What do you picture when you think of “the news”? It might depend on what media you currently consume or perhaps what you grew up watching and reading – perhaps an online news feed, a favourite TV channel, the radio? Still, for many people, a newspaper comes to mind.
It was not easy to deliver newspapers, particularly in rural areas. It could be hard work, and in the Archives, we hear multiple voices from the first half of the twenty-first century recalling the challenges and rewards of delivering papers.
Richard Birch:
We had a couple of horses and my brother and I used to deliver newspapers all over the area. One of us would ride the pony and one would ride a bicycle and we’d go all over that hillside up from Fraser Mills, right up behind the golf course and all over Burquitlam.
(Coquitlam 100 Years, p. 165)
Reginald Caddy:
I started to work early in life. My first job was delivering newspapers on horseback. I had two newspapers, The World and The Columbian; The World then became the Vancouver Sun. All the delivering was done on horseback, with the newspapers in saddlebags. I would start at Sapperton, come up North Road to Austin and go down Government Road to Kensington. And then I went through to Hamilton at the school, up Hamilton to Clarke and along Clarke to Como Lake. I don’t know how long it took; in those days, time didn’t seem to matter. Everybody had to have a stove pipe on a post, so I never had to get off the horse. People had to pay 50 cents a month, and some tried to cheat me out of that. We were allowed $16 a month extra for keeping the horse.
(Coquitlam 100 Years, p. 181)
Antonio Pare:
Actually, my first job was delivering The Province newspapers. Back in 1929, the papers were delivered seven days a week. The weekday papers were dropped off at the corner of Marmont and Brunette by small trucks, and as I remember, sometimes by motorcycles equipped with sidecars. On weekdays, I had between 28 and 30 customers, mainly in the Maillardville area up to Dawes Road, at the far end. Sundays, however, were completely different stories. First of all, the papers came from Vancouver by inter-urban tram, and were dropped off at six in the morning at Swift’s Canadian packing plant. It seemed everyone wanted a Sunday Province, and I would have 100 customers or so to deliver to. The Sunday papers would contain up to 100 pages each, and the only way to handle them was to drape two bags, one on each side of the bicycle seat, and walk alongside. It was impossible to ride the bike.
(Coquitlam 100 Years, p. 101)
By definition, the news is primarily concerned with disseminating information about new matters, so it makes sense that the format and content of news would evolve. The radio was a key innovation in news reporting prior to television, online news, and via all the methods available in 2025.
I remember our first radio: it was quite an attraction, like getting a brand-new TV. Everyone sat around and listened to that thing until about 10 o’clock at night, until it was time for bed, so you could go to work the next morning. The 10 p.m. news was quite interesting, actually. Most of the homes had radios and gramophones, and stuff like that. There was no local newspaper in those days. They had a newspaper from New Westminster – The Columbian later on, I think – and that’s what everybody bought. There were only two printing presses in New Westminster, and that was it.
(Coquitlam 100 Years, p. 122)
Over the years, news reporting has undergone significant changes, not just in terms of format– but what makes up the news itself. For instance, at the turn of the century, social news often could just cover that a family had traveled out to Vancouver on Wednesday, or that a Mr. Smith was recovering from a nasty cold. Nowadays, updates on such individual matters that don’t impact the larger population are not newsworthy.
We can also see a constant change of news providers in our local area. Some of these publications ran concurrently, while others found a niche to fill during a coverage gap.
While we associate “archives” with recorded information of historical significance, archival documents could be better defined as unique recorded information originally intended to accomplish an action. For instance, a receipt shows that you have paid a bill, and authors’ storyboards and notes help them get to their final product and goal, the publication of their book. Newspapers, published material distributed on a mass scale, are helpful insights into the historical period in which they were created; however, some theorists might argue that—in isolation, and by the strictest definition—they aren’t archival documents.
The City Archives has an impressive collection of several newspapers bound by year, as well as newspaper clippings. There are two reasons.
The first consideration is that newspapers can provide compelling insights about the time in which they were created, through descriptions of current social and political events, hot-button issues, advertisements and weather reporting. Having a comprehensive reference fits our mandate of preserving the City’s documentary cultural heritage.
The second reason is that some materials associated with newspapers (for example, the original photo negatives) are not published and, therefore, can give new context or tell a slightly different story about the published record. In addition, many donors keep clippings from newspapers interfiled with other personal original documents as context directly relating to their current activities, often explaining them–which can transform the newspapers into original, unique records.
One of the City Archives’ key responsibilities is to safeguard records from damage. One way we do this is by monitoring archival materials for preservation issues and mitigating them. Newsprint can be a particularly challenging format to preserve based on its chemical composition. Newspapers are typically made out of a very acidic mixture of ground wood pulp that does not have a protective alkaline barrier. This makes it less stable and durable so that over time and, especially with exposure to light and oxygen, this type of newsprint becomes more acidic and brittle, leading to fragile, yellowed and faded pages. The damage can even transfer to other paper if they are not kept separately. (Fun fact: older newspapers can have approximately the same pH balance as orange juice!)
If you have handled newspapers in your life, especially older ones, you may have noticed that ink sometimes smears or comes off onto your hands as a powdery residue. This is called “chalking” or “ink dusting” and can occur when the ink is poor quality, has an incorrect ink-to-water ratio, dries or adheres poorly, or the paper and ink are just chemically incompatible.
To prevent the acids in newsprint from leeching onto and damaging other types of paper, newsprint should be stored only with like materials. Bound volumes of newspapers are ideal as an archival reference in that they are easier to retrieve, store, and handle–in addition, they provide full context.
The City of Coquitlam Archives boasts a significant inventory of local newspapers in our holdings, which take multiple forms, including annual, bound volumes, microfilmed records, and less comprehensively, curated scrapbooks or binders of news clippings from individuals and organizations
Our earliest newspapers such as the Coquitlam Star, and the Coquitlam Times are captured in microfilm, and we have substantial bound collections of the Tri-City News, The Tri-Cities Now, and The Herald.
Easily the largest collection is the Tri-City News: this fonds consists of 133 bound volumes, 4 microfilm reels, and–impressively–about 350,000 photographic negatives.
We also have 120 bound copies of The Tri-Cities Now, also known as The Now, and The Coquitlam Now, from 1984 to 2015 (1986 is missing).
This collection also includes 1,403 prints of photographs from 1991, copies of the newspaper on 13 microfilm reels from various years, and photographs and contents of the newspaper from 2007 to 2015 on 263 DVD-Rs. Our Herald holdings include 25,000 photographic negatives, 700 contact sheets, and about 29 cm of textual records.
Community newspapers have increasingly struggled in recent years with declining readership and to the availability of news alternatives. In August 2023, the last newspaper serving Coquitlam, the Tri-City News, announced that they had published their last print edition and would be moving to an exclusively online platform in order to reduce expenses and stay afloat. Even without the costs of materials, deliveries and, later, the rent on a physical office space, the somber news came in April 2025 that by the end of May 2025, the Tri-City News would be shut down permanently. It is a sad moment and the end of an era, with a news desert in our community and neighbouring cities.
This web exhibit is a tribute to work done in local news reporting over the past decades. In acquiring the entire print run and thousands of images, the Archives is preserving this important work for present and future generations.