Condensed Excerpt, Imperial Oil Review by Andrew Allentuck – as printed in the Reader’s Digest 1992
By the blue-tinged light of an early winter dawn, farmers meet at Edgar’s*, a popular restaurant in Steinbach, Manitoba, to sip coffee and catch up on the news. Outside, their diesel trucks idle in the cold. Inside, the substantial and the trivial of country life is the morning’s gossip. The men wear their caps, each with the trademark of a seed company, a tractor maker or a rural co-operative. They joke about their endless concerns over prices of the harvest past and insects of the summer to come. They pour over the local weekly, The Carillon, reading and discussing stories of town meetings and new hay balers with the intensity of physicists analyzing new theories.
In the widely scattered towns and hamlets of the Prairies, scores of rural weeklies, each printed for perhaps just a few thousand readers, serve villagers and farmers whose lives are the land they till. Often without local radio stations and far from major towns, these people have virtually no other way to learn one another’s stories. The weeklies are the voices of Prairie life.
Rural Manitoba has 45 weeklies, Saskatchewan, 90, Alberta, 110. They bear such colourful names as the Rose Valley View From Here, the High Level Echo, the News Optimist and the Crow Wing Warrior.
City newspapers can be more than pages long. By necessity, they are scanned as much as read. But the small-town papers are often just 24 pages. People read them cover to cover, learning about their world – about high school hockey games and church socials, new markets for crops and ways to keep their pickup trucks running.
Gathering their news in its own way is as tough as life on the farm. Committed to print only that which immediately affects the communities they serve, rural papers must work hard to hold their readers’ interest. Reporters must be able to cover anything and everything.
*Edgar’s Diner, a family owned restaurant since 1959, is located on Highway #12 N in Steinbach, Manitoba. Owner Edgar Kehler, a Berliner Kehler, continues to operate this restaurant together with wife Helen.