When I checked the morning news on SooToday on Wednesday, May 8, 2024, I saw dramatic images that stirred up ashes from my own journalistic past.
SooToday's Derek Turner had been driving to work that day when he spotted a burning building at 647 Queen St. East.
Derek was there before the fire trucks and took photographs that captured the intensity of flames and smoke pouring from the property's third-floor attic windows.
Twenty-two years earlier, I had a tiny garret office on the third floor of that building.
Each day, I toiled alone at a desk directly behind those upper-storey windows, launching SooToday, the digital-only news service that would grow into Village Media.
Day after day, I reported the stories of a community that hadn’t yet decided what to make of my unorthodox approach to news.
I looked out those windows, dreaming of a day when people might stop referring to the results of my 18-hour workdays as an "online rag."
During my tenure in the building, the ground-floor storefront was occupied by a business named The Party Palace.
Since then, tenants have included Games Nook II and the Silly Rabbit Vape Shop.
SooToday, meanwhile, has cannonballed into Village Media, a province-wide chain of 30 hyperlocal news sites with a parallel collaborative network offering our proprietary technology and consulting services to strategic news media partners across North America.
In 2024, we launched TorontoToday as well as Spaces – our very own prototype social network hosted by community champions.
During my months at 647 Queen, I quickly learned Sault Ste. Marie was unlike any other community I'd been privileged to serve.
I noticed those who arrived from points south, assuming their southern solutions would work here, were often wrong.
I resolved, out of respect for this very unique northern city, to refrain from passing opinions or writing editorials until I'd lived here for a decade.
That was in 2002.
By 2012, I observed that the Sault was doing quite well without my two cents' worth.
I decided to continue delivering the news straight, without jumping on bandwagons or running interference on contentious issues.
Well, I was asked to write this 2024 retrospective as an opinion piece, so just this once, I'll sound off on a thing or two.
I'll get to that in a minute.
My office at 647 Queen was actually a storage room – its walls lined with dusty business records from a sister company.
But I liked working downtown because it allowed me to be close to the city's heartbeat.
I was within walking distance of city hall and the waterfront.
While Sault Ste. Marie is a respectable-sized city, I quickly figured out that in many ways it was still a village.
You could learn all kinds of stuff from movers and shakers you met during evening strolls on the boardwalk.
I also learned a lot during the two meals a day I ate at Muio's.
A lot of important business deals went down over Muio's broasted chicken.
If there's a place in the Great Beyond where legendary eateries go after they've served their last veal parm, Muio's went there in 2021, flatlined by the pandemic.
In 2024, SooToday's Darren Taylor reported on the removal of the iconic Muio's sign and I wrote about the extraordinary couple who moved here from Mongolia to transform the place into Ojas, the Sault's first plant-based fine-dining establishment.
The Sault faced some big challenges and disappointments in 2024:
- the costly pipe collapse at Algoma Steel
- the near-loss of the YMCA
- problems at our once-revered Group Health Centre
- the ongoing opioid crisis
- environmental and health issues
- housing shortages
- the loss of long-time SooToday cartoonist Ron Moffatt, who hid a dark secret until his final years
On the brighter side, I was happy to see the Sackville Road extension finally approved and demolition crews preparing to bring down the old hospital.
City council approved ongoing funding for the local Dolly Parton Imagination Library, a childhood literacy initiative of Ward 3 Coun. Angela Caputo that ensures future generations of Saultites will be able to read news services like this one.
The city has started a multi-year project to revitalize Queen Street and we built a downtown plaza despite strong opposition from many ratepayers.
As in all my reporting, I steered clear of value judgments on the plaza controversy and reported impartially on council's deliberations.
Corporately, however, Village Media became a key plaza sponsor, contributing $150,000 in cash and in-kind contributions.
Personally, I was delighted to see that support.
The Sault has invested heavily in its waterfront over the years, but benefits from things like the Bondar tent pavilion have somehow never reached the commercial parts of Queen Street.
The new plaza is designed as a bridge linking Foster Drive to Queenstown.
It's making a difference.
Nothing made me prouder in 2024 than seeing the huge, happy crowd gathered around the plaza's centrepiece – the Village Media stage – to witness our first New Year's Eve puck drop.
In addition to our corporate support for the plaza stage, Village Media CEO Jeff Elgie was also thanked in 2024 by Mayor Shoemaker for launching a membership drive that ensured the YMCA's survival.
I have a different window on Queen Street these days.
Our offices now stand proudly at Queen and Bruce, in the former Royal Bank building.
Gazing through those stately sheets of glass into a new year, the view looks decidedly optimistic, at least to me.
