OLDS — Town council has passed a couple of bylaws that allow the Town of Olds to advertise on other platforms besides local news media.
Council made that decision during its Dec. 9 meeting after holding a public hearing on the two bylaws: an advertising bylaw and an amendment to the land use bylaw.
The town received one letter in support of the advertising bylaw from Helmut Wollenberg who wrote that printing of “timely notices” in the newspaper is “insufficient” and that in addition to reaching people more quickly, online notices would reach a different demographic of people who don’t read the newspaper.
Mayor Judy Dahl called for anyone in support of the bylaw to come forward to speak to council. No one did.
Two people spoke against the bylaw: Albertan publisher Murray Elliott and Mountain View County resident Ross Dabrusin.
“Administration believes that passing this advertising bylaw will allow for greater flexibility on how we advertise and communicate with the public,” planning and infrastructure manager James Crozier Crozier said.
Elliott said during and post-pandemic, Mountain View Publishing’s business “dropped 50 per cent just about overnight.”
“I had to shed 40 per cent of my staff,” he said. “I still have offices in the outlying towns, but we had to really cut back.”
He said the company’s smaller papers were “morphed” into the Albertan to avoid leaving “news deserts” in those towns.
Elliott said allowing those news deserts to occur would actually have been easier, but “we believe in community and we believe in community newspapers.”
Online giants like Google and Facebook have received much of the advertising that newspapers, including the Albertan, used to receive.
“Town advertising and county advertising is making up a much bigger percentage of our advertising base. We still have regular advertisers, particularly in the surrounding areas. It's one of the only reasons we're still there,” Elliott said.
He said many towns the size of Olds don’t even have newspapers anymore and are thus “news deserts.”
“I'm confident we can continue with the help of the town of Olds and others to do what we're doing, because I think it's important for democracy and it's important to the citizens of Olds and area,” Elliott said.
Elliott said the paper is also available online and is getting good readership.
He said people are devoted to the paper and get upset when it’s not delivered, which just shows its reach.
He said a big grocery chain dropped all its advertising but ended up buying full pages with the newspaper in order to reach customers, so that shows its power and reach to people.
Crozier also read into the record a letter against the bylaw written by Olds resident Peter Premachuk.
Premachuk said he gets his information through the paper, rarely from the Town of Olds' website.
“The Albertan is my comprehensive source at this time. I believe the Town of Olds information is better pushed to us via the local newspaper as it is currently,” Premachuk wrote.
“Any other publication method used by the town of Olds should be used in conjunction with, and not replace, the information in the Albertan.”
Dabrusin expressed concern that without Town of Olds advertising, the Albertan could suffer and perhaps eventually disappear, like many other small town newspapers have in recent years.
“I value our local newspaper. For one thing, they are local, and Murray Elliot started it, as opposed to large companies,” Dabrusin said.
“If you go to this model. I'm wondering if you're going to go to places like Amazon and X, so the money will be going to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.”
“I think this comes under the category of unintended collateral damage,” he added.
Mayor Judy Dahl, chief administrative officer Brent Williams and all councillors who spoke indicated support for local news media, including the Albertan.
They said under the bylaws the municipality will still continue to advertise in the paper and other local news media in addition to other options such as its website.
“This is to ensure consistency in both process and language,” Dahl said.
“I look at this as I said as just one more tool in the tool box to make sure that we are getting the information out, whether that is advertising, whether that's public notice, whether that is planning and development information or just general updates,” Coun. Darren Wilson said.
Williams said the change will simply allow the town to advertise notices sooner.
He also said the town’s small, increasingly busy planning department sometimes gets too busy to get ads out to the newspaper in time and that can cause delays for getting notices published. These bylaws would rectify that problem.
“As a former journalist on dailies and weekly newspapers, I know the value of newspapers and what they bring to a community, and so I too would not want to see us abandon that form of advertising,” Coun. Heather Ryan said.
“It says very clearly that there are no plans to change the current scope. So just want to make sure that everybody realizes that we have no plans change.
“This is only a compliment to what we're already doing, and in fact, I think it's actually a good compliment because it allows us the flexibility and speeds up development permits, so I'm in support of this.”
Coun. James Cummings expressed his sympathy and support for the paper and proposed a motion to in which town council would “affirm our belief that advertising locally in multiple media, including the newspaper and the radio,” as a way for the Town of Olds to conduct its business and keep the community informed.
However, Williams and legislative clerk Marcie McMillan said three communications policies are coming to council for possible revamping in about February anyway.
In the end, the two bylaws were passed and Cummings withdrew his motion.
