It is with great sorrow that we announce that Kamloops This Week, both the newspaper and the website, will be closing later this month.
After 35 years of publishing in the city, next week’s edition of KTW, on Wednesday, Oct. 25, will be the final newspaper to be delivered to homes and drop boxes.
Due to myriad challenges, including market conditions and unrelenting rising costs, KTW will close, leaving Kamloops without a newspaper for the first time since 1884.
“We face a bunch of issues that are outside of our control,” said Robert Doull, president of Aberdeen Publishing, the company that owns Kamloops This Week. “Our paper costs have increased. Our printer went out of business with 10 days’ notice and the sole available replacement is only able to give us a smaller page size at a higher price.”
In addition, website views have fallen by half as a result of Meta and Google blocking news links due to the Online News Act, while lease rates for office space have doubled.
“To operate our business, we need a stable revenue base and controllable costs so that we can commit to providing forward advertising contracts with certainty,” Doull said.
“The cost half of our equation no longer makes sense and we don’t see any way to solve it. The newspaper has simply come to the end of its business life. We had hoped that we might be able to find a way for the paper to continue as a non-profit enterprise. However, in the end, it proved to be too difficult and too lengthy a process for us to be able to make the transition and we simply ran out of time.”
Since its birth in 1988, KTW has been the recipient of numerous awards, including being named a finalist of the 2022 Michener Award, Canada's highest journalism honour. KTW has also won five Webster Awards (B.C.'s highest journalism honour) and has been a Webster finalist numerous times. In addition, KTW has taken home dozens of BC/Yukon Community Newsmedia (known as the Ma Murrays) and Canadian Community Newspaper Association awards. In 2014, KTW was named best community newspaper in Canada and in 2014 and 2015, KTW was named best community newspaper in B.C./Yukon.
KTW's newsroom is planning the final edition, which we aim to fill with memories and thoughts from our staff and from readers and advertisers. In the meantime, we will continue to report the news on the website through this month.
SHARE YOUR MEMORIES
The final print edition of KTW will be published on Wednesday, Oct. 25. We would like to include the thoughts of our readers and advertisers in those pages.
Please email your thoughts to [email protected].
