Two moments from Kevin Swayze’s time at the Cambridge Reporter stand out above the rest.
The first was in 1998.
He was sitting at his desk in the since demolished newsroom that once stood at 26 Ainslie St. S. when a call came over the emergency transponder. A 12-year-old boy, Mark Gage, had gone missing after swimming near the Parkhill Dam.
Upon arriving at the scene, constable David Nicholson of the Waterloo Regional Police Service Underwater Search and Recovery Unit had entered the water. A short while later, police were calling on residents to join the rescue line in an attempt to pull Nicholson from the river.
Neither Gage nor Nicholson surfaced alive.
“I remember watching it,” Swayze recalled of the moment he went from reporter to concerned citizen.
“It was at dusk and I could see he had a flashlight. You could see him behind the dam and then the light disappeared. I was one of the 20 people on the rescue lines. It was chaos down there when the he was sucked into the dam.”
The second moment was in 2003 when Swayze was the last person to lock up when the Cambridge Reporter closed its doors for good after 157 years of operation.
He recalls packing boxes full of newspaper clippings, photos and whatever else he could salvage in what he described as a surreal moment. Many of those items remain locked in the city's archives.
While both were negative memories, there were plenty of positive ones over the years as the newspaper became the heartbeat of the city.
Now Swayze is inviting residents to a 'Remembering the Reporter' public session at the Idea Exchange on Sept. 19, exactly 20 years to the day of its closure.
“It was your grandparents' Facebook,” he said.
“I’m going to talk a little bit about the history. I hope people do a bit of reminiscing because I talk to many people who remember winning contests in the paper, advertising, delivering the paper after school as their first job and how the Reporter played to Cambridge, Galt, Preston and Hespeler.”
Taking on a few different names, including the Galt Reporter and Evening Reporter before settling on the Cambridge Reporter in 1973 when the city officially amalgamated, the paper thrived on local wall-to-wall coverage of everything from crimes to city council.
Swayze's presentation of its history comes at an interesting time after Nordstar announced it has put Metroland newspaper group into bankruptcy and cut over 600 jobs. Part of the plan is to convert 70 print newspapers into a digital-only format.
"This is a hard day for every journalist and employee of Metroland newspapers," Swayze said.
"When the Cambridge Reporter closed 20 years ago, I vividly remember how rattling it was to see good people doing important work for their community lose their jobs. It’s brutal."
As the way people consume news continues to evolve, Swayze can’t help but remember taking the paper hot off the press and it still being warm to the touch. In the digital world people now live in, Swayze is concerned finding news that matters locally is becoming harder and harder to access.
“It’s just noise some days,” he said.
“It’s a lot of work to find out what you want to learn about. It’s more work now than it was before. You’ve got Facebook doing all the work for you but you don’t know why they’re giving it to you.”
But for at least one night next week, people can tell old stories and remember why quality local journalism is still vital to a thriving community.
“It was very much a community view of the world here,” Swayze said of the paper's coverage.
“We were very clear about our audience. It was Cambridge and what people cared about.”
The presentation will take place at the Old Post Office Idea Exchange at 12 Water St. S. from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Registration can be done here and video of the session will be posted on the Idea Exchange YouTube page in the days that follow.
