New news team takes over at the Mercury
A team of reporters from Caribou Publishing will be taking over the duties for the Tofield Mercury beginning with this week’s newspaper.
John Mather and Jana Semeniuk share duties at the Lamont Leader and now bring their skills and “noses for news” to the Tofield Mercury as well.
“John and Jana have been working together as a team for a few years now and have been doing a great job. We look forward to what they can do here,” said Eric Anderson, Sr. Vice President for Caribou Publishing.
Mather and Semeniuk will be working with manager Lisa Kuflay, student reporter Jordyn Charlesworth, and publisher Kerry Anderson to bring a better variety of news to our readership.
John Mather comes to the Mercury with more than 45 years of newspaper experience. After graduating Humber College in Toronto with honours in Journalism in 1976, he worked briefly for the Chatham Daily News before helping start a weekly newspaper in Tottenham, Ont.
Moving to Alberta in 1981, John worked at the Fort Saskatchewan Record and other newspapers throughout the 1980s. He briefly worked with a public relations/advertising agency before moving to the Edmonton Journal and later the Edmonton Sun where he worked as a copy editor until 2003.
John is a former city councillor at Fort Sask, and ran a couple of small businesses before joining Caribou Publishing in 2019.
Jana and her husband Chris moved to Bruderheim with their 10 month old twin daughters in 2015.
“I have been a trained dog groomer since 2006 and took the opportunity to start a home grooming business so I could stay home with our girls and bring in some extra income,” said Semeniuk. “In 2019 I had the opportunity to fill in temporarily at the Lamont Leader which led to a permanent reporter position. It fit in well with my schedule and still allowed me to maintain my grooming business part-time while being available for my family. When the opportunity arose to also report for the Mercury I was very happy.
“Spending the past three years getting to know the residents, service clubs, and councils of our small towns and villages makes me feel we are doing a valuable service by reporting their news.
“Although I was sad to say goodbye to my clients in the grooming business I have built over the past seven years, I’m excited to spend more time doing something I love just as much; taking pictures and writing,” said Semeniuk.
“Community journalism is such a valuable service for our rural communities,” added Mather. “People might think everything is on social media, but in rural areas, it’s still the community newspaper people turn to.
“Whether it’s finding out who has been born, married or passed away to checking what’s on sale through the local advertisers, the community paper is a fixture providing local content with no personal agendas or bias. Our editorials share our opinions, but the news pages contain the information about your community that you, the residents, want to know about.”
As well as John and Jana’s fine reporting, readers can look forward to Mather’s “rants” as he calls them. An honest, hard-hitting opinion column that has been a hit at other locations.
