I’m going to show my old geezerdom again when I recall how much I enjoyed reading a column in Huron County Focus, a free newspaper distributed in Huron, about the glory days of Circle 8 Ranch on CKNX TV.

Columnist and history buff David Yates, wrote of the show in the heyday of CKNX-TV in the 1950s until its demise in 1978. The show was the product of local programming by CKNX founder Doc Cruickshank who made  CKNX a success as a professional station in the 1930s and 1940s and in the 1950s became fascinated with the possibility of TV and wangled the channel originally designated for Owen Sound for Wingham, bringing it on board in 1955.

Doc was also a country music fan and so created the CKNX Barn Dance and Circle 8 Ranch, which employed many of the stars of the Barn Dance.

We didn’t have TV until my older sister bought one for the family later in the 1950s. I was originally a fan of Circle 8 Ranch’s Ernie King,  Rossy Mann and Don and Cora Robertson. I was there to see them when the Travelling Barn Dance came to my town on a Saturday night.

Eventually Doc became too old to keep the station going and sold it to Walter Blackburn at CFPL London, His daughter, Martha, in turn sold to other corporate owners. 

And that’s where the old becomes new again. Western Ontario became a different place because of Doc Cruickshank’s imagination, introducing a whole series of innovations that shaped the culture of the region. The London-based owners of CFPL did the same for their region. Today, there are none of the local programs that created local “stars” in both regions.

Similarly, originally each town and village had a newspaper and printing shop. The coming of offset printing changed all that in the 1960s. Most of the owners tended to be more printers, rather than publishers, so sold the newspaper portions of their businesses to centralized publishers such as Bob Shrier, owner, at that time, of Signal-Star Publishing Company Inc. in Goderich. Originally designed to seek out local news, the newspapers functioned well in the 1970s through to the late 1990s with the number of staff dedicated to seeking out the news increasing.

But  the Bob Shriers of the region (he eventually owned newspapers from Owen Sound to Grand Bend) grew older and sold out to chain owners. The farther the ownership  got from local control, the less interested the chains were in providing a news service to the towns and villages and the more interested they became in creating profit.

At the same time, the internet was attracting the attention of many younger residents. Rather than the local control of the pre-1970s era, companies like Facebook and Google are the opposite extreme­ – international giants. 

The poorer the job local newspapers  do, the less important they become to local readers and the fewer subscribers and the less advertising they have. The Ontario Community Newspaper Association, which sells to national advertisers who want to advertise to regional audiences, used to put the subscription numbers for each newspaper on its website, until the numbers became so small they were embarrassing.

There are still a few newspapers that break the trend. The Citizen, the local community-owned (dozens of shareholders) newspaper which publishes this magazine is a rare  case of a locally-owned newspaper. But advertising in community newspapers has become rare because most newspapers are failing.

Will we lose local newspapers like we lost CKNX television and lose all they have meant to our local culture? I fear we will .◊