When the news was printed on paper

The history of newspapers in Yorkton now spans 132 years, starting with The Messenger, published in 1892, two years before Yorkton officially became a village. It was written by hand on notepaper, and reproduced by stencil. 

But we wonder, in 2024, if the writing is on the wall for newspapers printed on paper, as we explore the long history of this first, and for for several decades as Yorkton was established and grew, the only means of local mass communication.

For me, this story is up close and personal, having been one of the founders and the editor of Yorkton This Week, an upstart weekly newspaper that  in 1975 took on the behemoth of media companies at the time, Thomson Newspapers, a Canadian company with massive holdings at home, as well as in the United States and Britain. Thomson owned The Enterprise, which by then had been the dominant newspaper in Yorkton for 80 years.