Kamloops This Week ceasing operations, leaving city with no newspaper

Photo: Kamloops This Week

Kamloops This Week is ceasing operations, which will leave the Tournament Capital without a newspaper for the first time in nearly 140 years.

The newspaper confirmed the closure on Tuesday afternoon.

“The expenditures outweigh the revenue,” KTW editor Christopher Foulds told Castanet Kamloops.

“It comes down to a bunch of issues outside of our control.”

KTW has been published continuously for more than 35 years. Its first issue hit doorsteps on Aug. 28, 1988, and its last issue will run on Oct. 25.

Foulds said the company has been faced with increased production and paper costs and increased rent while ad sales remain stagnant and web views are down.

“It’s a perfect storm of financial calamity,” he said.

“We were trying to find a way to make the paper continue as a non-profit but it’s too difficult and too lengthy a process and we can’t make the transition. We ran out of time.”

An estimated 30 newspaper staffers will be out of a job, not including carriers.

KTW got its start as the Kamloops Super Shopper in the aftermath of the closure of the Kamloops Sentinel in 1987. It was renamed Kamloops This Week in the summer of 1988 after joining forces with Black Press and staffing a newsroom.

Black Press operated KTW until it was sold in 2010 to Robert Doull.

The newspaper punched well above its weight class, earning multiple Jack Webster Awards and dozens of BCYCNA Ma Murray Awards. In 2014, a few months after the closure of the Kamloops Daily News, KTW was named Canada’s best community newspaper.

The highest honour given to the paper’s newsroom came following a series of stories in 2021 exposing a spending scandal within the Thompson-Nicola Regional District. That work was shortlisted for the Michener Award, the top prize in Canadian news — evidence the closure is not a reflection of KTW's journalism but the result of a changing landscape.

“It’s turned into a way for corporations to just make money at the expense of the value of a newspaper — which is to be the voice, interrogator and heart of a community,” said Dale Bass, a Kamloops city councillor who worked as a reporter at KTW for nearly 20 years before retiring in 2018.

“The journalism that has come from KTW, particularly in recent years, has been stellar. The awards they have received show that, but the business case driving the newspaper is not sustainable.”

KTW sponsored many community events and operated the Christmas Cheer Fund since 2014. It’s not immediately clear what will happen to that campaign, which traces its roots back to 1992.

The newspaper published three issues per week for most of its existence but had been printing just one issue weekly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

KTW bulked up its staffing considerably after the closure of the Daily News but has undergone a series of job cuts since 2017.

Foulds said the newspaper is hoping to put together a special issue for its final press run next week.

“That will be the final edition," he said.

"We’re asking people who have read us, advertised with us or worked for us to send memories. We’re going to try to fill the paper with their thoughts about the 35 years.”

Bass said it’s a sad day for Kamloops.

“It will be a colossal loss for this city,” she said. “We saw that when the Daily closed and we’ve slowly seen it with KTW.”

Kamloops’ first newspaper arrived in the city in 1884 when the Inland Sentinel relocated its operations from Yale, north of Hope.