LONG AGO, before there was a Kamloops Chronicle, a man named Michael Hagan decided Kamloops would be a good place to publish a newspaper.

Hagan was a teetotalling entrepreneur who left Ireland in the late 1870s, soon landing in B.C. where he started a paper he called the Inland Sentinel in the Fraser Canyon in 1880.

After a visit to the growing railway and cattle town of Kamloops, Hagan decided to relocate, and so it was that the first edition of the transplanted paper rolled off Hagan’s ancient press in Kamloops on July 31, 1884.

The Inland Sentinel would become the Kamloops Sentinel, in its early days carrying social tidbits and news as well as Hagan’s opinions on topics such as his disaffection with the CPR or advocacy for indigenous and Chinese communities. He even published excerpts from a novel he’d written.

From the day Michael Hagan put the first copies of his humble little paper in the hands of Kamloops readers, this place has been a newspaper town. There’s something about the feel of having the news in your hands — even with a little ink rub-off — that an electronic device can’t beat.

Hagan was the first of a long line of colorful characters, anonymous plodders and determined rivals — and even a Catholic priest — who dedicated themselves to keeping Kamloops residents informed via the written word for close to 140 years.

The priest was Father Jean-Marie-Raphael Le Jeune, who started a unique newspaper on May 15, 1891. The Kamloops Wawa, which means Talk of Kamloops in the Chinook trade jargon, carried on until 1904.

Most of the stories were written in Chinook, while others were in various indigenous dialects Le Jeune had mastered — he sometimes joked he could swear in 22 languages.

Kamloops got its second English-language paper in 1897 when a group of Conservatives started the Kamloops Standard as a dissenting voice to the Liberal-minded Sentinel, but the two merged into the Standard-Sentinel in 1916. That paper then merged with the Kamloops Telegram in 1924.

This time the paper stuck with the Kamloops Sentinel name until 1955 when it expanded from once to five days a week, becoming the Kamloops Daily Sentinel. One of its long-time “back shop” employees was a fellow named Cliff Branchflower, who would later be elected mayor.

A new paper arrived on the scene in 1965. The Kamloops-North Kamloops News Advertiser had begun life in 1931 as the Kamloops Shopper, founded by George Duncan Brown. When George Dawson and Watt Francis took it over in 1937 they renamed it the Kamloops Advertiser but didn’t start adding news content until 1968.

As the paper grew, it went through several name and format changes but is most remembered as the News Advertiser in those early days.

In the summer of 1970, a young journalist named Mel Rothenburger joined the paper. “Advertiser” was removed from the name in 1973 and it became The Kamloops News, increasing from two editions a week to three under the kind and capable leadership of publisher Harry Francis.

Southam News Inc. bought the paper in September 1981, ending local ownership of Kamloops papers. It was later acquired by Hollinger Inc. and then Glacier Media.

Those were heady days. New ownership brought new resources. Publishing three times a week, we were in stiff competition with the Thomson Newspapers-owned Sentinel, and after we turned daily in August 1982 — five days a week — the market really heated up.

In order to go head to head with The Sentinel on a daily basis, we began charging for subscriptions — $2 a month. Our full-time newsroom staff increased from 12 to 17 members and then more.

Kamloops was one of only a half dozen cities in the country that enjoyed the choice between two daily newspapers. That was great for readers but it couldn’t be sustained and, within a couple of years, The Sentinel cut its publishing schedule and changed its format to a tabloid before shutting its doors altogether in 1987.

The Daily News increased to six days a week in 1986 and, in 1995, switched from its long-standing evening publishing schedule. Sitting down with coffee and the morning paper now became part of the city’s lifestyle.

Kamloops wouldn’t be a one-newspaper town for long. Within a year of the Sentinel’s closing, Clarence Wiseman started publishing the Kamloops Super Shopper, which soon became Kamloops This Week under Black Press.

KTW was a free-distribution paper just as various iterations of the Kamloops News-Advertiser had been. With the latter now the subscription-based Kamloops Daily News, the newspaper scene had come full circle.

The publishing frequency for KTW varied from weekly to three times weekly during its 35-year existence. In 2010, it was purchased from Black Press by Aberdeen Publishing.

And just as The Daily News had received a major boost when the Sentinel closed, Kamloops This Week got a big shot in the arm from the closure of The Daily News in 2014. But nobody saw COVID coming, which kicked a major hole in advertising revenues.

Combine that with shifting viewer habits brought on by the Internet, and KTW joined the list of failed newspapers, delivering its last copy in October 2023.

Suddenly, Kamloops had no newspapers. With a population of less than 4,000 in the early 1900s, the community had been able to support two newspapers and was almost never without two papers in all the years that followed. Yet now, with 100,000-plus residents, the town has no printed media outlets. No paper to land on doorsteps and coffee shops with political and police news, crossword puzzles, sports scores, perfect cribbage hands, classified ads, entertainment news and reviews, weddings, obits, lists of births — the gamut of community life that’s just not available anywhere else.

I often hear people reminisce about their first jobs — delivering newspapers. Or the simple pleasure of relaxing with the paper. They speak wistfully of “the old days” of media in Kamloops. Maybe the Kamloops Chronicle can bring back some of that feeling.

Submitted by Mel Rothenburger. He is a former mayor of Kamloops and former editor of The Kamloops Daily News.