Until 1981, the Medicine Hat News was housed in this 1st St. building, overlooking Finlay Bridge. The Empress Theatre building next door was used for newsprint storage and office space. Today, the site is home to Medicine Hat's city hall.

celebrating 125 years of change

But through moves and machinery upgrades, Mossey says a few key things about the paper stayed the same.

"Nothing technological can help a reporter be better. You have to be able to report," he says. To find reporters, he'd head to journalism schools to interview recent graduates, trying to bring the most promising ones back to Medicine Hat.

"Peter, first of all, he was a great teacher," says George Willcocks, The News' publisher from 1986 to 1990. "And he knew how to find good, young journalists."

Both men can list a string of News reporters who went on to cover provincial legislatures, major sports teams, or who became editors at some of the country's major dailies.

"I was out in Victoria reading the paper one day, looked at the masthead and one of the young reporters who worked for us - Denise Helm - was there on the masthead, managing editor of the Victoria Times," Willcocks recalls. "They've gone on to do good things."

Current publisher Mike Hertz arrived at the paper in 1996, just in time for what many consider the biggest change - and challenge - to newspapers

in years: The rise of the Internet and digital publishing.

"When I first came we were just kind of dabbling in the Internet,” Hertz remembers. “We had a web presence, but there wasn't much there, it was pretty static. Then within a year we started posting stories and photographs."

Today the paper’s website garners about 6,200 visitors a day, and hosts videos and reader comments as well as content from the paper. It’s definitely not the last digital upgrade The News will see, says Hertz, adding new tools like e-book readers and Apple’s iPad are possible platforms for newspapers of the future.

But he suspects the hard-copy, newsprint edition of the paper that’s been around since the city was still a collection of tents by the rail tracks isn’t going away any time soon. Other News veterans like Mossey and Willcocks agree.

“You can get the news on television, you can get it on the radio, but it's very condensed...” says Willcocks. “If you rely on television to tell you who won the game the Tigers are playing tonight, you get the score, but you get nothing about shots on goal or the highlights of the game. You have to read The News to do that."

The News' old letterpress, removed in the early 1970s, was donated to the Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa when the paper acquired a then-revolutionary linotype machine.

Barry Carswell (right) and an unidentified employee operate the News' linotype machine. Used to lay out pages for printing, the machine revolutionized newspaper production until it was replaced by computerized publishing in the 1980s.

Bill Hartley poses with a pyrofax machine. The pyrofax was used to turn the paper - made by cutting and laying out stories by hand - into plates which could be run through the press.

The News' old press was donated to the Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa. The press, which used lead plates, is reportedly still functional today.

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