Fading ink: Western Star collector saddened by halt to paper's daily presses

On April 10, Corner Brook resident Bruce Stevenson got an email telling him he'd received his final daily edition of the local newspaper.

It was sad news for the longtime Western Star reader and avid collector, who has originalcopies of every Western Star from its first 40years of existence.

"[The email] said 'Guess what? You're not getting any more papers,'" paraphrased Stevenson, a retired Corner Brook Pulp and Paper employee

"And wow, that just came out of nowhere."

The newspaper's publisher SaltWire Network announced in April that they were discontinuing the six-days-a-week print edition of the Western Star and replacing it with a free weekly publication.

Stevenson, who said he is "old school" and still prefers to hold a paper in his hands, was unhappy to get that news via email.

"I didn't think it was a very good way to inform readers that it was happening," he said.

"It was disappointing and not very courteous.I wondered, how we are going to get our local news?"

'What a pile of history'

Canadians increasinglygettheir news on their phones and tablets, but reading the newspaper has been a decades-long daily ritual for Stevenson and his wife Gale.

"When I got up, I'd put on a pot of coffee, go out to the driveway, where the mailbox is, come back in and pour the coffee," he said.

Then he'd settle in with his wife to read the local news from Corner Brook, the Bay of Islands and western Newfoundland beforedoing the crosswords and other puzzles.

Stevenson's lifelong love of newspapers stretches back to his childhood. Helistened as family members read the Western Star out loud and discussed the news of the day, and his mother regularly clipped articles to send to friends and relatives around the world.

In the early 1980s he acquired a collection of the paper's earliest copies from a member of the Barrett family, who ran the paper until selling it in 1942.

"I was able to convince [Mr. Barrett]to donate the papers to me for looking after because he didn't really know what was going to happen to them," Stevenson said of the collection, which sits in his basement in neatly organized binders and runs fromthe first paper publishedin 1900 up until March 1941.

"I thought, this is great. What a pile of history we have here that doesn't really exist anywhere else that I'm aware of.News, you know, continuously for 41 years."

In those first decades of the paper's publication the news was largely personal, Stevenson said,"about families from the area, the shipping activity, train movements, that sort of thing. So it was all very interesting."

He still leafs through the yellowed papers from time to time, whether it's to find information for someone who has requested it or simply to enjoy the stories and advertisements.

In with the new

SaltWire offered Western Star's subscribers a free three-month subscription to the Telegram, the daily paper based in St. John's. Stevenson is giving the subscription a try, but isn't yet sold on the online experience.

He worries about the decline of local news, he said, misses having a daily local paper to hold in his hand.

"I'm more into that mode of reading physical books, papers.It's more intimate. You could smell the paper, feel it," he said.

"And you know that a hundred years ago or whatever, somebody actually had to put that together and print on it and deliver it.'

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