Local paper closes after 46 years in business

The Jasper Booster is another casualty of restructuring and downsizing by Sun Media, which has cut 600 jobs in Western Canada, Ontario and Quebec since last December.

The newspaper printed its final issue last week after serving the community for 46 years.

A story on the front page of its last issue cited shrinking advertising revenues and rising costs as reasons to fold the publication.

“It was a very difficult decision to cease publication in such a wonderful and picturesque community, but the reality is, the business model no longer made sense in the current economic environment,” said Craig Martin, Sun Media’s executive vice president of operations for Western Canada, in a news release.

Publisher Sonia Germain wrote one of three farewell columns in last week’s issue. “I never thought that I would be writing in the last edition of the Jasper Booster with tears in my eyes and a feeling that something great, something so many different people cared about over the last 46 years just died,” Germain wrote.

The Booster employted three full-time staff and two freelancers.

Peter Glenn, editor of the Booster from 1997 through 2000, said he was surprised to hear that the Booster was closing, though he could understand how it might have happened.

“Probably with moving so much of the operation to Hinton, they just left the Booster as kind of a branch paper of the [Hinton] Parklander,” Glenn said. “So I don’t know that endeared them to advertisers and readers, then profits start to slip and now we’re hit with the recession.”

Glenn, who is now a senior copy editor for the Calgary Herald, called the decision to close the paper “disappointing.”

“It kind of lets the town down,” he said. “When a company like Sun Media goes in and buys a long-standing institution like the Booster, in my opinion I think it would have been nice for them to look for a local owner or alternatives to them shutting it down.”

Glenn was with the Booster right when the Jasper Improvement District was striving toward self-governance, and he enjoyed writing about the struggles between the town and Parks Canada. “It was just always interesting, the dynamic between the park itself on the one hand and the businesses, the tourism on the other,” he said.

Though Jasper’s going back to being a one-newspaper town, Glenn’s seen it before and doesn’t expect the news to suffer. “I felt that because in a smaller community your readers are so in-tune with what you’re writing and so responsive to what you write that they kept us in check,” Glenn said.

Hâf Baillie, who worked for the Booster for 12 years through the 90s, said she was sad the paper folded. “There was a team of us, and the four of us worked together for quite a while,” she said. Her colleagues were Peter Glenn, Sascha Bennett-Moir and Karen Young, who is now publisher of the Fitzhugh.

Some said the Booster lost its small-town feel when it was taken over by Sun Media, and Baillie said her fond memories were distant when she heard the paper had closed. “It was almost like somebody I knew, but someone I didn’t know well, had passed away,” she said.

But her memories certainly are fond. Baillie started off as the ad sales representative in 1991 before taking over as publisher from 1998 to 2003. “It was fun, great fun,” she said. “Everybody knew me, so when they saw me coming they’d either hand over their wallets or turn and run.”

Baillie won’t be the only one sad to see the long-running paper close. “You ask any of the seniors in town who have been here most of their lives, Wednesday was the day to get the paper,” she said.

The Booster was started in 1963 by Fred Donovan, though it was later purchased by Bowes publishers, then Sun Media. Other papers in the town’s history include the Jasper Signal (1927 to 1928), the Totem pole (1947 to 1948), the Jasper Totem (1955 to 1967), and the Jasper Gateway (1965 to 1969). The Fitzhugh was started in 2005 by a group of five Jasperites.