Medicine Hat News
Andrea Klassen Medicine Hat News
At 125 years, Medicine Hat’s newspaper has been around longer than most of the Historic Downtown and, since the province of Alberta is 20 years its junior, longer than the city itself has officially existed.
Today, The News has staff of just under 100, a circulation of over 12,000 copies, and more than 85 percent of readers in the area pick up the paper every week.
Not bad for a publication started by two men from Ontario with a letterpress and an abandoned railway boxcar.
The community of Medicine Hat was about two years old when printer Andrew M. Armour and school teacher-turned- newspaperman Thomas B. Braden arrived in 1885. Two years earlier the pair had given the fledgling town of Calgary its first weekly publication, The Calgary Herald, and that year they aimed to do the same for the small but growing settlement that had sprung up on the edge of the South Saskatchewan River.
After moving into their boxcar-office on what is now known as North Railway Street, the pair produced weekly installments of The Medicine Hat Times, a two-page collection of local news and sports, with plenty of opinion from its editors thrown in.
Though Armour and Braden sold the paper the next year, the boxcar would continue to house the paper until the 1890s, when it moved into a more permanent - and presumably roomier - building on Second Street.
Changes to the paper came rapidly during the next two decades. First to go was the "Medicine Hat Times" moniker, after a group of local businessmen and editorial staff took ownership in 1894 and re-christened the publication The News. The weekly publication schedule followed suit in 1910, and News staff began supplying citizens of the recently incorporated city of Medicine Hat with daily reports on local life.
A few years later, the News moved into the space it would occupy for most of the 20th century: a three story building overlooking Finlay Bridge, now the site of City Hall.
Former News editor Pete Mossey, who first arrived at the paper in 1955 to write, as he puts it, "headlines for filler stories," was on the scene for the publication's next batch of changes, many of them technological.
In the 50s, the paper was still running on a hot metal press, where plates were literally cast in molten lead before printing could begin and, as Mossey remembers, writing a story could be a long, complicated process.
"I'd write three or four lines, and they'd take it to the back shop and set it. Then I'd go write a few more lines," he says. "When they switched over to computers it speeded things up and gave the writers, I think, a bit more freedom."
That switch wouldn't happen until 1983. By then, The News had moved into its current building on Dunmore Road - which, according to reports from the time, was noted for its "modern newsroom" and "spacious, Parisian cafe-style lunchroom," as well as its updated press facilities (the hot metal press of old having been donated to Ottawa's Museum of Science and Technology).
The Medicine Hat News' press, seen here in its former First Street location, is still in use today, though some of the equipment has been modernized over time.
Former director of manufacturing Bill Hartley checks the paper in the News' press room, February 1, 1981.
56 — REPORT ON SOUTHEAST ALBERTA 2010 ■ Celebrating our Community
For years this large camera, operated here by Harold Pearcey, was used to produce film negatives for printing. In 2008, The News switched to Computer to Press Technology (CTP), which offers readers crisper photos and text.
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