Going, but definitely not gone

I wanted to convey my love for the printed word and my passion for journalism. I wanted to share my thoughts and dreams for a future in the media, while putting an emphasis on the importance of a free press and free speech in our society.

In short, I wanted to get my career started as a writer, and I used this very newspaper as my launching point. The Monitor has played an important role in my life since as far back as I can remember.

Growing up in NDG, it was the local paper of record for everything from municipal politics and the local arts scene, to my passion: community sports.

I would come home from school every Wednesday and the first thing I would do - after a snack of course – was open the Monitor to see what was going on in my community.

Not long after writing that application letter and getting into the program, I ran into the now-former editor of this paper, David Goldberg, who had been reading my work in The Concordian student newspaper.

Dave had always been kind to me going back to the days when he was my peewee hockey coach, and he was one of the people with whom I consulted early on about a future in journalism.

Dave started me off covering a baseball game here, a hockey game there, and here I am a decade later as one of the Monitor’s senior writers.

But now, just as the Monitor seemed to be hitting a stride once again, we are saying goodbye to the print edition of the most important community newspaper the West End has ever known.

Does it hurt? Of course.

But not because my name will no longer appear in print.

No, it hurts for the same reason the Expos leaving town hurt; it hurts for the same reason the Montreal business exodus of the early-90s hurt.

It hurts because it’s a blow to our community.

The Monitor might have been a small paper, but it was the only paper in the area that truly cared about the ever-changing, usually-shrinking West End anglophone community.

Sure, there are others – and who knows, even as we stop printing this paper, someone else may be prepared to step up with another local weekly.

But there will always be only one Monitor – one paper that had watched out for us since 1926; one paper that had chronicled the growth, sputtering, and re-birth of our local community; one paper that may have had the bills paid by a conglomerate, but was truly owned by the community it represented.

But now it is gone, so we focus on a new medium: the Internet.

The coverage won’t change – other than to improve. We’ll still be there looking out for your interests, only instead of reading us in black and white once a week, you’ll be able to flip open your laptop and read us in full colour whenever you’d like.

In one sense, this is just evolution – the Internet isn’t just the way of the future anymore, it’s the here and now.

But in another sense, it’s the end of an era.

I sit here now as I did a decade ago trying to find just the right words to tell you how lovely the journey has been and how important you, the readers, have been to me and to this paper, but the words just don’t come.

So instead, I’ll simply bid you farewell in print, but say that I look forward to meeting you again online – a place where I’ll not only be able to talk to you, but where you will have the chance to talk back.

The future is exciting and the future is now.

See you there!