Kamloops This Week will publish its final edition on October 25.
The newspaper, which has been operating in the southern city for 35 years, blamed the closure on a myriad of issues including market conditions and ever-increasing costs. The closure will leave Kamloops without a newspaper for the first time since 1884. It’s website will also close.
“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, in a statement on the newspaper’s website. “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.”
Aberdeen Publishing purchased the Prince George Free Press in 2010 and subsequently closed it in 2015. The move comes on the heels of Glacier Media shuttering the Dawson Creek Mirror and the Alaska Highway News.
Doull said Kamloops This Week 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.”