From The Editors Desk: Getting by with a little help from our friends

Editor-in-chief René J. Roy is also an experienced book editor, trained photographer, volunteer firefighter, volunteer board member for the local chamber and diehard fan of the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens team. You can find him waxing poetic on twitter as @hfxhabby.

Running a community newspaper is no small task. Here at Wreckhouse Press, we are actually running two of them, believe it or not. We have the Wreckhouse Weekly, which covers news and events from Rose Blanche – Harbour Le Cou to the Codroy Valley – South Branch, and we now have this publication, which encompasses the entirety of the Bay St George area all the way out to Robinson’s.

The difficulty in running these publications is in having relevant content. Without being directed to story leads, we can’t publish. Without anyone contacting us to let us know of any important or major (heck, even minor) events going on, we would never know about them.

That’s why we are always looking to you for new content. We can and do track down our own as much as possible, but it is much better for us and most definitely you, if we have content that matters to you.

The Wreckhouse Weekly covers a few small towns, with the largest being Channel-Port aux Basques. Given that this is where our offices are, it is considerably easier for us to hear of and locate story ideas since this is where we live and work.

The Bay St George area is considerably larger and much further away. We have freelancers in your area and they do their best, but because we are located over an hour away we ask for your help.

Another area we haven’t had much success in around here is with notices or in memoriams. Obituaries are an important part of the bereavement process, and in the Weekly, they are quite common. I remain unsure why the funeral homes in this area are so reluctant to offer this crucial piece of the process to family and friends of their loved and lost family, but they are.

To date, in over two months of publications, not one funeral home has reached out to us to work with us. It just strikes me as truly strange and more than a little disappointing given how important a role it plays for our Wreckhouse Weekly readership.

Did you know community notices are free to publish in the newspaper for non-profits? Small groups with meetings, anniversaries, birthdays and fundraisers matter to us as much as they matter to you. We want to help you succeed with whatever it is you’re focused on.

While our offices are not open 24 hours a day, our voice mailbox and emails are. We aren’t hard to find, and we check in regularly. (P.S. We are looking for newspaper carriers, too!)

So if you have any stories, a person of interest to profile, an event, or anything else you’d like to see in the paper, do reach out. I won’t promise it will be published, but I will promise to at least look into it.

We can’t do this without your help.

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