Journalists at Kamloops’s Radio NL had just arrived at the office when their program director asked them individually to follow him to an office down the hall.
Joined there by two other senior executives, the journalists were each told last Tuesday that operations had become unsustainable, and that their positions were being eliminated – effective immediately.
Four of the station’s seven employees lost their jobs that morning at “B.C.’s hardest working newsroom,” which had a reputation for consistently punching above its weight – leading news coverage not just in the southern interior, but across the province.
While parent company Stingray Group Inc. says the AM station is pivoting from news-talk to “a mix of music, news, sports, and community information,” past employees say its esteemed newsroom is effectively shuttered.
A year prior to Radio NL’s layoffs, the city had already lost its last print newspaper, Kamloops This Week. The cuts reflect a broader trend of community newsrooms closing and reducing service across Canada, owing in part to economic factors such as a decline in advertising revenue.
Morning show co-host Bill Cowen, NL Newsday host Brett Mineer, assignment editor Victor Kaisar and assistant program director Shawn Pooley have been let go, while program director Paul James, morning show co-host Jeff Andreas and Kamloops Blazers play-by-play announcer Jon Keen remain.
Mr. James said Thursday that he was still trying to absorb the impact of losing not just four colleagues, but four friends. The station is not dead, he said, and these changes are a necessary effort to keep its legacy going.
He said newscasts will continue at the top and bottom of the hour during morning, and the 4 p.m. show newscast will remain. However, the larger noon and 5 p.m. newscasts have been cut.
“We’re going to try and maintain as much coverage as humanly possible, but there’s only so many things you can do in a day when you’ve got limited resources,” Mr. James said.
B.C.’s NDP Leader David Eby has criticized the layoffs, which took effect in the midst of an election campaign. In a message posted to X on Tuesday, he said Radio NL “has long been a trusted source of information for the community,” and that what was happening “is just bad news for local journalism.”
Stingray Radio president Steve Jones said numerous AM radio stations have closed across Canada over the past year, and that changes at Radio NL were made “to ensure the radio station’s long-term viability and commitment to the community.”
The remaining news team will “continue to provide the most local newscasts throughout the day,” he said in a statement issued last Tuesday.
April Lindgren, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism and founder and co-lead of its Local News Research Project, said the cuts and closings that have been particularly brutal for community newspapers over the last decade are now starting to emerge as a trend in broadcast media. Her data show that 36 private stations across Canada closed since 2008, a quarter of which shut down in the past 18 months.
Prof. Lindgren said research has shown that diverse sources of news in a community result in more extensive coverage and a better informed public.
“What I’m hearing is happening on the ground from local politicians is that it’s getting more difficult to govern because people don’t know what’s going on,” she said.
“A decision winds its way through council, nobody knows about it, so there’s no chance to voice your opinion or call your local councillor if you disagree with an idea that’s being kicked around, and then all of a sudden the bulldozers show up for that major highway they’re going to construct at the end of your street, and you’re irate.”
Clearwater Mayor Merlin Blackwell said he first heard Radio NL as a teenager in the early 1980s, when he worked at the Big Bar Guest Ranch in Clinton, about 180 kilometres northwest of Kamloops. The station primarily played “crappy” music at the time, he recalled.
But in more recent years, as the station focused on news talk, it became “fabulous stuff,” with intelligent conversations about local issues, he said. And as wildfires encroached on Kamloops, Radio NL’s anchors remained on air, late into the night, making sure people had the information they needed.
“With all these staff gone, even if they wanted to, I don’t think there’s a way to do that anymore.”
Shane Woodford was a recent journalism graduate and part-timer at CBC in Vancouver when he drove to Kamloops for an interview with then-news director Jim Harrison, in 2009, stressed about making a good impression.
“The job interview was, legit, three hours long,” Mr. Woodford recalled. “It was everything. And as he was grilling me, he would occasionally stop, see something on his computer, say, ‘Hang on a minute,’ and then phone somebody and do like a three- or four-minute interview right there in front of me.
“He would chop it up, do three versions, two voicers, incredibly fast, and be like, ‘Okay, where were we?’ He churned out three different stories. That did nothing to lower my blood pressure.”
Mr. Woodford, who was hired as an anchor and reporter and served as news director from 2016 to 2019, said he felt a knot in his stomach when he learned of the cuts.
“We were a huge force in provincial politics, we were a huge force at Kamloops City Hall. That newsroom, thanks to the work of Jim Harrison and [late broadcaster] Angelo Iacobucci, in a very real way put Kamloops on the map in a way that it would not have been had those people not been there.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article said 36 private broadcast stations have closed since 2018, but it should have said 2008. This version has been corrected.