We are building a country of news deserts

There is a town in northern Ontario called Hearst. Twelve hundred people live there. Until last month, they had a newspaper.

They don't anymore.

The slow erasure

The Hearst Northern Times published its last edition on April 28. Postmedia, which acquired the paper in 2017, cited "declining advertising revenue and shifting reader habits."

Reader habits did not shift in Hearst. The paper was still being read.

What shifted was the spreadsheet in Toronto.

What disappears with a local paper

Not the obvious things. The obvious things — the council coverage, the obituary section, the high-school sports page — those go first, and people miss them.

But what disappears underneath is harder to name. The shared attention. The thing a community pays to itself.

A town without a newspaper is a town that has forgotten how to listen to itself.

The receipts

Since 2008, Canada has lost 478 local newspapers. The Local News Research Project at Toronto Metropolitan University maintains the count.

478 papers. Most in towns under 30,000 people. Most in regions that already feel ignored by Ottawa.

Did you know that 84 percent of those closures happened in the eight years following the federal government's 2018 "Journalism Fund" — a $595 million package that, by design, mostly subsidized the same chains doing the closing?