Just a note to congratulate you on your courage and civic-mindedness in rescuing the Picton Gazette.

I wish you the best of luck. In 1999 I was a university professor who helped to found The Crier in Port Hope. It was started from scratch to protest the decline in quality of the daily Port Hope Evening Guide (which fell under Conrad Black’s chain ownership and today is no more).

It was a lot of volunteer hard work but much fun, and Farley Mowat was one of our founding partners. Alas, the challenges of editing it in my spare time while commuting to what was then Ryerson University in Toronto proved too much and we had to abandon plans to make a business of it, but in a year of publishing monthly we managed to do important journalism and even won some provincial awards for our journalism.

Our communities do need their own newspapers, and I applaud you for preserving yours.

Best wishes,

John Miller

Emeritus professor of journalism

Toronto Metropolitan University