It’s an odd thing, this business of introducing yourself to thousands of strangers.
I could start out with factoids about myself: midlife mom of a tween daughter, cat lover, choral singer, hiker, scribbler of short fiction, drinker of far too much coffee. Or I could jump in with a description of how ridiculously excited I am to be sitting at my desk in my brand-new office writing this column (we’re talking kid-on-Christmas-morning levels of excitement, for the record).
I’ll spare you all my cat and kid stories for now (though I make no promises about the future). But I will take the time to tell you a bit about how and why I landed in this office with the new title of Surrey bureau chief, overseeing the newsrooms of the Surrey Now-Leader, Peace Arch News, Cloverdale Reporter and North Delta Reporter.
I started my career in community journalism more than 30 years ago, thinking it might provide a stepping stone to work on a big-city daily, or perhaps a magazine.
As it turns out, community newspapers stole my heart.
My life in community newsrooms brought me from Ontario, where I got my start at the Orleans Star, to B.C., where I’ve served as a reporter and editor in communities including Ladysmith, Abbotsford, Burnaby and New Westminster.
I couldn’t have imagined, back in those Orleans days, what massive societal and technological change I would see over the course of the next three decades. The shift from a newsprint-only landscape to one in which you can access news anytime, anywhere from your own phone has changed journalists’ jobs in ways that would have been unimaginable to my cub-reporter self.
But you know what hasn’t changed? The fact that local news outlets are still the beating heart of the communities they serve.
Publications like this one hold the stories that matter most: the stories of everyday folks making a difference in their communities and the issues that shape their lives.
I’ve been lucky enough to be able to tell those stories for the past three decades. That I now have a chance to venture into this fast-growing region and to continue that work on an even larger scale is an enormous privilege (I know, I know, it sounds corny, but I mean it in the most genuine and heartfelt way).
I’m excited to be here working alongside the talented teams that bring you the Surrey Now-Leader, Peace Arch News, Cloverdale Reporter and North Delta Reporter as we keep doing the work that drew us all into this business in the first place: keeping you informed about life in your community and maybe, just maybe, helping to build a better world along the way.
I can’t wait to get to know you – both the individual “you” who’s reading this right now, and the collective “you” that is the population of the vast and rapidly growing region we serve. I look forward to hearing from you with all your stories, your news tips, your letters to the editor and, yes, your gripes and complaints and what-were-you-thinkings.
I want to know what you want to read about – what we’re doing well, what we could do better, and what may have flown entirely under our radar. So please, share your thoughts about all of those things. Or just reach out to say hi, if you’d rather.
You can send me an email anytime to julie.maclellan@blackpress.ca, or find me on Twitter/X if you prefer.
This is your newspaper, so let’s shape its future together.
Julie MacLellan is the new Surrey bureau chief for Black Press Media.