Utsav Srestha, UnSplash
I was certainly not surprised at the demise of The Oakville Beaver and other Metroland papers in the announcement that Metroland applied for bankruptcy protection.
As publisher of Abbey-Oaks News and later Oakville Today for thirty years, I could see the drop in advertising revenue.
To give one a sense of the difference between newspaper ad rates and digital rates, just imagine one million dollars in newspaper revenue being replaced by 85,000 in digital dollars. Too much lost revenue to keep going. The other issue was the huge amount of flyer delivery, which was dropping rapidly every week, and the amount of loss revenue was significant.
Lost in this announcement are all the carriers that have also lost their jobs. These jobs gave young people the value of hard work and responsibility, and that will never be replaced.
It is a shame that today’s young do not read newspapers and mostly could care less about their community. Abbey Oaks News and The Glen Abbey Resident’s Association kept a close eye on The Town Of Oakville, and the result was a beautiful community that residents were so proud to live in—no buildings over eight stories and reasonable density.
Now that they are both gone look at the mess in North Oakville with backyards 20 feet from major roads and 4 feet apart. Now you can see the value of a newspaper.
Best wishes for The Oakville News to do the same for future growth in Oakville.
