Tomorrow's News

The death of journalism has been predicted for decades. What would it take to avoid it?

- JESSICA JOHNSON

FOR 100 YEARS, the Cut Knife Courier was the newspaper of record in Cut Knife, Saskatchewan. Every week, it reported on community news: 4-h club agricultural competitions, the RCMP police blotter, or notable events (the prime minister’s 2019 visit made the front page). When I visited Cut Knife in 2018, after my father retired there, I felt that I already knew it through my email subscription to the Courier.

A forty-five-minute drive west of the Battlefords, Cut Knife is a town of 600 where many of the larger issues Canada faces seem magnified: retired farmers, commuters from the Alberta oil patch, and newcomers from a range of countries share space with as many as five churches and the residents of three reserves. Cut Knife is politically and demographically divided, and it’s trying hard to work on its problems in the midst of economic uncertainty and cultural change. Perhaps because of this, the Courier’s most popular feature was a column written by a cat named Tuc. (“That cat,” my father once remarked, “is able to say things about politics and religion that people couldn’t.”)

When the paper folded, in September 2020, it wasn’t a surprise to anyone, but it was a blow. The Courier had often been lauded as a throwback — a community newspaper still alive in the age of media contraction. Ray and Andrea Stewart, both former horse racers and trainers from Alberta, had bought the paper in 2016. According to Ray, the