For the first few days after the shooting, I tossed myself out as a metaphorical bone for the newshounds to chew on, in the hopes that people closer to the tragedy wouldn’t be pestered by reporters.
And, while there were some reporters who were respectful, there were others who were transgressive, tracking down parents to capture their raw grief, trying to sneak into the Community Centre, despite the no media signs, and apparently joining the line when Safer Schools brought phones and other items from the school to the Golf Course to distribute them to the kids, apparently pretending to be parents.
After a few days, though, I began waving off interviews. I understand that you are in London, and yes, I know you mean England and not Ontario. Still, you need to do your job and let me do mine.
But even now, people are still contacting me, asking for my opinion. My story.
Along the way, I started to describe myself as the arse end of Ouroboros.
Ouroboros, for those of you who don’t follow these things is the Greek name for a much older symbol of a snake (or dragon, depending on who you talk to) eating its own tail. Indeed the name literally means “tail eating.”
The symbolism is life, death, rebirth. In this case, however, it’s about how the media is eating itself.
We see it all the time. A news outlet breaks some news story. Within ten minutes, there are a hundred different versions of that initial story. None of it is new. None of it brings any new information to the story. It’s just a rewritten regurgitation of what someone else originally wrote, and probably much better.
In my case, the issue was news people interviewing news people (me), to tell news stories. There’s nothing really “new” about it. There’s jusy different words to say the same things, over and over again.
In the past few weeks I’ve become a little less hard nosed about it. I keep telling people to find more interesting people to talk to, but unfortunately, I’m part of the story. “You were the first reporter on the scene.” That’s because I’m the only reporter for 10,000 sq km. ((That sounds so much more impressive than saying “the nearest other reporter was 100 km away.”))
And why’s that? Well, even if we weren’t living in a day and age where news outlets were closing on an almost monthly basis (according to the Local News Map, between 2008 and October 1, 2025, 603 local news outlets closed in 388 communities across Canada. Of those, 440 of the total were community newspapers which publish fewer than five times per week. That total includes 115 local community newspapers that closed after they were merged with other newspapers to produce regional publications), Tumbler Ridge has never been a hotbed for journalism.
There was a period of about six months when former Tumbler Ridge News Editor Greg Amos left the paper and started an online publication, but there’s never been a plurality of papers in the time that I’ve been in Tumbler.
Fortunately, most of the interviews I’ve been doing recently have been more… thoughtful. More considered.
I talked to Tim Conrad from the Wildfire, Floods and Chaos Communications podcast a few weeks back, when he walked past me doing another podcast interview for … I don’t even remember who it was. Someone out of Toronto, at any rate. He invited me to sit down and talk about what had happened here, looking at how the event was covered. And yes, we talked about how sometimes it felt like media was eating itself.
That interview should be coming out someday soon, though I don’t see it on his website.
Which brings us to the story in this paper about the Northern BC reporter for The Tyee touring around the Northeast to look at the state of local media.
While it is a bit navel-gaze-y (wherein the news industry is writing about—wait for it—the news industry), it is different than the usual stories focused on Tumbler Ridge. Yes, I’m sure the fact that I was the first reporter on the scene will come up (again), even though the fact is, I was the only reporter in town.
But I am part of that news industry so I kinda like talking about the news industry and what it’s like running a small community newspaper.
In fact, Follett Hosgood was just here, as I was working on the paper, and I’ll give you three guesses as to what we talked about as we went for a walk along Flatbed to look at the mountain goat, who is still out there on the cliffs.
If you said “the struggles of running a small paper in a small town,” you’d be partially right. (We also talked about my history in town, her last time in Tumbler, and what was that strange, brown, smelly substance that the dog was rolling in that smells like poop. I’m pretty sure it was poop and not from a deer or bear. Thanks a lot, whoever pooped along the Flatbed Trail and didn’t cat hole it….)
We also talked about The Tyee (which I used to write for twenty years ago) and the fact that the New York Times is looking for a Western Canada Reporter (she’s not applying. With a starting salary of $158,000, I—along with most every other reporter this side of Thunder Bay—am. I won’t get it, but a boy can dream.)
All this is to say that I really like what I do; I’d like it even more if I were able to make a living doing it. If you’d like to help me get one step closer to making a living telling local stories, go to patreon.com/c/tumblerridgelines
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
