Postmedia completes $IM SaltWire purchase

Some fear culture will suffer as Newfoundlanders say goodbye to local daily paper

- SARAH SMELLIE

The Telegram, a 145-year-old newspaper in St. Johns, N.L., is cutting its daily print edition to once a week after Postmedia purchased parent company SaltWire Network.

The final edition of the Telegram newspaper’s daily print hit the stands in St. John’s, N.L., on Saturday, marking the end of a 145-year run and a move to a weekly print version with daily stories online.

The People’s Paper, as it is also known, was part of SaltWire Network, which was sold to Postmedia for $1-million in an agreement approved this month. The sale did not include the Telegram’s printing press — the last of its kind in the province — which has left several other papers scrambling to find a new plan.

The plant fired up last Friday for what could be the very last time to print the last daily Telegram. The building is on the market for $5.9 million and if nobody comes forward to buy it, it will be lost for good.

Nicole Penney, with Memorial University’s Folklore and Language Archive, said people have long turned to print newspapers to help them catalogue local life and family stories. The carefully curated folders of documents people bring to the archive are always stuffed with Telegram clippings.

Those folders, and those stories within, help map out the province’s social history, she said.