Looming closure of Thompson newspaper 'a huge loss' for northern Manitoba: culture minister

A northern Manitoba city's only weekly newspaper is folding after more than 60 years.

Noah Cooke, the publisher of the Thompson Citizen newspaper, confirmed to CBC News on Tuesday that it will close, but offered no further comment.

He didn't say when it will publish its last issue, or give a reason for the closure.

The newspaper was founded in 1960, according to its website, and 4,000 copies were published each week.

Its sister publication, the Nickel Belt News, met the same fate in 2022, the Winnipeg Free Press reported at the time.

As of Dec. 3, Manitoba has lost 31 news outlets over the last 16 years, according to data from the Local News Research Project — a crowd-sourced resource that tracks local news sources Canada. Only 11 news outlets opened in the same time period.

The project also found that smaller communities like Thompson — a northern hub with around 13,000 people — are more likely to lose a local news outlet.

About half of the 526 local news outlets that closed across the country since 2008 were in places with populations of less than 20,000 people, said April Lindgren, the journalism professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who co-leads the Local News Research Project.

That can create problems for both citizens and local governments, she said.

"It creates a space for rumour and innuendo and basically making stuff up," so "people start to believe what they see on social media when there's no local reporting to make sure that that information is actually true," Lindgren said.

Local governments then "have to step up and start providing more information, [because] they have fewer opportunities to get that information out via the local media."

While it's not yet clear why the Thompson Citizen is closing, Lindgren said getting a newspaper to doorsteps can be costly.

"When you combine that with the loss of advertising revenue as businesses have shifted advertising to online platforms like Google and Facebook … it's proven to be deadly for a lot of community papers over time."

'Echo chambers' threaten democracy

Provincial Culture Minister Nellie Kennedy says local newspapers are "the heart" of communities, and the closure of the Citizen "is a huge loss for all of northern Manitoba."

The NDP government is looking for ways to support local print journalism, after a motion it put forth to set up a non-partisan legislature committee to help local outlets was blocked, she said in a statement to CBC News.

But Dale Eisler, a former journalist and a senior policy analyst at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy in Saskatchewan, says thanks to social media, people are now less likely to wait to read a weekly newspaper or watch the evening news to stay up to date.

"Now people are being constantly exposed — bombarded, in effect — by other sources of news," Eisler said.

However, there are risks when curated algorithms feed users what they want to see, he said.

"People just go and choose what they want to be exposed to, whereas a newspaper would expose you to things that you might otherwise not think about," said Eisler.

"You're getting people now who kind of retreat into [their] echo chambers of what they believe and what interests them, and for democracy to work, you have to be exposed to other ideas that maybe challenge your beliefs."

Eisler said the ability to publish ideas at the click of a button means journalism is changing and emerging in different forms, and it can become more "individualistic" under platforms such as Substack, an American online publishing platform.

But newspapers are a crucial part of communal identity in cities the size of Thompson, as they track important issues and reflect a sense of collective memory, he said.

"What we're losing is the sense of community," said Eisler.

"It's a newspaper that reflects the interests of the people who read it, and as that dies, so does the connection to the community."