The Scarborough Archives has the Mirror on microfilm from 1961 to the 1980s and hard copies from the 1980s to the present.
By Mike Adler
Some of you may still be wondering where the Scarborough Mirror went.
It’s kind of a long story.
Working for Metroland, which owned the Mirror and still runs Toronto.com, is a job I’ve given half
my life to.
That job will end by December 31. The people I’ve worked with at the Mirror and Toronto.com – those
who hadn’t left already – are being laid off, too.
The Mirror, published from 1962 until this September, is another casualty of the long and now rapid decline of local journalism in Canada.
We knew something like this was coming, but we didn’t know exactly how or when it would end.
Our newspaper once landed on Scarborough doorsteps three times a week, wrapped around flyers as thick as a brick sometimes.
I’ve been on the Scarborough beat for about 17 years, and the last half-dozen or so were very difficult. The papers had shrunk, the flyers were scarce.
We said goodbye to our office. We said goodbye to most of our colleagues.
The pandemic and Facebook’s ban on Canadian news links have hurt local media badly.
I could tell you more about Metroland and its owner, the Toronto Star’s parent company, and how their corporate decisions affected the outcome, but what does it matter? The Mirror is gone.
You can – for now, at least – still find news about Scarborough on Toronto.com, though it may seem hard to find at times.
I’ll still post items about Scarborough on X (I still call it Twitter), through the @SCMirror account, until the company tells me to stop.
I’m still writing about Scarborough, but now it feels like what I’m really doing is saying goodbye.
As for what the plan for what Toronto.com might be next year, I haven’t heard. I only know their plans
don’t include me.
If you ever miss the Mirror, Toronto Public Library’s Cedarbrae branch should have close to our entire set of back issues on microfilm, and many of our bound volumes are at the Scarborough Archives in Highland Creek.
I’m grateful to everyone who thanked me or wished me well since the Mirror stopped publishing. You told me the newspaper was a part of your lives and you appreciated that.
This has been a great job, one I’m hoping somebody else can do some day. There is so much happening in Scarborough, good and bad, that needs to be written about.
But who will write news about Scarborough and get paid to do it, that I don’t know.
Your Centennial News, whether you read it every month or not, is a treasure. It does for your neighbourhood what I tried to do for Scarborough. It speaks to you about people you might see and places you might go in your community. It responds to you, since you are the reason it’s being published. And it’s free.
That’s what I believe local news should be, and that’s what the Mirror was, for a long, long time.
But now that’s over.