Exeter Examiner 2.0

Stewart Grant, owner and publisher.

By Stewart Grant

Many readers will recall that roughly ten years ago, on July 8, 2016, I suspended operations of the original Exeter Examiner. After buying the St. Marys Independent in 2014 and having some initial success, I was keen to expand this newspaper model into nearby Exeter, and we optimistically rolled out the first issue of the Examiner on June 19, 2015.

Our newspaper was raw and folksy, but people always told us that they enjoyed it, and they appreciated that they could read it for free, with advertising sales ideally covering the costs of operations.

While we made a good try of it over 29 bi-weekly issues, as a father with a young family I felt it would be irresponsible of me to continue to incur financial losses in a start-up newspaper that still faced a formidable competitor in the Metroland-owned Exeter Times Advocate.

Even as we closed the doors in 2016, I always felt philosophical about the experience. I loved the entrepreneurial adventure – meeting so many new people, closing sales, and trying to make a positive difference.

On the financial side, I didn’t classify the losses as permanent, but rather as “tuition”. Lessons were learned from this interesting experience. In fact, in that final edition, I recounted the “Top 10 Key Success Factors for the Exeter Examiner” as I made the case for its eventual return.

So here we are, ten years later. It is time for the Exeter Examiner to return.

Going back to my Economics course at Western about supply and demand, while people continue to have the demand for local news and information, so much has changed on the supply side. Local news in so many communities has vanished, while in others like Exeter, the newspapers are mere skeletons of their former selves.

In 2016, Metroland and Postmedia dominated the news industry throughout the province, including small towns where they had bought up family-run independents over the preceding decades. But this started to change in late 2017, when the two media giants completed an anti-competitive deal that closed three dozen community newspapers, including the St. Marys Journal Argus.

In the years that have followed, Metroland and Postmedia have continued to drastically cut their staff, reduce page counts, and stop publishing print editions altogether in many communities.

The big conglomerates have failed to adapt to the internet era. They continue to charge for readership of their papers, even as they insult readers by scaling back their local coverage and shift operations out of town.

At Grant Haven Media, we’ve been busy the last few years by trying to restore journalism to communities that have been abandoned by the media conglomerates. In 2020, we bought the 125-year-old Tavistock Gazette and gradually expanded it from an 8-page paper to a 32-page “Wilmot-Tavistock Gazette”. In 2021, we started the Stratford Times as a monthly which has since evolved into a weekly that has surpassed the Beacon Herald. Within the last three years, we’ve started the Woodstock Ingersoll Echo, the Goderich Sun, the Tillsonburg Post, the Simcoe Advocate, and the Paris Independent, all of which have been meaningful additions to the communities that they serve.

It’s particularly special to me to be restarting the Exeter Examiner, where this whole adventure began. We have learned so much over the past ten years and this time we return to the Exeter area equipped with an incredible local team that includes Dan Rolph, Deb Lord, Meg Pearson, John Miner, Samantha Lawson and I’m sure many to follow in the future.

I have a spreadsheet that tracks the sales of advertising for start-up newspapers. Exeter Examiner 2.0 is the ninth community newspaper that we have started from scratch, and we are already well ahead of pace versus the previous eight, which is a testament to the strength of this community.

It took four years for the Stratford Times to grow from a monthly newspaper to a weekly. The Tillsonburg Post began as a bi-weekly but had enough advertising support to move to a weekly within nine months. I’m hoping that with the continued support of Exeter, Lucan, Hensall, Zurich, Grand Bend and all areas in between, we can shift the Exeter Examiner from a bi-weekly to a weekly publication in record time so to best serve the continued desire and need for local news and information.