Letter to Ottawa Sports Pages supporters,
It is with mixed emotions that today we are officially announcing the end of our print edition, though the Ottawa Sports Pages name and its tradition of providing a spotlight for local sport will carry on with our weekly email newsletter.
This was a very difficult decision to make, with many pros and cons, but we believe that moving fully online will ultimately allow us to better serve the local sports community and our partners.
This is definitely heartbreaking for us – we won’t pretend otherwise. There’s no question that we’re gonna miss having the newspaper, and we know many of our loyal readers will be sad too.
COVID can definitely own a solid share of the blame. I’m not sure we would have arrived at this point if not for what we’ve experienced the past 2+ years.
An important factor in the decision of course are the business realities faced by a sports industry that’s been hammered hard during the pandemic. In part, this is a move that should help ensure the ongoing sustainability of our not-for-profit organization.
We’ve battled hard to reach the 10-year mark, and community support for the Ottawa Sports Pages Fund will be crucial as we face our biggest challenge yet. (Please do consider donating!)
But when we were forced to cancel our first print editions of 2022, it also led us to reevaluate our priorities. We are a small team at the Sports Pages, and it was truly an epic task for us to produce each newspaper edition. We’ll now be able to redirect our efforts into delivering more frequent and timely news on OttawaSportsPages.ca and in our weekly newsletter, instead of focusing most of our energy solely on creating newspapers every month or two.
We’ll also be able to better highlight advertisers to our digital audience – which has almost quadrupled in size compared to 2020 – thanks to our revamped partnership packages, with more services under development.
It was such an honour to tell over 6,000 stories on local high school, university, community and elite amateur sport in the 98 newspaper editions we printed from 2011 to 2021. Actually, we’re gonna go ahead and call it 100 in total by liberally counting our April 2020 “e-paper” (which didn’t end up hitting the presses) and the farewell edition we’ve got planned for late July.
We are so proud of all those newspapers and the void they filled in media coverage of local sport, but we promise our work to shine a light on the Ottawa amateur sports scene won’t stop at all.
Our 2022 Ottawa High School Best Series, presented by Louis-Riel Sports-Études, is already underway on our website as we tip our caps to some of this year’s top graduating student-athletes. Local sports reporting veteran Martin Cleary’s High Achievers column continues to appear daily on OttawaSportsPages.ca.
And we’ll begin sending the Ottawa Sports Pages newsletter to our subscribers every Saturday starting on July 9. Come the 2022 Canada Summer Games, we’ll share daily recaps, previews, profiles and schedules for our Ottawa participants like we did during the recent Olympics and Paralympics. (You can sign up to join our mailing list below.)
Lastly, we want to thank our readers, our partners and all our friends in the local sports community for your continued support as we begin this new chapter! Your comments, questions and ideas are welcome at execdir@ottawasportspages.ca .
Dan Plouffe
Executive Director
Ottawa Community Sport Media Team
OttawaSportsPages.ca • OttawaSportsCAMPS.ca
By clicking on the submit button, you consent to receive the above newsletter from the Ottawa Sports Pages. You may unsubscribe by clicking on the link at the bottom of our emails. Ottawa Sports Pages | 345 Meadowbreeze Dr., Kanata, Ont., K2M 0K3 | 613-261-5838