Pontiac loves news!

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Dear Readers:

We, the team at the Pontiac Journal, wish you the best of everything for 2025. We are neighbours, family, customers, and volunteers sprinkled throughout the Pontiac – and we love our newspaper.

How much we love news, and our communities, shows. Imagine providing fact-checked news coverage from Pontiac’s 18 municipalities, the MRC, organizations, associations, and school boards. Imagine researching and writing about what provincial changes are happening that impact Pontiac (and what is not changing!), crimes, accidents, plans and projects, including the economic development efforts of individual businesspeople, family businesses, and government organizations like the SADC who provide support to business. Just this list of important article topics is dizzying.

At the heart of our mandate is providing quality news FOR FREE to everyone. This philosophy is the foundation of how the Pontiac Journal has impacted the region for the past 38 years. Yes, it is expensive to pay journalists and fact-checkers and pay for printing 10,000 copies of the newspaper for every household in the Pontiac (including
store copies and outside subscriptions). But we do it! And yes – we all know how expensive paying Canada Post is, especially to deliver to every single home in the Pontiac. But we do that too!

All this is possible because we – all of us Pontiacers – make it possible together. Advertisers pay for their ads. Shoppers spend with the advertisers. Governmental departments (municipalities, provinces, health boards, school boards etc.) know the Pontiac Journal is delivered and read right across the region, so they advertise with us.

The future of our democracy is intimately linked to the future of
credible news. “Citizen Journalism” and communicating by social media may create juicy news tips, but it does not create actual news. It is critical to make the distinction between a social media post and a researched article.

My commitment to the Pontiac is to fact check those social media posts, interview the experts and provide trustworthy news versions. Know the difference between that and an informal news outlet that has no credible journalist on the team. Be wary of radical ideas; it is too easy to hide in the shadows knowing that many Pontiacers do not have good internet bandwidth nor the time to spend verifying postings as our team of journalists do.

Long live local news! It is an honour to serve the Pontiac.