- by Anne Finlay-Stewart, Editor

This is article #15,196 of the Owen Sound Hub. The first one was in mid-May 2014.

The founders, Michael Den Tandt and Paul Lachine, explained their new project this way:

"We built this website because we believe the people of Owen Sound and the surrounding area deserve to have, and in fact need, their own viable, free-standing, locally controlled and operated newspaper.

"We are here to tell the stories other media don't, can't or won't – stories about local news, local politics, local sports, local music, theatre and art, local entrepreneurialism and innovation. You will notice a pattern developing here: We are local, local, local and more local. That is what we do. It is what engages us."

We have done our best to continue to tell those stories ever since.

When the present becomes the past, those in the future may want to read about what happened and what we all felt and thought about it. In digital media, there are no clippings to keep in a shoebox.

Thank you to Jon Farmer for figuring out how we can keep a copy of every letter, opinion piece, news and feature article in a fairly searchable format, at least for the near-mid future.

If you have basic computer skills, you can help us protect the past nine years of the Hub against an uncertain future or technical failure.

If you can offer us a few hours of your time, you'll be assigned a limited batch of articles at a time to copy and paste in an agreed format into a Google doc or Word doc.

We can even do this together down at the office with some refreshments, if you like company.

If you can help us out with Project Shoebox please get in touch at owensoundhub@gmail.com.

Many thanks.