When the Presses Stop: What the End of Print Means for Northern Ontario
Postmedia ends print for the Sault Star and five other northern papers this month. What the end of print costs the North, and what should not be lost.
The end of print for much of Northern Ontario’s daily news arrives at the end of this month. Postmedia has confirmed that The Sault Star, The Sudbury Star, the North Bay Nugget, the Timmins Daily Press, The Standard in Elliot Lake and the Mid-North Monitor in Espanola will stop their print editions and go digital-only. The Cochrane Times-Post will close entirely. The North Bay plant that printed them shuts on October 31, and 11 printing and distribution jobs go with it.
Postmedia says no newsroom jobs are affected. It plans a new weekly paper, Northern News This Week, for print subscribers across the North. In an email to CTV News, the company said it “remains committed to serving the northern Ontario market.”
That’s worth something. Reporters who keep covering councils and courts matter more than the format their work appears in. Still, we shouldn’t pretend that moving off paper costs nothing, especially here.
What paper did that a website doesn’t
It reached people who aren’t online. Many older readers in the North still get their news on paper. Rural internet along the Lake Superior shore is still patchy, and some households have no connection at all. A printed paper on the counter at the post office or the coffee shop reached people whom no push alert ever will.
It stuck around. A printed public notice about a zoning change, a tender or a road closure sat on kitchen tables for a week. Online, the same notice falls off the homepage by evening.
It kept a public record. Bound back issues in libraries and newsrooms are how we know what councils promised in 1985. Websites get redesigned and links break. The old Algoma News site is a good example: the only reason many of its stories can still be found is that the Internet Archive saved them.
Wawa already knows what it’s like to lose its paper. The Algoma News Review printed its last edition in 2022, after nearly six decades.
What the North should ask for now
- Keep public notices in print where people will see them. Municipalities that relied on these papers for legal notices should say where those notices will go, and make sure residents without internet can still find them.
- Help readers make the switch. Libraries, seniors’ centres and municipal offices can help people get online. Some are already doing it: Wawa has set up help desks for this month’s phone and internet-only election.
- Watch the coverage. The promise that no editorial jobs are affected is the right one. Readers will judge it a year from now by whether reporters are still at council meetings in the Sault, Elliot Lake and Espanola.
Moving local news off paper doesn’t have to mean less of it, but that only holds if the coverage stays local and keeps reaching the readers who were left without the printed copy.
Source: CTV News / CP24, October 1, 2026.