Just after Rendezvous, nearly half a century ago in 1975, I was a newly minted journalist at my first Whitehorse city council meeting. Paul Lucier was both mayor and fire chief. Whitehorse had recently installed its second stoplight, zinc had eclipsed gold as the territory’s richest mineral by revenue, talks about land claims talks were just beginning and the people of Old Crow would — that summer – tell the Berger Inquiry that a Mackenzie Valley pipeline posed an existential threat.
On the city council agenda that bitter winter evening was whether public drinking should be outlawed, and debate raged over whether the risks of the intoxicated freezing to death unnoticed in alleyways was worse than the unsightliness of public drunkenness. It was abundantly clear that I had lots to learn. Beside me was Max Fraser, another new arrival.
Max worked for the Whitehorse Star, famous for many things, not least its pseudo-Latin motto. I had just been hired by the upstart Yukon News. Also present were reporters from the locally owned radio station as well as CBC which, then, has a full newsroom in Whitehorse.
The Yukon was booming. And Whitehorse had a thriving, local and independently owned media.
It’s difficult, even in retrospect, to assess the intangible values of independent, locally owned media. But it’s big. Just ask anyone in the hundreds of small cities scattered across North America that have become media deserts.
The death of the Whitehorse Star is to be lamented. But there’s no reason that its long, storied, legacy of holding the powerful to account and reflecting the special character of Yukon life needs to die with it.
After a few years, I moved on to cover other stories in other places, but I learned my craft in those years competing against very good journalists in Whitehorse.
Max’s venture to keep locally owned, independent journalism alive and thriving is high risk for him and his colleagues. But for Yukoners it offers rich rewards deserving of support. I’m a proud subscriber.
– Paul Koring, New York City
