About The Temiskaming Speaker

The Temiskaming Speaker

The Temiskaming Speaker is a local newspaper serving Temiskaming Shores, a city in the Timiskaming District of Northeastern Ontario — the Ontario-Quebec border country where the Little Clay Belt's farms meet the Canadian Shield. Founded in 1906 as the New Liskeard Speaker by E. F. and A. E. Stephenson — a father-and-son duo — it has published for nearly 120 years, absorbing the Haileyburian (1904) and the Cobalt Weekly Post along the way. The paper's independent streak is legendary: in the 1930s it refused to give politicians free coverage, telling them to purchase it as advertising — the news columns not for sale at any price. Novelist Mary Lawson's books mention the Speaker — the paper has entered the region's literature as well as its history, the archive and the novel.

Overview

The Speaker covers Temiskaming Shores — the city formed in 2004 by the amalgamation of New Liskeard, Haileybury, and Dymond Township — and the surrounding Timiskaming District: municipal politics, the courts, agriculture (the Little Clay Belt's dairy, beef, and cash-crop farming — the farmland that shouldn't exist on the Shield but does), mining (the region's silver-mining heritage from the Cobalt rush and the modern exploration reviving it, including the battery-metals interest), forestry, education, health care, and community life. The paper serves the English-speaking communities of the Ontario-Quebec border region — where the agricultural south meets the mining north, where Ontario meets Quebec across the lake, where the Little Clay Belt's fields give way to the Shield's forests. The bilingual borderland shapes the coverage: the Quebec neighbours, the cross-border commerce, the French-Ontarian communities nearby.

History

The paper was founded by E. F. and A. E. Stephenson, father and son, as the New Liskeard Speaker in 1906 — the agricultural settlement's voice in the Little Clay Belt, the fertile pocket of farmland amid the Canadian Shield that drew settlers to the Temiskaming region when the railway opened the north. They published the newspaper weekly until 1938 — through the First World War, the Depression's depths — when C. E. Bond purchased it; it was placed under the Temiskaming Printing Company and renamed The Temiskaming Speaker — the name it has carried for over 85 years, through the Second World War and into the present. The 1930s policy — refusing politicians free coverage, requiring them to purchase it as advertising — established the paper's independence as a matter of principle: the news columns were not for sale, but the advertising columns were open to all, including the politicians. In an era when small papers often traded coverage for favour — the press barons' game played at village scale — the Speaker drew the line and held it: cover us as news if we're newsworthy, buy your space if you want your message. The principle has outlived the Depression, the wars, the amalgamations: the paper that won't be bought.

In 1962, the Haileyburian and the Cobalt Weekly Post were merged with the Speaker — consolidating the district's English papers into a single voice, the tri-town region speaking through one paper. The Haileyburian had its own dramatic history: founded on September 23, 1904, by C. C. Farr — the founder of Haileybury itself, the town-builder who created the community and its paper together — as the town's first newspaper, initially called the Haileyburian & Temiskaming Mining Journal, serving the silver-mining boom town at the height of the Cobalt rush. Its offices were destroyed twice in town-wide fires, including the devastating Great Fire of 1922 that levelled much of Haileybury — one of the great disasters of northern Ontario history, the fire that destroyed the town and scattered its people. The paper restarted printing in April 1923 from a streetcar on Broadway Street in Haileybury — the newsroom on rails, journalism persisting through catastrophe, the press literally mobile. The Cobalt Weekly Post served the silver capital, the town whose 1903 silver strike had built the region and drawn thousands north. In the 1970s, A. J. Wright took ownership of the Speaker and appointed Don Curry as editor — the modern era's stewardship, carrying the paper through the late twentieth century's transformations. In 2003, the Temiskaming Printing Company and Cold North Wind Inc. created a digital archive for the Speaker — preserving over a century of district history in accessible form, the bound volumes' contents made searchable; the Haileyburian's copies are likewise preserved in a digital archive, the fires' destruction answered by digital permanence — what the flames took, the scanners restored.

Popular Culture

The Speaker has entered literature: novels by Mary Lawson — the acclaimed author of Crow Lake, The Other Side of the Bridge, and A Town Called Solace, set in the northern Ontario of her upbringing — mention the Temiskaming Speaker, embedding the paper in the region's fictional as well as factual record. Lawson's northern Ontario — the small towns, the lakes, the families enduring — is the Speaker's territory; the paper's appearance in her novels acknowledges its place in the region's consciousness. Few community papers achieve this double immortality: the archive and the novel, the record and the story, the history and the literature.

Coverage and Audience

The Speaker serves Temiskaming Shores' roughly 10,000 residents and the wider Timiskaming District: the farmers of the Little Clay Belt (the agricultural exceptionalism — some of Ontario's northernmost farmland), the miners and prospectors (the silver heritage, the cobalt and battery-metals future), the forestry workers, the small businesses serving the district, the retirees, the cottagers on Lake Temiskaming. The coverage reflects the border region's dual economy — agriculture in the south, mining and forestry in the north — and the community institutions binding them: the schools, the hospital, the churches, the service clubs. The municipal coverage tracks Temiskaming Shores council; the district coverage follows the surrounding townships; the courts and community coverage serves the readers' daily concerns.

Ownership

The Speaker is published by the Temiskaming Printing Company, the local institution that has owned it since 1938 — over 85 years of community-based ownership. The ownership model — the printing company and the newspaper under one local roof — is the classic small-paper structure: the job printing sustaining the journalism, the journalism serving the community that provides the printing business. The community-based ownership has preserved the paper's independence — the 1930s principle intact across the decades and the ownership changes: politicians buy their space like everyone else, the news columns are not for sale, the paper answers to its readers alone.

Digital Presence

The Speaker maintains an online presence, with the 2003 digital archive — created by the Temiskaming Printing Company and Cold North Wind Inc. — making over a century of issues accessible to researchers, genealogists, and the curious. The archive is a treasure: the settlement era, the silver rush, the Great Fire of 1922, the wars, the Depression, the amalgamations — the district's history in the Speaker's pages, the fires' ashes answered by the scanner's light. For genealogists, the births, marriages, and obituaries of five generations; for historians, the continuous record of a northern Ontario district. For Temiskaming Shores, the paper remains the district's voice: the weekly that has chronicled the Little Clay Belt since 1906 — through the silver rush, the fires, the amalgamations, the digital age — still publishing, still independent, still telling politicians to buy their ads like everyone else — the Speaker's 1930s principle intact in the digital age, nearly 120 years on.