About Trenton Trentonian

Trenton Trentonian

The Trenton Trentonian is a weekly newspaper published in Quinte West, Ontario — for over half a century the voice of record for the former town of Trenton, the RCAF town on the Bay of Quinte, and the surrounding communities. Founded in 1956 by Senator W. A. Fraser and built through mergers with the Brighton Ensign (1871) and the Trenton Courier-Advocate (1853), it carries a journalistic lineage stretching to the mid-19th century — through the railway age, the air force century, and the modern city. Publishing under managing editor Jennifer Cowan, the Trentonian has won numerous provincial and national news awards through the Ontario Community Newspapers Association and the Canadian Community Newspapers Association — the peer-judged honours that mark the difference between a shopper and a newspaper. Today it falls under Postmedia's Sun Media banner, alongside the Belleville Intelligencer, the Picton County Weekly News, and the Stirling Community Press — the Quinte cluster.

Overview

The Trentonian covers Quinte West — the city formed by the 1998 amalgamation of Trenton, Sidney, Murray, and Frankford — and the surrounding Bay of Quinte communities: municipal politics, the courts, education, the economy (the region's manufacturing base, the agricultural townships, the tourism of the Bay), community events, sports, and the everyday life of the Quinte region. A distinctive and nationally significant beat is CFB Trenton — Canadian Forces Base Trenton, Canada's largest air force base and the hub of the country's air mobility operations, home to the CC-130 Hercules and CC-177 Globemaster fleets, the National Air Force Museum of Canada, and — most solemnly — the repatriation point for fallen Canadian soldiers, whose caskets travel the Highway of Heroes from the base to Toronto. The base's presence shapes the community's identity and the paper's coverage: the deployments and homecomings, the repatriation ceremonies, the military families' lives. The weekly serves the readers of the former Trenton and its neighbours with the community journalism that has won it provincial and national recognition through the OCNA and CCNA awards — the small paper that covers the big base, week after week.

Early History

For over half a century, the Trentonian has been the voice of record for the former town of Trenton and the current city of Quinte West and its surrounding communities. Founded in 1956 by Senator W. A. Fraser and merged with the Brighton Ensign (founded 1871), the Trentonian eventually absorbed the Trenton Courier-Advocate (founded 1853) in the early 1960s to create a larger tri-weekly newspaper — a fresher, more modern alternative to the historical weeklies. The lineage thus reaches back through the Courier-Advocate to 1853: over 170 years of Quinte journalism under the Trentonian's masthead, through the railway era, the RCAF base's arrival, the postwar boom, and the modern city.

The startup story is pure community-paper lore. In its first editions — before the move to the new location at 41 Quinte Street, the address that would become the paper's long-time home — state-of-the-art equipment and a working press were located in the rear of the building; printing was initially done in Picton, across the Bay, and getting started proved difficult. The paper's first editor-reporter-photographer, James M. Muir — one man doing three jobs, the classic small-paper beginning in a downtown furniture store — recalled: "We were ensconced in a vacated furniture store in downtown Trenton, deep in planning the most awkward newspaper operation with which I've ever been associated." Despite the hardships, Muir said the Trentonian was readily welcomed by readers for two reasons: it carried local news photos — something the Courier-Advocate had still not caught onto, the visual journalism that readers craved and that made the paper feel modern — and its more extensive coverage of the Royal Canadian Air Force base near town, the institution that defined Trenton's modern identity and employed so many of its readers. The Trentonian eventually formed a four-page base section distributed with Dominion grocery store flyers — the advertising innovation, reaching every household with the weekly groceries, that proved so successful the Trentonian's owners were able to buy out the Courier-Advocate once and for all, completing the consolidation.

Ownership

Years passed, and the paper left the hands of the James family — the local owners who had built the modern Trentonian — and was sold to Ken Thomson, the newspaper baron whose Thomson empire dominated Canadian publishing. After more than 20 years of Thomson ownership, the paper passed to fellow newspaper mogul Conrad Black in 1997, becoming part and parcel of the Hollinger Newspapers Group — the Black empire at its height. In the summer of 2001, the Trentonian — along with 29 other Ontario newspapers — was purchased from Hollinger by Michael Sifton's Osprey Media Group Inc., the Sifton family returning Ontario community papers to Canadian ownership. In the summer of 2007, the Sun Media Corporation wing of Quebecor Inc. purchased Osprey and changed its full name to Osprey Media Publishing Inc. — the Quebecor era. Today, the Quinte area papers — the Trentonian, the Belleville Intelligencer, the County Weekly News of Picton, the Community Press of Stirling — all fall under Sun Media's banner, the regional cluster covering the Bay of Quinte from Trenton to Picton. In 2015, Sun Media was acquired by Postmedia Network, making the Trentonian part of the country's largest newspaper chain — the end of a journey from Senator Fraser's independent startup through Thomson, Black, Sifton, and Quebecor to Postmedia, the consolidation of Canadian community journalism in a single corporate history.

Coverage and Audience

The Trentonian serves Quinte West's roughly 45,000 residents plus the surrounding Bay of Quinte communities: the military families of CFB Trenton (the base's personnel and their families, a significant portion of the population), the manufacturing workers (the region's industrial employers), the farmers of Sidney and Murray townships, the retirees drawn to the Bay of Quinte's shoreline, the commuters working in Belleville and beyond. The base coverage — the deployments to Afghanistan and subsequent missions, the homecomings, the repatriation ceremonies for the fallen (the ramp ceremonies at the base, the procession along the Highway of Heroes) — gives the paper a national resonance beyond its circulation: the Trentonian has covered the stories that the whole country watched. The municipal coverage tracks Quinte West council's decisions; the courts coverage follows the region's justice; the schools, sports, and community coverage serves the daily life of the readers. Publishing under managing editor Jennifer Cowan, the paper has won numerous provincial and national news awards through the Ontario Community Newspapers Association and the Canadian Community Newspapers Association — the peer recognition of quality community journalism.

Digital Presence

The Trentonian's digital home is trentonian.ca — which now resolves to Postmedia's Belleville Intelligencer platform, reflecting the chain's consolidation of its Quinte digital properties. The online edition extends the weekly print paper with digital news serving the Quinte region: the municipal coverage, the base news, the community stories. For Quinte West, the paper remains the voice of record: the weekly that has chronicled Trenton's life since 1956 — through the air base's growth into Canada's air mobility hub, the municipal amalgamations creating Quinte West, and the community's evolution — now part of Postmedia's Quinte cluster alongside the Intelligencer, the County Weekly News, and the Community Press, still publishing the local news its readers welcomed from the first photo-filled editions produced in that vacated downtown furniture store back in 1956.