I can’t deny a piece of me died last Wednesday when the suits came to deliver the final blow to the Chilliwack Times. We saw it coming a long way out, but that didn’t make it any easier. And now, this final column as editor of the Chilliwack Times feels a little like delivering the eulogy at my own funeral.
After 31 years of serving the community, my beloved Chilliwack Times has published its last, the victim of a changing media landscape. Black Press, the parent company of both local newspapers since 2013, is calling it a “merger.” A buzzword to be sure, but if you’re looking for me to tee off on the company that shut us down, you won’t find that here. Since the switch in 2013, Black Press has been nothing but fair and decent and they continue to be as we navigate new waters.
This isn’t a eulogy about what went wrong at the Times. There are no good guys or bad guys, just characters. Most of them funny, some of them crazy, none of them forgettable. But that’s newspapering. It’s intense, it’s relentless and once the ink is in the veins, it never leaves.
While I worked as a journalist for five years before coming to the Chilliwack Times in 1990, the Times will always feel like the true beginning of my newspapering career. Everything good in my life stems from this newspaper and by extension, this community.
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Another Story: The Times closes but Chilliwack journalism goes on