UPDATE 5:30 p.m. – Kamloops This Week – the only physical newspaper in Kamloops – will cease operations later this month.

The award winning newspaper, which was founded in 1988, will publish its final edition next Wednesday, October 25. Its closure will leave Kamloops without a newspaper for the first time since 1884.

“We face a bunch of issues that are outside of our control,” Robert Doull, president of Aberdeen Publishing, the company that owns Kamloops This Week, said in a KTW story confirming the closure.

“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.”

Doull also said website views have fallen by half as a result of Meta and Google blocking news links due to the Online News Act, adding 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 added.

City Councillor Dale Bass – who retired after an 18-year career at KTW in 2018 – told Radio NL it is a sad day for the Kamloops area.

“It is really hard to explain right now how awful this is,” Bass said on NL Newsday. “We saw this with the Daily [Kamloops Daily News in 2014], that was awful. “I just left a meeting and my colleagues were saying ‘how can a city our size not have a newspaper at all?”

Bass also said that the closure of the newspaper will have ramifications for the City as well.

“We have to run ads in the paper, where are we going to run them now? Where are we going to put notices of upcoming public meetings?” Bass said. “There is a lot of stuff that is actually going to reverberate back on what we do as a council and what we do as a staff here.”

Last month, a KTW story titled “Kamloops This Week is NOT closing” quoted Doull where he said they served notice under Section 54 of the BC Labour Act as they needed to “adjust some aspects” of the operation.

Doull said the goal was to “hopefully arrive at a mutually agreeable plan to ensure sustainability going forward.”

KTW Editor Chris Foulds told Radio NL that talks had been going on behind the scenes for the past two months trying to find ways to save the paper.

He says one option that was explored was switching operations to a type of non-profit model, though in the end he noted that those details – including possible concessions from the paper’s union, Unifor Local 2000 – could not be resolved before a looming deadline.

“COVID really changed everything and we haven’t got back to pre covid levels of revenue with respect to advertising,” Foulds said on NL Newsday. “We were doing alright in the years before COVID. 2019 was a pretty good year and then COVID hit and everything went sideways.”

“We did a reader appeal that year because we weren’t sure we were going to survive but the community came forward with I think $84,000 to help us out [though] we had to make cuts, we had to lay off people. After the pandemic restrictions, we never got back to what was sustainable for the operation that we want to run here.”

The closure will put about 30 people out of a job, not including carriers.

“Its a horrific day for the staff there,” Bass added. “I hope we don’t lose any of them but some of them really should be moving on to much bigger media outlets. I’m talking about Marty [Hastings] for example. Marty could probably write a ticket anywhere, so could Jessica [Wallace].”

“I just hope they don’t go. I hope we find something for them and I’m totally dreading the last paper.”

Marty Hastings covers sports for Kamloops This Week, while Jessica Wallace primarily covered Kamloops City Hall and the Thompson-Nicola Regional District.

The newspaper was a finalist for the 2021 Michener Award, Canada’s highest journalism honour. It has won five Webster Awards – B.C.’s highest journalism honour – while being a finalist on numerous other occasions. KTW has also won 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, it was named best community newspaper in B.C./Yukon.

News of its upcoming closure comes one day after Glacier Media announced it was shutting down both the Dawson Creek Mirror and the Alaska Highway News. The Alaska Highway News was first published in 1943 while the first incarnation of the Mirror arrived in 1930.

Foulds says the KTW newsroom is hoping to fill the final edition next week with memories and thoughts from staff as well as from readers and advertisers.

People can email their thoughts here.

– With files from Brett Mineer