Davies: Algonquin times

My alma mater is making headlines this month, and for all the wrong reasons. Canadian colleges and universities have been crushed by federal cuts, inflation and the cost of living (just like all of us).

The loss of international tuitions and grant money has been devastating on higher education. International tuitions can be anywhere from double to triple (or more) the cost of what Canadian students pay. And schools don’t have to offer international students anything above or beyond the curriculum offered to locals.

The loss of funding for college’s fast-track programs has also been a huge hit. These so-called fast-track programs that go back all the way to when I went to Algonquin College, offered programs that could be completed in six to eight weeks. The reason they were so streamlined is because there was a reciprocal grant offered by the ministry of employment (now known as the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills) that offered a grant to those on unemployment insurance that covered the entire cost of a program as long as it ran less than eight weeks.

I believe colleges created these fast-track programs specifically for that reason. They were a cash cow for colleges. But they’re gone now.

Hospitality is one of the 30 programs recently cut by Algonquin College. I don’t disagree with the experts in the media who say the loss of these programs will have an impact on the local economy, but I remember eating at the school’s hospitality program-run restaurant, served by students who were actually going to school to learn how to become a server. I clearly remember how nervous they were.

One of my first jobs as an adult (you know, when you have to pay your own rent) was working as a server at the Olive Garden restaurant on Merivale Road. Our training, and I had never been a server before, involved three shifts of following another server around. Fast track indeed.

The same could be said for journalism, another Algonquin College program casualty. I took that program from 1997 to 1999. In the early 2000s I worked with two reporters who had no background and no schooling in the craft. Peter Clarke who covered sports for the Renfrew Mercury used to volunteer to submit game reports from Renfrew Timberwolves games until the newspaper hired him to do it for money. Arnprior Chronicle-Guide reporter Peter ‘Hungry Like’ DeWolf says he learned the trade growing up on the mean streets of Belize. That may or may not have been true, but I can confirm he worked at Radio Shack before becoming a reporter. Editor Jason Marshall dropped out of school because he already had the job of working at a newspaper.

Current West Carleton Online reporter Nonie Smart is incredibly well educated and even has a doctorate. But none of her education is in journalism, and she is one of the best reporters I’ve ever worked with and has shown far more talent and detachment than many of the journalist graduates I have overseen throughout my career.

I’m not saying these programs aren’t necessary, I know for sure I would never have had a journalism career (or any) if I didn’t take the program at Algonquin College.

I have some great memories from my time at Algonquin College. I was never in to photography before my time at college. Our photography teacher (I remember her name, but have no idea how to spell it, so won’t try) was a Citizen photographer and amazing wedding photographer. I had bought an old Pentax camera that did not have auto-focus. After a month of class, she asked if she could take my camera home for the evening. The next day she returned my camera and told me I should get my eyes checked. I’ve owned glasses ever since (but rarely wear them thanks to auto-focus).

Our class was the last class to still use the school’s darkroom and shoot on film. Even if you headed straight to school after an assignment, it would still take at least two hours before you knew if you took any good photos. By that time, if you hadn’t, you couldn’t ask organizers to run the parade again. From out of focus photos to darkroom mistakes, photography was much more stressful than it is now.

Working on the school paper, the Algonquin Times was also stressful fun. We argued over stories, over edits, over headlines. None of us had a clue about grammar.

My placement was at the Ottawa Sun. I worked on Y2K stories. Our Sun editor Mick O’Reilly also taught at Algonquin. I don’t think he liked me. He was old school and thought it was okay to yell at people. Constantly. He told me I would never work in newspapers. In fact, his exact words were “you might work at a magazine some day, but you will never work at a newspaper.”

Luckily, he was wrong on so many levels. I don’t even know what a magazine is? While we had a few in our class that were newspaper superstars for a time, Steve Ladurantaye, Jeff Pappone, Chris Yzerman (yes, that Yzerman’s brother), I don’t think there is a single other person from my two years in Algonquin College’s journalism program that is still in the industry. Just me.

So, when I hear all these Twitter warriors roar Algonquin must do everything it can to keep these programs (specifically journalism) going, my first question is why?

Obviously, without government support, these programs lose money. On the other side, what parent in their right mind would encourage their child to take journalism? Only a parent who wants a lifetime tenant who is always late on the rent.

The journalism job market is shrinking and it’s already pretty tiny. With an Algonquin program and a Carleton program and a uOttawa program, the city was producing, ballpark, 200 educated journalists a year. Where on earth are they going to get a job? How on earth are they going to pay off their student debt?

I get to meet a pile of journalism students every election, as the Citizen will hire them (or offer them real-world experience) for the evening to cover the less “newsworthy” ridings or candidates. That’s literally the only time I seem to meet them.

Newspapers are disappearing, radio stations are disappearing and the online world does not offer a living wage.

We have hundreds on local social media, decrying the loss of journalism, but I wonder how many of those social media warriors actually pay for a subscription to a journalism outlet?

That’s where it starts. It’s a bottom-up approach. Colleges are designed to prepare its students for the work world. If you can’t find work as a journalist, why would they offer the program?

West Carleton Online works because there are just enough supporters (and several of those supporters are fervent in their support, encouraging their friends and neighbours to check us out constantly – and sadly that is our entire marketing strategy) who believe in the importance of journalism and believe in us. And because we have amazing contributors like the aforementioned Smart, who go above and beyond every single time to create stories our readers want to click on.

We do it without hyperbole or clickbait, and we do it in a community that hasn’t seen a news product delivered in this manner before. Maybe someday we will get big enough that we will be able to hire our own journalism graduates, and we will set the standard for other rural communities that have lost their newspapers like Arnprior and Almonte and Carleton Place and hundreds of others, and then, maybe we will be able to convince Algonquin College journalism is a program worth offering again, where a graduate can once again create a career covering the news.

This year’s top stories so far

At this pace, I might get six, maybe seven, of my monthly columns in this year. Hot dang. Other good news, while we are two months and 16 days in to the new year, we’ve already had 114,478 pageviews from 24,817 unique users, meaning we are on pace to smash our 2025 record for pageviews and unique views.

Let’s take a quick look at our Top 10 stories of 2026 so far, and they run the gamut from emergency news, to politics to human interest to profile stories. We’ll try to keep the asides to a minimum. As is tradition, I am finding out what stories made the list as I share them below.

1. Police briefs: Franktown snowmobile crash claims one life, Child sex doll, Man arrested in Carleton Places robberies (Published Jan. 3, 1,402 pageviews): It’s becoming tradition one top stories story seems to be a random Police briefs story, that I can’t understand why it’s so popular. Perhaps the out-of-context ‘Child sex doll’ part of the headline touched a nerve. Didn’t I just write above we don’t do clickbait?
2. Scratch Sandwich Shop all homemade (Published Jan. 20, 619 pageviews): A new business profile story hits Number 2 in 2026. We tell people all the time our business stories are well read and here’s the proof. If you haven’t contacted us about your business (and ‘new’ is a relative word to us), better put it on your ‘to do list.’
3. Baird shares toll or real estate legal battle (Published Jan. 27, 604 pageviews): This story was a challenge to write as mistakes were made, people got hurt, and they were all people we know on both sides.
4. Carp intersection looks at roundabout (Published Feb. 2, 584 pageviews): A dangerous section of March Road is finally getting the attention it deserves (eventually). Carp resident Greg LeBlanc cracked me up when he shared in the story the intersection is locally known as ‘Car Parts Corner.’
5. Dunrobin’s Lawson ready to lead Ottawa (Published Feb. 3, 517 pageviews): Our first 2026 municipal election story (of many more to come), and it’s a big one. For the first time since I’ve been covering Ottawa politics (off an on for 23 years or so), West Carleton is going to have a mayoral candidate (although they can’t officially declare until May). Home builder Alex Lawson has big ideas for City Hall and he shared some of them with us.
6. Anti-South March BESS group taking issue to court (Published Jan. 13, 514 pageviews): This story generated a lot of letters to the editors, but almost exclusively on the issue of our headline wording.
7. Skylark Café fresh from the heart (Published Feb. 17, 503 pageviews): A second new business profile arrives in our Top 10 list. Similarities between the two include reporter Nonie Smart wrote both of them and they are both businesses that serve food. We do other businesses as well.
8. Dunrobin plaza’s first tenant opens this week (Published Jan. 27, 443 pageviews): While this counts as a business story, it was not a business profile. Although, new business beat writer Nonie Smart would do one not soon after this one was published.
9. Carp Fair introduces new leadership team (Published Jan. 24, 418 pageviews): The Carp Agricultural Society annual general meeting is the largest AGM in the community and the community’s first chance to meet the new Carp Fair presidents.
10. Dunrobin siblings representing WC at Olympics (Published Jan. 29, 404 pageviews): Our Olympic coverage of course included local ski cross competitors the Schmidt siblings. It was the second Olympics for both of them. Over the course of a year I get to find out exactly how many world class athletes West Carleton produces every year.