What you’re holding in your hand right now (or looking at on your phone, or your PC, or however you might be reading this) is something I think is pretty special. It’s the first issue of what we hope will be a new ongoing newspaper for the city of Kamloops and it’s called the Kamloops Chronicle. And I’m pretty excited to be able to share it with you.
I care a lot about local news because local news has been a pretty massive part of my life for a long time. In fact it was my career for a very, very long time.
If you’ll indulge me, I’ll take you on a very quick tour of my newspaper history.
I started working at the High Country Advertiser in Williams Lake in the early 90s. Years passed, the paper changed names once or twice before sticking with the Williams Lake Advocate. I moved to the Williams Lake Tribune for a few years before taking a layoff to spend a few years trying to write independently.
Right around the time that was failing to pay the bills, I discovered that a new community newspaper that had started up a few years before had been purchased by a handful of people I knew from my time at the Tribune and with some conversations and negotiations, I joined them as a partner for about a decade.
When that paper — the Cariboo Advisor — was purchased around 2010, I took a buyout to create a passion project, an arts and lifestyle magazine called The Stew. It ran in Williams Lake from 2010 until 2013 when my partner and I sold it to move to Kamloops.
That would have been the end of a lengthy career in newspaper except I did eventually connect with Kamloops This Week in 2018, where I worked as a writer until COVID struck and I was laid off when they weren’t able to sustain their staffing level.
Sometime later, as we all know, Kamloops This Week closed its doors.
So it feels both weird and perfectly appropriate for me to be here right now, at another newspaper, doing this all again. And it’s exciting and it’s terrifying and I certainly hope you all like what we’ve put together for you.
Let’s talk about this thing in your hands for a second. The first thing you need to know is that it’s a work in progress. We’re maybe not 100 percent sure what it’s going to be yet. Think of it as a living document, which may evolve, or morph, into new, different, and hopefully always better things in the weeks and months to come.
Another thing you should know is that we really want this to be a community newspaper, in that we want this to be the voice of the community.
What that means is that we need you to let us know what you want this to be. What do you want to see in it? What do you not want to see in it? We’re hoping that if we can provide you with the closest thing you can get to the ideal community newspaper experience, you will want to support us, and continue to support us, in the months and years to come.
And that’s maybe the most important thing, how we’re looking to try to keep this thing going, because we hope this will just be the first of many issues. Like many newspapers, we intend to rely on advertising dollars, but unlike many newspapers, we’re looking to the community for support.
We’re hoping that with 4,000 Kamloopsians donating $10 a month we can keep the papers coming off the press and the community news in your hands.
We’re also approaching this as a non-profit society, which is a new angle for newspapers. Most newspapers are run for profit, and that often results in decisions made not in the interest of the news, but in the interest of improving revenue.
We want to make our decisions based only on creating a sustainable, high-quality product, that the community can get behind.
And here it is. Our first crack at it. Be sure to let us know what you think.