Want to know keep up-to-date on what's happening in Victoria? Subscribe to our daily newsletter:. This is how a quest to turn a small-town newspaper empire into a continental behemoth backfired. This story was first published by Tyler Olsen, managing editor of the Fraser Valley Current , a publication in the Overstory network.
Support their work and award-winning local journalism by becoming a member , or subscribing to their daily newsletter. It owned a daily in Alberta. As I learned how to write a story and take a photo, Black Press owner David Black was doing what made him rich: he was looking to buy another newspaper. But driven by ambition, this one would be bigger than any he had bought before.
This is how a quest to turn a small-town newspaper empire into a continental behemoth backfired, and how the fate of Black Press was determined not in Williams Lake or Abbotsford, but in a gritty industrial Ohioan town. A full declaration of my conflict of interests for this story would be the story of much of my adult life.
My first work experience week in high school was at the Black Press-owned newspaper in my hometown of Vernon, BC. My first post-university newspaper job was at the same paper.
I returned to Black Press in , when it acquired the second paper I worked at: the Chilliwack Times. The company then transferred me to work at the Abbotsford News, another of its titles. I consider many people still employed by the company to be friends and want them to stay employed. I love newspapers. But somebody should write in depth about what led a BC paper chain with continental ambitions to end up filing for creditor protection this week.
