the broken typewriter

Editorial

Like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, Fort St. John’s beloved Alaska Highway News is back in our community once again.

When Glacier Media shut the doors of the Alaska Highway News in October 2023, after 80 years of bringing local news to Fort St. John and surrounding area, the community and AHN staff alike were heartbroken. Even though some twenty years have lapsed since my time at the AHN, I was sad to see the paper I had once poured my heart and soul into vanish.

Enter Todd Buck. With only two years reporting experience under his belt, he was unwilling to give up the writing career he loved and the skills he’d honed under the tutelage of former managing editor Matt Prepost.

So, he came up a with a plan.

Buck formed his own media company and purchased the name and masthead from Glacier Media just before Christmas 2023. Since then, the heavy-equipment-operator-turned-reporter-turned-publisher has been working hard to re-vamp and re-launch the Alaska Highway News. He’s been collaborating with Rob Brown, former managing editor of the Dawson Creek Mirror and Trent Ernst, publisher of Tumber Ridgelines to get his enterprise off the ground. Co-incidentally, Brown also started his own community paper in Dawson Creek following the shutdown of the Mirror in October.

The reborn AHN is a bit different than the old. Buck has gone with a tabloid format rather than the previous broadsheet – like the Northern Horizon or if you remember it, The Northerner. The first edition is 8-pages long and according to the AHN’s website will be published bi-weekly initially. Buck aims for the paper to become a weekly, but for now, 4,000 copies of the AHN can be found twice a month at 20 newspaper boxes around town.

In keeping with the smaller, entrepreneurial spirit of the new paper, Buck is running the whole operation from home, with his wife and children assisting with the website, circulation, and distribution.  

Buck said on the AHN’s website that he’s truly passionate about the Peace and that he wants “nothing more than my time to be a contribution, and to have an impact on the beautiful community me and my family call home.”

Despite fears of the North Peace becoming a news desert when the Alaska Highway News shut down in October, it’s clear that the entrepreneurial spirit and determination, as well as the love for our community has triumphed over the nay-sayers. Between Buck’s Alaska Highway News, my own The Broken Typewriter and Adam Reaburn’s Energeticcity.ca, it’s clear that this region is anything but devoid of sources of local news. Because all three of these local publications give “a tinker’s dam about the North Peace.”