Mon Aug 25 – What's Happening In & Around Owen Sound; A New Community Poll

Local news updates on Sydenham Sportsmen and the Salmon Spectacular, Owen Sound Attack, TOM Gallery, WHSS alumni, 'Loathe Thy Neighbor' filmed in Bruce County, and more

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Photo credit: Robert Mackey

As summer winds down, I’ve been reflecting on where we’ve come from and where we go next. Two years ago, when OwenSoundHub.org announced its impending retirement, many in the community were asking Maryann and me the same question: What are you going to do about it?

It took a lot of convincing (of ourselves and each other), but eventually we said yes, we would do something about it. We were in danger of losing a local publication, and we are both big believers in the archival value of having a daily. I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone back into the Hub’s archives (and other local publications) to confirm details, dig up background, and connect the dots.

Where we’ve been matters just as much to a healthy community as who we are now and what we’re going to do next. It’s how we learn, evolve, and grow.

What we’ve created doesn’t look like the daily papers of decades past. We don’t land on your doorstep each morning… we land in your inbox. We don’t run obituaries or classifieds; funeral homes now publish obits directly, and people turn to Kijiji or Facebook Marketplace for buy-and-sell.

And from the start, we knew we couldn’t build this on advertising. Not only is that an increasingly shaky model, but running the ads side of a publication is a huge drain on time and energy. We felt our effort was better spent doing what matters: gathering information, documenting what’s happening in our community, curating existing news, and writing original stories.

If we were going to do this, we agreed that our measure of success had to be simple: community support.

If an independent local news source matters to Owen Sounders and those in the surrounding region, they’ll support it, we rationalized. Not through page views from clickbait headlines to please corporate overlords, and not through a bigger share of someone’s marketing budget, but through real people — the ones who live, work, and play here — subscribing, engaging, and backing our work.

And you have. Since our soft launch in October 2023, The Owen Sound Current has grown steadily. Thousands read our free content each day: letters to the editor, public notices, and community columns. Over the past three months, we’ve been averaging 5,000–10,000 reads every day.

Full subscribers get the deeper connection and bigger picture: daily curated news, local event listings, and conversations in comments. Plus — and this is a big one — access to our full archive of more than 2,200 articles, so you can look back at what events, decisions, and circumstances have helped shape the stories you’re reading today.

These aren’t just numbers to us. We believe this activity is helping to build a more informed, better-connected community.

Now, as we head into our third year, we’re asking: what’s next?

Full subscribers and Sustaining Supporters, you’re the ones driving this project. You’re the fuel that keeps this engine going. We’ve put together a quick poll about what you’d like to see from The Owen Sound Current, and we’d like to know what you think of the options under consideration. You’ll find it below.

Read on for that poll plus local news updates, including our exclusive interview with a co-star and co-producer of the feature film Loathe Thy Neighbor, a big win for a Thornbury boutique, a new leader in the Salmon Spectacular, and a lot more.

~ Miranda Miller, Editor

Public Notice

• Notice: Sale of Land in Owen Sound - 1348 7th Avenue West - Grey County

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