By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
I picked up my first copy of The Georgia Straight on a crisp fall afternoon, wandering through the East Vancouver neighbourhood I had just moved into. The air smelled of damp leaves, a woman was singing from the second-floor balcony, and I still didn’t know where to buy the good dumplings. Tucked into a rusty blue box near Victoria Drive, the paper felt like a time capsule and a relic. Thick with classifieds, live music listings, and bold headlines about local parks and politics — I couldn’t believe they were distributed for free.
Holding that newspaper did something no algorithm ever had: it told me where I was, not just geographically, but culturally. It told me about experimental live music at the Biltmore and the story of resistance emerging from CRAB Park. It helped me better understand the place I was in, and with it, a sense of belonging to a rich history of local stories. Hidden in the newsprint, I hadn’t just found information, I had found a friend — an unlikely intimacy.
In a world where clicks shape headlines, these little encounters brought me back into my reality. They made me reconsider: what happens when news serves community rather than capital?
Local and student newspapers might not seem revolutionary. After all, they are slow to be published, some smell like dust, and are decorated with coffee stains and margin doodles. We find them discarded around the hallways and assume they are practice runs for aspiring writers building their portfolio. But in that slowness, in their physicality and long-term commitment to a place, they gently resist the way most of us consume news today. They don’t just report events, they participate in collective memory. While the world accelerates, they stubbornly stand still and ask us to pause — to hold, to remember.
“The folded newspaper on your kitchen table doesn’t just say this happened; it says this matters.”
Consider Haida Gwaii, a temperate archipelago draped in fog and stories of resilience. Here, the sea presses up against the forest, and the islanders’ lives are shaped by wind, salt, and time — a place of mostly locally owned businesses. Here, The Haida Gwaii Observer ran locally from 1969 until it was sold to Black Press in 2014. This wasn’t just a matter of economics; the islanders lost a mirror that reflected to them their values and voiced their concerns.
When the ferry ride to the mainland takes seven hours and things like milk become difficult to find, “go local” becomes a strategy for survival. Black Press’ ownership, tied to Big Oil, led to headlines that missed the nuance of kinship and ongoing local disputes. Simon Davies, former communications director for the Council of the Haida Nation, told J-Source that when journalists lack the awareness of decades of cultural annihilation and resource extraction, they “stomp around on top of material.” Davies added that they “don’t know the situation, don’t know the complexity, don’t know the families, don’t know the strife within the families.” That’s the difference between larger publications and local news: when residents can read a story and recognize it as their own. It’s what makes the work of community members like Stacey Brzostowski, who co-founded and runs the Haida Gwaii News from her kitchen, stand out. While algorithmic newsfeeds collapse geography and context and create an illusion of omniscience, her paper is rooted in the now, bringing the community together.
The Observer is not alone in its disappearance. Since 2008, over 340 Canadian communities have lost local news providers and today, over 2.5 million Canadians live in postal codes with none or only one local news source. In the silence left behind, we are at risk of losing the ability of a place to remember itself.
Cultural critic Walter Benjamin once wrote that modern time is “homogenous and empty” — a string of identical days to be filled with productivity. TikTok trends vanish in hours, news disappears behind paywalls. By contrast, the work of local newspapers lives on, allowing the past to surge into the present with urgency. The folded newspaper on your kitchen table doesn’t just say this happened; it says this matters.
“They record what the dominant media forgets: the lives of seniors, the questions of tenants, the songs of underground musicians, the legacy of local traditions.”
The Georgia Straight for instance, was born during the Vietnam war, the environmental movement, and a counterculture looking for a home. It reported police harassment, platformed scandalous art, and educated readers about climate change long before it was fashionable. Its power lay in its refusal to be just a “product” because really, it was making culture. Just as a dam alters the flow of a river and protest signs shift one’s perceptions, a local newspaper can reshape its community. That’s why sociologist Bruno Latour called some objects “actants,” things that don’t just exist passively but have the potential to initiate change. Local newspapers are actants too, they can change a community’s sense of self.
The Ubyssey, UBC’s student paper since 1918, sued the university in 1995 after exposing a secret deal with Coca-Cola. Their win set new benchmarks for transparency across Canadian universities. This same spirit fuels The Eastern Door, a community paper in Kanien’kehá:ka which started with a print circulation of only about 1,500 copies. Under financial strain from the pandemic, they launched a bilingual site to preserve Elder stories in Kanien’kéha. Perhaps not traditional news, it became the site for cultural and linguistic revival for the community.
Beyond present-tense media, these newspapers thus also do the work of cultural and political memory keepers. They witness, record, and remember with care that few institutions can summon. They create living archives of sidewalks and townhalls, of public parks and public grief. Take The Sprawl from Calgary — launched just before the 2017 municipal election — its purpose is not to dominate headlines but to deepen them. Funded by over 1,600 readers giving $5 a month, it tries to tell stories that other media don’t. And to tell them slower, to dwell, to notice. This commitment is present throughout the country. In Montreal, a banker named David Price launched The Westmouth Independent and here in Vancouver’s West End, a writer and publicist Kevin McKeown launched The West End Journal to chronicle the small stuff: sewers, rezoning applications, local artists. The news of ordinary life, with the trust that someone will care enough to follow it.
In a time of sponsored content, disappearing stories, and infinite scrolls, unfolding a local newspaper and smearing your thumb across the newsprint is about joining a quiet ritual of remembering together.
From the archived cover pages on The Peak’s office walls and the archived photographs of WWII veterans being welcomed back home on Crowsnest Pass Herald’s office door, local newspapers show up every day to document the mundane. As Pass Herald’s publisher Lisa Sygutek writes, “Local papers are the diary of their community.” They record what the dominant media forgets: the lives of seniors, the questions of tenants, the songs of underground musicians, the legacy of local traditions. They gather the evolving symbols, dialects, and concerns of a place before they are forgotten.
So, we press ink into paper like our ancestors pressed pigment onto rock. We declare: we were here. In the pages of our community paper, we ensure we still are. And in doing so, we believe we can continue to be.
