It’s hard to believe we’re rapidly approaching the first anniversary of the Kamloops Chronicle. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve gotten older and time moves differently now, or if it’s because we’re only putting out one issue a month, but as of next month we will have been publishing this thing for a year.

There was a very big part of me that never expected to find myself back at a newspaper again. The industry has been, at best, in flux, with most newspapers just struggling to keep their presses running and the news in people’s hands. I doubt anyone with half an ounce of sense has spent much time thinking of starting a new one.

And yet here we are, almost a year later, and we’re still going.

One of the things I’m really proud of, maybe the thing I’m most proud of, with the Chronicle is how we’re approaching this a bit differently than the traditional newspaper because we’re running it as a non-profit society.

The reason that’s important to me is that I think one of the big reasons that newspapers have been failing in recent years is because they’re treated primarily as a business, with a goal to be profitable, rather than beeing seen primarily as a service to the community.

As a non-profit, though, we’re able to make sure any of the money we make goes only back into the paper itself, helping us to grow and expand over this last year, increasing our stable of freelancers, seeing our page size grow, and begin having conversations about increasing the frequency with which we publish.

But as a non-profit, we’re also reliant on a board of directors to help to shape our product in the months and years to come. And with that first anniversary looming, that means we’re coming up on our next Annual General Meeting, and a potential need for some new recruits to join us in this effort.

While we’re certainly not the first newspaper to go down the path of running as a non-profit, it’s still fairly rare, to a very large extent we’re making a lot of this up as we go along. And granted, I’ve been bringing a lot of lessons I’ve learned from working at newspapers in the past to this one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for new ideas.

I’ve always kind of believed that if someone asks, “Why are we doing it this way?” and the only answer you get is, “Because we’ve always done it this way,” that’s not a particularly good answer.

So maybe, like many of us, you’re excited to see a print newspaper in Kamloops again, and you feel like you want to reach out and do what you can to help keep it going. Maybe you’re someone with some business experience and you want to bring that expertise to the board and help us expand our bank balance so we can hit that twice a month or weekly publication schedule that we’re hoping we can reach. Maybe you just really love the written word and want to do what you can to help celebrate it in print.

There are probably as many reasons to get involved with the Kamloops Local News Society as there are people in Kamloops, and most of them are probably even good reasons (I’m cynical enough to know that there are almost certainly some bad ones out there, but I’m not going to spend too much time thinking about them). So if you’re someone who has a reason, especially a good one, we want to hear from you. For more information, you can contact Tom Dickinson, our Board Chair, at [email protected] or call 250-851-9630.