully drifting off into retirement, she’s more than willing to put her reporter’s cap back on if a new opportunity to cover local news presents itself.

“People still want to know what’s going on,” she said. “Older people still want to be able to know what their grandchildren are doing or what the town is doing in general and there’s just no avenue for that anymore.”

The Plaindealer first started publishing in 1892, more than a decade before Souris was officially incorporated as a town in Westman.

 

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