EDITORIAL – Mourning the loss of the city’s daily newspaper 10 years ago
An editorial by Mel Rothenburger.
TEN YEARS AGO, in January 2014, Kamloops lost its daily newspaper. I don’t think the city has fully recovered.
The Kamloops Daily News closed a year and a half after I retired, and I like to say it just couldn’t survive without me. In truth, though, I was devastated, and wrote at the time that I had always believed the paper would outlive me.
I thought it would be there to publish my obituary when the time came. Now all I’m going to get is a notice on a website. Used to be, when somebody you knew died, you clipped it out and filed it somewhere. Websites aren’t good for clipping.
The thing about newspapers is that they were generalists. They published everything from obits and minor league ball scores, crosswords and who got a perfect hand in cribbage, to City Hall, world news and in-depth series on things like the pine beetle rampage and the Ajax mine.
You didn’t have to agree with everything you read in the paper; in fact, reading things we disagreed with was healthy. Nowadays, people tailor their news menus so they only have to read whatever reinforces their own biases.
They get their information on what’s going on in the world from Facebook and TikTok, and that makes their world pretty small.
Kamloops doesn’t even have a weekly newspaper anymore. Some folks are hoping to start some sort of volunteer or community based replacement and are shopping the idea around, trying to get potential advertisers to commit support.
Sadly, as nice as it would be to get a newspaper back — daily or weekly — it’s not going to happen. Today’s generation doesn’t have room for the printed word anymore. What we’re left with is a sentence or two on Twitter/ X, or 30-second stories on radio or TV.
The new generation that gets its information on a device instead of at the doorstep doesn’t know what it’s missing.
I’m Mel Rothenburger, the Armchair Dinosaur.
Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Thanks for the memories, Mel. Surprisingly enough, this morning I met Sandy….significant other of Susan who was on staff at Kamloops Daily News. We shared a few laughs & I recalled having taken home made Christmas shortbread for Susan and I told her to make sure Mr. Duncan got some! That brought a few chuckles to the people close by in the office.
You were a good journalist in that you allowed both sides of a story to be given. You accepted criticism. Those qualities are still there but not so much in some of the other “digital” format news sites. And some of us may have saved clippings from newspapers over the years.
Susan was a force with which to be reckoned. She was not numbed by any kind of bullying at City Hall. More than one fiery editorial resulted after she had attended a meeting or received information that deserved to go to print. Given enough time, bullies disappear. Councillors came and went & still come and go.
When the parking pay stations were adopted, there was some fanfare. Jon Wilson was shown in a photo. We learned the server was in a European country; France I believe.
Because they were wireless devices, I knew there had to be radio waves involved. I listened to them then and can still listen to them now. No chance of ever doing anything with what is being heard, really. But for some reason, a couple of days after that tidbit of information got out, all the pay stations were covered up and seemed to have been put in a state of dormancy. The invisible power of the printed media held an invisible power something like the invisible radio waves.
A friend of mine died on December 30th this past month. There was no obituary in the newspaper. I had known the guy since some time in 1986.
I think we should all have a chance to write at least part of our own obituary. We could enjoy reading it too.
If it means anything to you, I’ll get together with a few thoughts and make sure they get forwarded to somebody, somewhere, who will make sure you get an obituary. Or, maybe the rapture will happen first.
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I was sure sorry to see that paper go. It had a good run though–from the Inland Sentinel to the Daily Sentinel to the Kamloops Daily News. Different owners, I presume, but ongoing and overlapping staff. I remember when you were the editor of the News-Advertiser before you became editor at the Sentinel. And now here you are, adapting to the times. Your nostalgia is well earned.
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To correct the record, I never worked at The Sentinel; it and The Kamloops Advertiser/ Kamloops News Advertiser, Kamloops News/ Kamloops Daily News were two different papers. But thank you for the nice comments.
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“Nowadays, people tailor their news menus so they only have to read whatever reinforces their own biases.“
I would argue it was always the case even when people bought their favourite daily from the newsstands.
Nowadays we have an incredible variety of news sources, commentaries, op-pieces, editorials and scientific articles to complement it all.
And for the ones who have left whom we truly cared about we don’t need to find stored away clips as their memories will be everlasting in our hearts.
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But Mel, newsprint left those inky marks on your fingers. I think the environment and we as a communtiy are better off without paper circulars. Something has been lost, you are right about that. But it just doesn’t make sense to distribute such a high volume of quickly discarded paper. I mean, what would David Suzuki think?
And Mel, you’re not getting an obit if I have any say on the matter! You’re staying right where you are; bringing readers the daily stories, op-eds and moderating the comments we so love to read when drinking our morning coffee.
Good day to you sir!!
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