Tri-County Vanguard says merging 3 papers ensures healthy future

Usually, word that three newspapers are being replaced with one means coverage suffers, but the brand-new Tri-County Vanguard on Nova Scotia's south shore aims to buck that trend.

On Feb. 2, the Yarmouth Vanguard, Digby Courier and Shelburne County Coast Guard merged into the Tri-County Vanguard.

"I'm so thrilled. I'm almost giddy waiting to pick up the first copy," says Jennifer Vardy Little. She's the managing editor of Transcontinental Media's Nova Scotia Weekly Group of Papers, including the new title.

"We were looking for a way to make a strong, sustainable model a way to give our readers the best possible product we could and that seemed like the best solution."

Vardy Little says a fall in advertising made the three separate papers unsustainable. She thinks the new solution will get around that by offering advertisers access to a much bigger audience. It will also save on production costs.

'They're champions for their communities'

"The best part [is] it's not impacting staff. It's the same journalists that our communities have known and loved," she says.

"I can't say enough good things about my staff. These people are so dedicated to their communities. They're champions for their communities. They work weekends, they work evenings, and they do it because they're so passionate about giving their communities their news. That's going to continue."

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If it works, readers will enjoy a better paper and no journalists will lose their jobs.

"It's offering our readers more. When you pick it up, there's going to be quite some heft to it," she says.

Finding the news you don't know about

Vardy Little says the advantage of keeping local journalists reporting on their communities isn't just that they will let you know what everyone is talking about. Her journalists "go out and find the stories that nobody else is talking about. They find the stories that aren't being told."

Local news also stays on stories for months and years, and readers trust the newspaper will dig deep and double-check the facts.

"We try to make sure that we're completely accurate. That's something we offer that Facebook wouldn't," she says.

It's unlikely your social media friends will volunteer to go to council meetings every week and report the facts with balance. Someone has to pay people to do it.

"There's a cost to delivering news. We do make staffing decisions on where we're going to send our people. Part of our role is to shine a light on things in the community that people aren't talking about."

The newly merged paper starts this week. Industry observers will watch carefully to see if the Tri-County Vanguard has indeed found a way to cover community news without cutting jobs.