Current Northern News Services editors Glenn Werkman, left, assignment editor for Nunavut News/North, senior editor Mike W. Bryant, managing editor Bruce Valpy and Randi Beers, assignment editor for NWT News/North. - Walter Strong/NNSL photo

NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
It was 1945 and the Second World War was starting to wind down. As many veterans struggled to return to civilian life one soldier knew exactly how he planned to start over.

An undated photo of Duke DeCouresy, founder and first publisher of News of the North in 1945. News/North publisher Jack Sigvaldason, left, with Jerry O'Donahue, at a St. Patrick's Day celebration on March 22, 1988. Yellowknifer started on a kitchen table in Jack Sigvaldason's house. It then expanded to a 416-square foot office without running water. The only source of electricity was a single extension cord connected to a building two lots away. Yellowknifer later amalgamated with News of the North after Sigvaldason purchased it in 1979. It was re-branded into News/North the following year. The front cover of the second edition of News of the North, published May 8, 1945, announcing the Allied victory in Europe during the Second World War. At the time, Duke DeCouresy was printing the paper from Stony Plain, Alta.

When Duke DeCouresy filed his application to leave the Canadian Air Force he was implicit, stating he intended to "return to work of national importance, the establishment of a weekly paper in Yellowknife."

As grandiose as those intentions inevitably were, the path to success would be a long-haul fraught with makeshift facilities, exploding machinery, communal honey buckets and races to the airport.

The first issue of News of the North hit the streets on May 1, 1945. At the time, DeCouresy was writing, editing and doing layout inside an 8x10 tent with his wife Maude, printing one page at a time on a large platen press.

It was a time of rapid change. A new hotel was in the works and the Hudson's Bay Company was expanding. Hopeful prospectors were filing into the territory in droves, desperate to make a quick fortune. The records office had run out of mining licences, having issued 35,000 of them - enough to form 1,000 mining companies and DeCouresy placed himself in the middle of the chaos, eager to feed on the energy and excitement of the infant city.

"I was on my way to establish News of the North and only a publisher and the people he works with can realize the ecstasy that is the formation of a newspaper from dream to reality," he later wrote in his memoir, The Yellowknife Years. "It was boom time and for the next few years I was privileged to witness one of the grandest times in the history of Canada."

By the winter of 1945, DeCouresy had moved operations into a new building and purchased a linotype and other printing equipment so the paper could be produced in house. However, deadlines were still sporadic and the papers came out at irregular intervals due to supply shortages and DeCouresy's unstable lifestyle.

1949 - 1967

Under Horton's leadership News of the North was for the most part a family business with his wife Alberta and son Marc doing all of the reporting, editing and layout. Despite limited staff and facilities, Horton managed to grow the paper from a circulation of 3,000 from 200 by the late 1960s.

Speaking from Edmonton, Marc recalls spending many late Wednesday evenings folding papers by hand ahead of Thursday's publication date.

"He had a flat bed letter press with a linotype and we fed it one sheet at a time," he recalled. "We didn't have a machine to fold them, so we did it all by hand."

Over the years Horton made a name for himself in the community as someone who wasn't afraid to stand up and take on issues - no matter how unpopular. Marc says his father considered himself a champion of the North.

"The paper circulated widely in southern Canada, so he was a big defender of the town and the North," he explained. "(News of the North) became sort of a spokesman for the town to the rest of the country in a way."

However, because his father had received no formal journalism training, Marc recalls his policies were not always in line with those of traditional newspapers.

"I'm not sure his news coverage always paid tribute to the god of objectivity," Marc chuckled. "I admired him a great deal, he's a hero of mine, but he was feisty - he didn't pick fights but he didn't back down from any either."

Just 14 years old when he started reporting for his father, Marc said he learned his lesson about journalistic integrity early. Responsible for laying out the Letters to the Editor page, one day he found himself coming up short. With deadline approaching and a bee in his bonnet, he decided to pen a letter of his own under a pseudonym criticizing Yellowknife politician Peter Baker's election campaign. When the paper went to press the next day, Horton was impressed by the controversy - that is until a libel lawsuit fell into his lap. Marc said he knew at that point he had to confess.

"Right off the press he gets one and he's flipping through it and he gets to the letters and says, 'Geez, I didn't see that letter' and he read it and said, 'Oh that's not bad'," Marc said. "But Baker sued us because it was libelous as hell, there's no question."

As a whole, Marc says Yellowknife was much more liberal-minded during his father's day, comprised of an eclectic mix of people who were open to a riskier version of journalism.

"It was a town that embraced eccentricity ... I think that's what made the newspaper a little different," he said. "There was more acceptance of human flaws ... a lot of people were up here because they were getting away from something down south - my dad loved the sense of adventure of it all and the unique opportunities that Yellowknife in that era offered."

1967 - 1974

"When I took it over, it was basically running eight pages of ink smudges with terribly broken-down equipment and they had a staff of two or three of us," Alexander remembers. He only had the paper a few months before purchasing a new printing press that could do double-sided 17x22 pages. He then hired students living in the Akaitcho Hall residential dormitory to collate and fold each edition.

Because of the generous government assistance programs in place at the time, Alexander said he struggled to keep staff as unemployment insurance paid better than going to work. He said often employees would work the required amount time to qualify for assistance and then quit.

"One day the person who was laying out advertisements got her paycheque Friday afternoon and said she wouldn't be in on Monday," he said, adding when he asked why, she replied, "'You've given me enough money over the last 12 weeks that between what you've paid me and what unemployment is going to pay me, my husband and I are going to buy ourselves a small airplane.'"

Alexander says while he had the paper, the hot button issue was the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline and the controversial Berger hearings and many of his stories revolved around this topic.

After a while though, he said he found it difficult to keep abreast of the swirling controversies in a town so rapidly expanding - particularly the continued lack of support given to aboriginal groups outside the city.

"It is inappropriate to keep people in remote communities with no employment, no prospects of employment, inadequate housing, over-crowded housing and inadequate resources all together," he said.

Ultimately the decision to sell the paper came out of frustration at the way the territory was being run, the changing attitude in the city after the creation of the GNWT and the general neglect of aboriginal issues, he explained. Despite wholeheartedly taking up Horton's mandate in the beginning, he said he felt like he was never going to be able to make a difference.

"At the best of times a newspaper is only a bit of a sounding board and a bit of a mirror of society and there's only so much it can do in terms of prodding and leadership to make changes," he said. "I was very frustrated."

Later expansion: 1972 to 1981

The first edition of the Yellowknifer was put together on Sigvaldason's kitchen table on 54 Street and flown to Edmonton to be printed. The makeshift office was later replaced by a 416-square-foot building with no running water and a single extension cord providing power from a building two blocks away. The nine staff shared a central honey bucket and an airtight heater which often exploded, covering finished pages in a layer of soot.

Nevertheless it was an exciting time to be a reporter and Sigvaldason was passionate about many issues of the time. News/North owner and manager Mike Scott worked with Sigvaldason in the 1970s and later became his partner. He said Sigvaldason had certain expectations and the more controversy the better.

"He was a fiery editor and partner. I remember him one time being upset that the paper had become too mamby pamby and he jokingly said if soon we didn't have a good lawsuit he was going to fire the entire editorial department," Scott laughed. "He wanted to see more hard-hitting editorial content."

It wasn't long before competition for advertising became too great and the two papers were amalgamated in 1979. News of the North was rebranded to become News/North and the focus shifted from Yellowknife to the rest of the territory.

A new home for News/North: 1981 to present

In 1981, News/North and Yellowknifer moved to their current publishing facility on 50 Street in Yellowknife with Canarctic Graphics.

As was the case in 1945, News/North remains focused on telling the stories of northern people - now expanded to around 60 communities from Pond Inlet to Tuktoyaktuk to Ft. Smith with combined circulation of 14,000. Just as the very first edition focused on the people coming and going in the city, managing editor Bruce Valpy says these are the stories still most likely to move papers from the newsstands.

"Those are the stories that will get cut out and put on the fridge and go yellow and fall," Valpy quipped.

Since the amalgamation of News of the North and Yellowknifer, reporting has expanded exponentially from a base in Yellowknife to the inclusion of bureaus across the territories and a separate edition of the paper in Nunavut. The expansion included Inuktitut translation which was spearheaded by Norman Keenainak with assistance from Kivalliq News editor Mikle Langenhan.

In 1996 News/North made its debut on the World Wide Web bringing the culture of Northern Canada to an even wider audience. Valpy says he expects this sector to continue to grow as more and more people turn to the Internet for information.

Senior editor Mike W. Bryant applied for a position as a reporter on a whim in 1999 - intrigued by the scope of coverage, he said he fell in love with the organization right away.

"I realized very quickly that the reach (our) newspapers had was very significant," he said.

"I think a lot of people who are new to our newsroom come up and are surprised by the depth of news that we get."

Having arrived in conjunction with the division of Nunavut, Bryant says the last decade has been an exciting period of change and development - a similar sentiment to Horton and DeCoursey's during the gold boom.

"It's a very interesting thing from a journalistic perspective to watch it unfold," he said.

Since the beginning, the North has remained one of Canada's frontiers, attracting young people looking for adventure and a fresh start. Valpy says in many ways, News/North is journalism boot camp, testing new reporters and editors in ways the south never will.

Although the North has grown and the focus of industry has changed, the spirit of the paper and the people who run it has ultimately remained the same.

"It's not the general ambition of young people in Canada to go to Yellowknife," said Marc Horton.

"It just attracts personalities of a different sort ... people with a sense of adventure."

Timeline of News of the North

• May 1945: First edition of News of the North published out of Stony Plain, Alta.
• Nov. 1945: Yellowknife business office is opened along with commercial printing plant
• April 1946: Paper published and printed in Yellowknife, expanded to eight pages
• May 1949: Ted Horton becomes owner/publisher
• Aug. 1953: News of the North moves to old Pepsi-Cola building in Yellowknife
• Sept. 1957: News of the North moves to old Negus Mine cookhouse building
• Oct. 1967: Ted Horton sells newspaper to Colin Alexander
• 1969: Computerized typesetting equipment is introduced
• April 1978: Bob Jenkins, Canarctic Graphics, become owner/publisher
• Aug. 1978: News of the North offices destroyed by fire
• Dec. 1979: Jack Sigvaldason becomes owner/publisher of Northern News Services
• June 1980: News of the North becomes News/North and expands to territorial coverage
• April 1981: News/North moves to current publishing office location on 50 Street in Yellowknife with commercial printer Canarctic Graphics
• July 1984: Michael Scott becomes partner, Northern News Services owner/publisher
• Sept. 1996: First digital edition: nnsl.com
• July 1998: Nunavut edition is launched
• Jan. 2004: Nunavut News/North launched and Inuktitut translations introduced.
• May 2015: Colour printing expansion to 24 pages

Source: Prince of Wales Heritage Centre

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