MPs told local reporting required to overcome Canada’s news blues
OTTAWA — The publisher of a small southern Manitoba family of weekly newspapers made an appeal for back-to-basics local reporting Thursday to a group of MPs examining Canada’s beleaguered news industry.
The gruff, to-the-point testimony by Ken Waddell of the Neepawa Banner, Neepawa Press and River Banner helped ground a Commons committee inquiry mired in months of often contradictory hearings.
“If information is not reliable and verifiable, it is at best useless and at worst dangerous,” Waddell, a news veteran of 50 years, told the Heritage committee Thursday.
“In the newspaper business that means that the role of publisher has to be locally based. Regardless of the size of the community, the publisher has to be local.”