Smart: Front row to West Carleton history

ARNPRIOR – For the final story in our series West Carleton: The gift that keeps on giving, we caught up with publisher Jake Davies to find out what has kept him on the local beat, up and down the Ottawa Valley, for more than two decades.

Since 2018, when he launched West Carleton Online, Davies has been covering West Carleton exclusively from all angles, essentially documenting the history of our community. While he says some residents still lament the loss of the West Carleton Review newspaper (which closed in 2017), Davies says the new online platform can do so much more.

“Never has West Carleton had news every single day,” Davies told us as we chatted in Arnprior recently (Dec. 12). “It’s multiple stories every single day, delivered to your email every morning or you can go straight to the website, however you choose. We can cover emergency news an hour after it happens. People are getting their news that much quicker and we can cover a lot more. As someone who worked on the former West Carleton Review, I know for a fact that we provide more news on a weekly basis than the newspaper ever did.”

 Newspapers are expensive to print and to deliver Davies says.

“When newspapers first came on the scene it was supposed to be a cheap way to get your news,” he said. “That is not true anymore. That is why the 40 odd newspapers I worked for (over my career) are all gone. They no longer could make money. What West Carleton Online has done in my opinion, is bring back, for a small fee, an inexpensive way to get community news. And no one else in the Ottawa media is doing it the way we are that I am aware of. Read the Ottawa Citizen tomorrow, the day after that, or the next day after that and tell me how many stories in there are about West Carleton? It’s those little stories that are really big for our readers.”

Nowadays online tools can be used to identify the stories readers are looking for.

“I get to go through the statistics from our Daily Headline emails to see what stories are clicked on,” Davies said. “I go to Google Analytics and I can find out what stories are doing well across the web and that shapes our reporting. At the end of a year, I always look at our top stories which is based on the ones that are most clicked on throughout the year. And, I think this one came in at number three, whatever year that was. It was our profile on the Carp Foodliner – a story about a convenience store. I never would have guessed that would be interesting. But when you do a little history of West Carleton, you learn that these stores such as Younghusband’s and Vance’s and others, were community hubs and very important to their community. We still see that to this day. A couple years ago when the Fitzroy Harbour store was at risk of losing its post office that was a big story. You couldn’t do that with a newspaper you can’t tell which stories are read. Now we have data that tells me what is important to the community.”

Davies says, because of that West Carleton Online has turned out to be a better and more accurate way of giving readers what they want.

“I get that it’s not the same as leafing through a newspaper at your desk while you have your coffee, but the last time I worked at the West Carleton Review, which was 2017, that paper was 14 pages,” he said. “I don’t think you could finish your coffee by the time you were done reading it. We all have to adapt. One thing I am very proud of is we have never once raised our prices. It was $50 through the pandemic, record inflation as well as soaring food and gas prices. I can’t promise it will be that way forever. But if we get more community buy-in there is no need to raise our prices. The goal was not to fleece the consumer but putting value on work done was important.”

Community journalism fills an important niche Davies says.

“For example, the Ottawa Citizen tries to do the best it can, but it has less ability than we do because we don’t get paid overtime,” he said. “We are not part of a union, so our reporters are allowed to take photographs. It doesn’t cost us as much to cover something. We don’t have any overhead whereas the Ottawa Citizen is part of Post Media. They have a whole bunch of managers that don’t contribute to the actual product, but they still have to get paid. So, the first thing that goes in the media world is the reporters. We are a very lean operation.”

Davies says community news also provides an opportunity for more in-depth reporting.

“There certainly is some cross-over with other media, but something that has been in the news for years is the South March BESS facility,” he said. “Every media outlet from the CBC to the Ottawa Citizen to us has covered it but none of them has covered it like we have. Nobody has produced as many stories. Nobody has covered it for two years straight. I might be wrong, but I don’t think the (South March BESS) zoning amendment that passed (Dec. 10) is going to be covered by anyone else but us.”

Not having to cover an entire city means West Carleton Online can focus on the small local stories.

“Ottawa is huge,” Davies said. “Our target audience isn’t the entire City of Ottawa, it is West Carleton and its immediate neighbours. The Ottawa Citizen has to reach a much broader audience.  The fact of the matter is nobody in Orleans cares about the South March BESS project but everyone in West Carleton, whether they are for it or against it, does have an interest.”

Davies says one of the biggest perks of his work is that he gets to learn something new about his community every single day of the year.

“It’s an interesting job,” he said. “Yesterday I was at Ottawa city council for the 2026 City of Ottawa budget and (at the same meeting) the South March BESS rezoning amendment vote. And I was there from 9:30 a.m. until almost 9:00 p.m. That is obviously a long day, but it’s kind of interesting too. Then you go to the other spectrum, the weekend before I was at the Fitzroy Harbour Children’s Christmas party and also at Brunch with Santa in Kinburn. The most interesting thing is all the different people you meet. They are volunteers, they are doing things for their community. There is no personal benefit to them and most of the time they are happy to see me.”

Davies says he gets a lot of support from the community.

“I wouldn’t say I’m an organized or scheduled person but it helps to be very flexible and adapt on the fly,” he said. “But what I know is I need six to 10 stories a day, five days a week, give or take, and I have a pretty good system for creating those stories. We are not at everything, but we are at a lot of things. The best stories are when we are boots on the ground, interviewing people, and taking photos. If I am not able to get to an event there is usually a volunteer who is happy to either send some notes or talk to me on the phone, and send me some photos.”

In Davies’ experience, the saying, ‘if you want a job done, give it to the busiest person,’ rings true for West Carleton volunteers.

“I will say the West Carleton volunteer core is very strong,” he said. “I think when it comes to events, most of them are volunteer-run. We just did a story on the Arnprior legion which is desperate for volunteers or they might have to close their kitchen. Meanwhile the West Carleton Legion in Constance Bay has done a great job with their meals to wheels program and they always have all kinds of interesting events going on there. Having said that it is usually the same volunteers doing all the work. And you could say that for a lot of organizations. In the West Carleton Disaster Relief (WCDR) organization, pretty much every volunteer director also sits on a community association board or other volunteer organization in the community.”

Reader feedback has almost always been positive Davies says.

“I will say one of the surprising things is we don’t get feedback claiming our reporting is an opinion,” he said. “I can certainly give my opinion in a column and all our readers understand columns are opinions. But an interesting story I would say, is that it’s no secret the proponent of BESS has been a long-time advertiser on West Carleton Online. There is a decent sized group very opposed to the project who were also a one-time advertiser, but of course they don’t have the same budget as Brookfield Renewable. When we posted those ads, I was pretty sure I was going to hear from our readers that we were biased but that didn’t happen, not once. In fact, a lot of people have said they appreciate that we have covered both sides of the issues. That makes me feel like we are succeeding in our mandate.”

Originally West Carleton Online was envisioned as being free of advertising but Davies says ad income is what keeps the business going.

“But we do try to make sure that does not affect our opinion,” he said. “For the most part our advertising rates are low enough that if we lost one because of something we wrote it would not kill us. But that has ever happened. I think that is a credit to the community having an open mind when they read our news coverage.”

Davies says an intriguing aspect of community journalism is that it often reveals more about our lives than meets the eye.

“Sometimes there is something buried deep in a story that people think is small,” he said. For example, event coverage is often aways about the spirit of volunteerism. It’s more than just brunch with Santa. I think sometimes we bury some pretty good nuggets in some of our stories that are under read.”