Heather Wright
The Independent
It’s been 11 years since the closure of The Northerner in La Ronge but its impacts are still being felt; this time in a song about the importance of community newspapers.
An Ontario folk-roots trio with ties to La Ronge, has penned a song about the importance of small town newspapers written by Kyle Faulkner, the groups guitar player and vocalist.
Faulkner says the idea for the song comes from his life in La Ronge, Saskatchewan. He and his wife moved there for work and quickly became part of the community.
“The word community actually meant something out there, people looking out for each other, and everybody helping each other out, and celebrating small group things and small individual things that might go unnoticed in bigger cities,” he said. That was reflected in the pages of The Northerner. “It really was kind of a way of keeping a record of those things and being able to look back.”
In Aug. 2015, The Northerner stopped running off the presses, stunning the town.
“It really struck me … talking to people in that had lived there their whole lives, and especially some of the elders in the community, how distraught they were – they felt like their voice was gone.”
Recently, Cabin Fever, based out of Lambton, Ontario, received a grant to record a video for the song No Back Page.
They approached Will Ronholm to shoot it and came to their hometown newspaper The Independent of Petrolia and Central Lambton to make a connection with Huron Web, where the Petrolia weekly newspaper has been printed for over a decade. The group wanted to record the song while the presses rolled.
Huron Web President Chris Cook says while the idea was unusual, he said yes, allowing Faulkner, upright bassist and vocalist Jessica McKay and Colin Jolly, the trio’s mandolin player, to use the floor of the plant.
Each week, 45 community papers roll off the presses, so Cook understands the love of the printed word.
“Community newspapers are important,” Cook said. “They’re the fabric of the community.”
Faulker agrees. “Our small-town newspaper was one of the staples of the community. And then, the publication ended,” a cost-cutting measure by a large newspaper chain.
“At the same time, I noticed in our town and in a lot of the other smaller towns, a lot of those things that have been around for a long time just seem to be getting kind of pushed out by convenience and modernization.
“The song is a story about a town that’s losing its small-town paper, but also more about that sense of loss within the community of all the little things and the charm and the character of those communities and how they’re disappearing.”
