The efforts to revive a local newspaper in Kamloops following the sudden closure of Kamloops This Week in October have fallen through “at the eleventh hour.”

That is despite over $600,000 being raised from a number of investors – including some “well-known business people” – who were hoping to launch the Kamloops Phoenix.

Long-time KTW publisher and current City Councillor Kelly Hall – who was set to serve as publisher of this new venture for the first year – tells Radio NL things fell apart last month.

“We had a lot of support through local investors here as well as support provincially,” Hall said on NL Newsday.

“We were in the market looking at locations and looking at doing renovations for a particular building. That is how close it came.”

The efforts to get the Kamloops Phoenix to rise from the ashes began not long after KTW published its final edition on Oct. 25, 2023. The closure of the award winning newspaper, which was founded in 1988, left Kamloops without a newspaper for the first time since 1884.

Hall says if everything went according to plan, the first edition of the Phoenix would have been published today, Feb. 8.

“We had a strategy employed where we were going to have publication dates picked, we had national flyer business all organized as well as well as an opportunity to communicate with the other media to let them know that, ‘hey, this Phoenix is rising,'” Hall said.

It’s not just the Phoenix, Kamloops Last Week, a weekly video podcast hosted by former KTW sports reporter Marty Hastings and Editor Chris Foulds is also ending after a nearly three year, 127-episode run.

“It was fun while it lasted,” Foulds said on the final episode of KLW which aired on Feb. 7. “We came closer than we thought we would ever get [but] it went sideways.”

“That paper would have been tied to the show because we would have the paper as a business that we would co-own and we keep doing the show like we did the show with KTW. We tried to grow both but the paper didn’t go ahead for various reasons.”

Foulds says he had already incorporated a company and was ready to announce the launch of the Phoenix, before issues with compensation for the sales staff, who he said “were among the best in the city.”

“They thought they needed more. We thought as the investor group that what was in the budget was enough to get them going. We were all willing to take a little pay cuts to get the paper going. But fair enough, they thought they wanted more,” Foulds said.

He also said time wasn’t on their side as the Phoenix was losing advertising to other media outlets in Kamloops and area.

“We wanted to get this paper up and running in mid-December then mid-January and we had February 8 [as launch date] but we we couldn’t do it and it just died on January 8,” he said.

“We had one last meeting [but] -t turns out that we just couldn’t bridge that gap.”

While it is not clear if there will be any more efforts to try and launch a newspaper in Kamloops in the future, it will likely not involve Foulds – who will be moving on to a new communications job with the BC Government – or Hall.

“The way it came to fruition, I think this particular venture is dead on the vine,” Hall added.

“I still believe that there is a viable business plan to be made for a newspaper in this market, but it takes the right people. If you’ve got good people, you’ll have a good product, and in this particular case you’d have good readership as well as good revenue.”