Welcome to the next 50 years.
Today’s Gazette includes a special 16-page supplement commemorating the newspaper's 50 years of serving St. Albert and area residents. The supplement includes stories on the Jamison family that has owned the Gazette since 1966, on previous editors, reporters and photographers, on the invaluable carriers, on St. Albert’s Mr. Hockey and on how the paper is produced.
It is an ever-so-brief look back at the first 50 years of the Gazette.
As the new editor, I am honoured to be entrusted with guiding the Gazette newsroom into the next half-century. I have been an avid reader of the Gazette since moving to St. Albert with my family in 1978 and have always been impressed with its quality of reporting, it's fairness on issues, its wide variety of news and feature stories and its commitment to the community.
It's that community commitment that is behind the health of community newspapers. As metro dailies struggle to survive, newspapers like the Gazette continue to thrive because they fulfil their role, to serve their local readers. It is only here that local city councils and school boards are covered, that the junior, school and minor sports teams are given their dose of support, that local artisans can find an outlet to promote their crafts.
After 46 years in the daily newspaper industry, and an all-too-brief 10-month semi-retirement, I find this new role both challenging and opportunistic. A challenge not to maintain the Gazette's award-winning ways, but, rather, to improve upon them. To make each of us in the newsroom better at what we do and in that way, produce a newspaper that will serve you, our readers, ever better.
The opportunistic aspect is that I can make changes. Probably nothing major, but tweaks to make us more responsive to the community and more informative and enjoyable for our readers.
Yes, we will challenge city council and school boards to explain their decisions. We will write about the people and events that make St. Albert what it is today and what it will grow into tomorrow. We will strive to be even better in the next 50 years than we were in the first 50.
It is the duty of the newspaper, whether daily, weekly or bi-weekly, to listen to and serve our readers. To that end, my door will always be open, my phone answered whenever I'm in the office and my emails responded to as quickly as possible. Even better, there is the direct, face-to-face communication. Relationships that benefit both the paper and its readers are often best established and cultivated over coffee.
So feel free to contact me or any of the Gazette staff with your ideas or suggestions for stories and your opinions on those we publish (the letters section is always one of a newspaper's most popular).
