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May Ip's back on the job

Posted by KeeMay on February 4, 2004 - 9:37pm

Do you still remember the Owen Sound Tribunes, which only lasted for about a year? For a while, the paper had columnists writing about happenings in different communities. Although that was 8 long years ago, people still remember me as a writer who showed an interest in the community and the people within it. Since Tribunes cancelled the community columns, I have been hoping for a day to arrive when I can once again celebrate with my readers the wonderful things our neighbours have done, and are doing. Given the time and opportunity to contrubute to The South Bruce Peninsular, I am going to pick up from where I left off almost a decade ago.

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The Owen Sound Tribune

Submitted by mmockler on February 11, 2004 - 11:57pm.

As the former editor of The Owen Sound Tribune, I can certainly attest to the fact that it lasted a lot longer than a year! In fact, it was published for three successful years, winning five Ontario Community Newspaper Awards and one Canadian Community Newspaper Award, before the publisher unfortunately sold it to Metroland Printing and Publishing.

Metroland destroyed that newspaper, turning it into a flyer wrap for a year before shutting it down.

One of the keys to success for The Tribune was our many community columnists - including May Ip, Dave Carr, Richard Thomas, Dave Steen, and many, many others.

The Tribune has earned a place in the history of Owen Sound and it will be sadly missed.

Melissa Mockler (formerly Elder)

My My, Hey, Hey (Gone but not Forgotten)

Submitted by garym on February 13, 2004 - 12:24pm.

Hi Melissa! Hope you don't mind the Neil Young reference ;) but it's true, the Tribune in it's short life did make a mark, and it's not forgotten --- when May and I travel about doing the Opry shows, almost every time _someone_ will come up and and tell May how much they missed those community profile reports. As much as I admire some of the writers at the Sun-Times (I'm thinking specifically of Bill Henry, but there are others too) it's just not speaking the voice of the people I know.

So I don't know if our little experiment here will ever hope to the Tribune's sort of legendary status. Afterall, we have a zero budget (a fraction of a shared minimal webhost account, but sustained by the googleAds) and only amateur and volunteer writers, photographers and otherwise contributors, and that's our rag-tag band of gypsies, but then, we're not really striving for _journalism_ per se, more of a community journal, more a public diary than anything else.

But then, that's what we hear people talking about when they remember the Tribune ... it's not the world events or the editorials or the ads or even the typography, what they tell us they remember is how the paper told _our_ stories, stories about us, told by us. While community blogging is "all the rage" these days, it's the pioneering neighbourhood self-journalism of your Tribune that _really_ inspired me to build this site and give it a shot.

Forget history, this is ourstory! :)