Seventy-two years ago, Rosaleen and David Dickson purchased THE EQUITY. They moved their young family from Ottawa to Shawville. They moved the paper from a small building on Shawville’s King Street into a larger one on Centre Street. They established Pontiac Printshop, a commercial printing service and stationery store where you could buy everything from pencils to typewriters. David managed the business side of things while Rosaleen wrote the newspaper. The combination of the newspaper with a few other revenue streams enabled their venture to support their family, which soon grew to six children, and employ a dozen people.
In their time as stewards of this newspaper, they saw it through technological revolutions including the rise of radio and television, the replacement of a printing process based on hot type made from molten lead to computer typesetting and million-dollar offset printing presses, and the dawn of the digital age. Rosaleen embraced all of these advancements. She co-hosted the first television show to be produced at CJOH, produced and hosted another on CHOV-TV in Pembroke, was a leading force in the establishment of Pontiac’s community radio station, CHIP-FM, where she also hosted a weekly show and, in the early days of the internet, was a co-founder of Freenet which offered the opportunity for anyone to set up an email account for free, long before most of us had any idea what email even was.
Rosaleen believed and was dedicated to the idea that it is vital to realizing our potential as individuals, as communities and as a species, that humans communicate with each other by whatever means, be it in person, in print, over the airwaves or through the internet. Perhaps somewhat prophetically, Rosaleen was quoted musing on her philosophy in an article on high school student and computer whiz Jon Stewart, published in THE EQUITY 30 years ago this week.
Sadly, many communities have lost their local weekly papers, in large part because they have not changed with the times. It has been our determination as stewards of THE EQUITY to make sure the people of the Pontiac don’t lose theirs. Because what is a community without some form of communications hub that serves as a chronicler of local events, a place where the public can exchange ideas about the path we take collectively, a watchdog on local government, and a reminder to the electorate to expect the best of their elected leaders?
To that end, while continuing to publish a printed newspaper week after week, we have also developed an accompanying digital version of THE EQUITY available through our website. Most recently, our work in this regard involved last summer’s overhaul of our website under the guidance of someone we have dubbed Pontiac’s digital guru, Jon Stewart, owner of Calumet Media. His collaboration with our staff worked well and has produced a very favourably reviewed new website, with many new and promising possibilities remaining to be brought to bear on our improvement of the ways in which THE EQUITY serves as a vehicle for communication for the Pontiac.
Rosaleen and David recognized some forty years ago that it was time to turn the stewardship of this business over to the next generation, and passed it along to their eldest son, Ross, and his wife, Heather. A few decades later, it came to me, the son who, as an infant, had a view of the whole printshop from my seat suspended over my mother’s desk. For those of us who can remember the bustle in the printshop as the paper was produced each week – the clatter of Linotype machines that spat out lines of hot type molded from molten lead, compositors assembling the type in pages locked in a steel frame, pressmen with ink up to their elbows rolling the pages on a dolly to the back of the shop where they were slid into position on the deck of a massive cast iron printing machine from the 19th century, the delivery of canvas bags of addressed newspapers to post offices throughout the county – it is now time to do as our parents did and pass the baton to the next generation who can take it to the next level.
And we believe there is none better-positioned to take Pontiac Printshop and THE EQUITY to the next level than Pontiac native, Equity enthusiast and digital entrepreneur Jon Stewart. Just as the diverse business lines of Pontiac Printshop enabled the continued publication of this newspaper over the past seven decades, the strength and future prospects of Calumet Media promise to do the same, giving THE EQUITY a new lease on life as the Voice of the Pontiac.
This is why we have entered into discussions with Jon that we expect will lead to an agreement within the next few months that will see the merger of Pontiac Printshop and THE EQUITY with his company, Calumet Media. Part of that conversation revolves around the roles that my daughter Sophie and I could continue to play in the publication of this newspaper.
For more on his vision, please see Jon’s article, below. For our part, as the current stewards of this newspaper at the 142-year mark in its history, and having seen it through some very challenging times over the past decade, we wish to express our sincere gratitude for the contributions of the many people who have worked for Pontiac Printshop over the years to ensure this paper is the best it can be. We thank our advertisers for providing the financial sustenance that makes a community newspaper possible. And we thank you, our readers, who make the whole experience worthwhile.
At a time when many newspaper publishers have simply had to lock the door one final time and walk away, we are pleased that this one is still a going concern, and that with the envisioned transition we are very optimistic about its prospects to continue serving the Pontiac for a very long time to come.
Charles Dickson and Sophie Kuijper Dickson
