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By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: Mourning the loss of the city’s daily newspaper 10 years ago

Jan 23, 2024 | 5:55 AM

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.

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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.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.