A history of Alberta told through the eyes of the province’s community newspapers, from 1882 to the present.

The Alberta newspaper industry was born on December 6, 1880. The Edmonton Bulletin was the first newspaper of any kind to be solely written, edited and printed in the western Canadian territory. At the time of its first edition, Alberta was still decades away from being a province and existed only as part of the larger North-West
Territories. Edmonton was nothing more than a group of settlements gathered around the Hudson’s Bay Company fort with a population of approximately 300.

Since Frank Oliver printed his first few sheets, many weeklies have come and gone from the Alberta news scene. Alberta’s Weekly Newspapers records the stories of many of these newspapers, the people who started them and kept them going throughout the years, the important stories they covered and their struggles and triumphs. Even through today’s tough digital challenges for newspapers, Alberta’s 120 weeklies still continue to publish the stories and lives of the communities they serve.

The needs of the community haven’t changed that much. If you read the weekly paper of 1908 and then you read the weekly paper of 2008, you can see the similarities in what they did, which was to report on what was going on in the district. And that’s what made the community paper successful for all those years.

–Frank McTighe, publisher of the Fort McLeod Gazette,
Alberta’s oldest newspaper