First, I want to applaud The Citizen's efforts to cover our local news, sports and human interest stories. I know that the advertising dollars needed to provide that coverage are becoming harder to get as various forms of electronic media siphon revenues from newspapers. I would miss not keeping abreast of local happenings through your paper. It follows that the revenues are just not there for the paper to fill all the holes between the ads with locally written material.
But we are Canadians, not Americans, and your decision to use an American news service to fill those holes is offensive. All of your papers have many of these news service stories but last Thursday's was the corker that got me writing this letter. Pages and pages of it. Canada is an interesting place with much for us to know more about. Your role should be to fill in the details on those short, snappy 10 second burps we get on TV news.
We have Canadian sports, arts and business celebrities to learn about, political issues and the gamut of Canadian news that is being pushed aside for your American coverage. These in-depth articles are available from Canadian news services. Is the Washington Post's news service that much less costly than a Canadian news service that you feel obliged to use them? Or are you buying into the concept that there is no real difference between our two countries so why not move closer to integration?
Neil Godbout has written several insightful editorials on the challenges facing news journalists and journalism. These concerns are real but by buying a U.S. news service rather than Canadian you have become part of the problem. You should be doing your part to support Canadian journalists. If the U.S. is going to insist on making it more difficult for our products to find their way into their market, why can't you find a way to use Canadian journalists rather than American?
You promote your newspaper as "Your Community Newspaper since 1916." You do a good job on the local scene but our community is more than Prince George and the northern interior. We are part of the B.C. community and we are part of the Canadian community. We are not part of the U.S. community.
You are also camouflaging your source. In the past, newspapers had a byline on news stories indicating their source. "Canadian Press Toronto" or "Washington Post Tampa" were clearly shown at the beginning of the article. You have chosen to eliminate that clarity from those articles not written locally and you either have no byline or "Citizen News Service" Both are deceitful and self-serving.
Perhaps if newspapers do not voluntarily show their sources our legislators will need to insist that "news" that is from a foreign country, written by a foreign journalist about foreign social, cultural, economic or political issues should be required to be clearly identified as such. We now demand that everything we purchase from bananas to bongos to bathrobes identify its country of origin. Why not journalism, too?
The shirt I am wearing tells me where it is made so why cannot the news I read tell me where it was written?
To be fair our TV and radio (with the notable exception of CBC Radio) are doing the same and should be just as accountable. But I think of newspapers, perhaps erroneously, as setting the standard for journalism. I get far too much American content on TV so am switching that off more and more. Must I now shut off my "Community Newspaper" as well?
I shouldn't be required to read down to the fourth or fifth paragraph in a story before realizing it is some canned article with no real connection to our city, province or country.
John Warner
Prince George
Editor's Note: Thanks for your letter. In answer to a couple of your questions, Canadian Press charges The Citizen $5,000 per month to use their stories and photos, in comparison to less than $500 per month for the Washington Post news service. Canadian Press is going through its own challenges, reducing its Canadian content and increasingly relying on Associated Press content from the United States. The Washington Post offers excellent, insightful journalism on interesting issues, much of it written for a global audience. They also carry J.J. McCullough's columns, a Vancouver-based writer who comments on Canadian affairs. My definition of community newspaper has always been what people in the community are interested in, meaning it's a mix of local, provincial, national AND international news. My apologies if you have found "Citizen news service" to be self-serving and deceitful. We have nothing to hide at The Citizen so we'll identify all sources of wire news going forward, in both The Citizen and 97/16. - NG
