About Le Nord-Côtier

Le Nord-Côtier

Overview

Le Nord-Côtier is a French-language weekly newspaper based in Sept-Îles, Quebec, serving the Côte-Nord shoreline of the St. Lawrence River. It publishes in print on Wednesdays and online through its website, covering Sept-Îles, Port-Cartier, Havre-Saint-Pierre and the fishing and mining communities of the Minganie further east. The paper belongs to Les Éditions Nordiques, the Baie-Comeau-based regional publisher whose other weeklies include Le Manic, the Journal Haute-Côte-Nord and Le Charlevoisier. Its slogan, in its own words, is "L'hebdo quotidien" — the everyday weekly.

The paper was launched in 2007 and is the established French-language community weekly for the Sept-Îles area. Its continuing operation is well documented in current sources: Le Soleil's February 2026 profile of eastern Quebec weeklies lists Le Nord-Côtier among the three hebdomadaires published by Éditions Nordiques, a media-monitoring press review recorded a Le Nord-Côtier story on a Sept-Îles affordable-housing project in October 2026, and its reporters were filing bylined stories through the November 2025 municipal election period and into the 2025–2026 school sports season.

History

Sept-Îles had a newspaper tradition long before Le Nord-Côtier. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) records a Sept-Îles paper called L'Avenir, paired with an English-language Sept-Iles Journal, in 1935, an L'Avenir week-end in the 1970s, and a regional paper titled Nord Est, covering Sept-Îles, Port-Cartier, Gagnon, Schefferville, Fermont and Havre-Saint-Pierre, in 2002–2004. Le Nord-Côtier itself, however, is a twenty-first-century creation rather than a descendant of those titles.

The paper's first issue appeared on 23 March 2007, as the paper states in its own description of itself. In an anniversary quiz published in its 4 October 2023 edition, Le Nord-Côtier told readers that it was founded in 2007, that its founding members were Gino Lévesque and Luc Brisson, that it carried the name Le Nord-Côtier from its very beginning, and that it formed part of the Éditions Nordiques group of Charlevoix and Côte-Nord weeklies headquartered in Baie-Comeau.

The young paper quickly became part of the region's media landscape, and occasionally of its disputes. In a 2008–2009 decision, the Conseil de presse du Québec upheld a complaint brought by the general manager of two rival Sept-Îles weeklies, Le Journal de Sept-Îles and Nord-Est, against Le Nord-Côtier's co-publisher Nicolas Asselin, finding that he had placed himself in a conflict of interest by writing articles and editorials while also selling advertising for the paper. The episode is a documented marker of the competitive two-paper market in Sept-Îles at the time.

BAnQ's digital collection holds Le Nord-Côtier from 2014 onward, and full print editions have circulated as online flipbooks. Through the 2010s and 2020s the paper consolidated its position as the Sept-Îles area's French weekly within Éditions Nordiques, alongside Le Manic in Baie-Comeau and the Journal Haute-Côte-Nord in Forestville. The group's president is Simon Brisson, with Sylvain Desmeules as vice-president of information. In February 2025 the group acquired Publications Le Soir in the Bas-Saint-Laurent and Gaspésie, and in September 2026 it launched Événements Côte-Nord, a regional events platform for the Côte-Nord.

Programming and Content

Le Nord-Côtier's coverage is centred on the civic and economic life of Sept-Îles and the surrounding shore. Municipal politics is a staple: its reporting on the long-running saga of Sept-Îles city hall in the autumn of 2025 followed an injunction application over the building's demolition and the reactions of citizens to a register on the question, and in October 2026 it reported the city's support for a 72-unit, $27.7-million affordable housing project. Infrastructure and public services feature regularly, as in its October 2025 account of Sept-Îles switching its drinking-water disinfection to monochloramine.

The paper follows its territory east and west along Route 138. It covered the tenth edition of Port-Cartier's Christmas parade in November 2025, a tour of the Minganie by the federal Member of Parliament Marilène Gill, and community events in Havre-Saint-Pierre and the smaller villages toward Natashquan. Sports coverage is detailed and local: in the 2025–2026 season its reporters covered the Sept-Îles judo academy's medals at a provincial competition in Jonquière, the finals of the Sept-Îles touch football league in October 2025, and regional school sports under the RSEQ Côte-Nord banner. Elections receive close attention, from advance-voting turnout to election-day reporting at Sept-Îles polling stations during the 2 November 2025 municipal vote.

The scale of the paper's sports and community brief is visible in its print editions, which run to several dozen pages: its 16 March 2022 edition carried the full RSEQ Côte-Nord school-sports calendar, with regional championships scheduled in Sept-Îles, Baie-Comeau, Port-Cartier, Havre-Saint-Pierre and the Innu community of Uashat. Alongside news, the paper carries the standard apparatus of a Quebec community weekly — public notices, classified advertising, obituaries and community announcements — and its team has produced special publications, including the Road Trip Côte-Nord tourism magazine promoted in its pages.

Audience and Reach

Le Nord-Côtier distributes along an unusually long and thinly populated shoreline. In its October 2023 anniversary edition the paper stated that its weekly print run was then 17,470 copies, distributed from Rivière-Pentecôte, west of Port-Cartier, to Natashquan at the far eastern end of the Minganie — a distribution claim made by the paper itself and dated to that edition, not an audited figure. Le Soleil's February 2026 account describes the Éditions Nordiques weeklies collectively as distributed between Tadoussac and Havre-Saint-Pierre.

The audience is the French-speaking population of Sept-Îles — the Côte-Nord's largest city and a major iron-ore port — together with Port-Cartier, Havre-Saint-Pierre and the villages and Innu communities of the Minganie. No independently audited circulation or readership figure for Le Nord-Côtier has been published in the sources consulted, and the paper does not publish one; the 17,470-copy figure above is the most recent statement of scale the paper has made about itself.

Digital Presence

The paper's website, lenord-cotier.com, carries its current reporting, and its articles are indexed by media-monitoring services as they appear. Complete print editions have been published as page-flip editions online, including the anniversary edition of 4 October 2023. BAnQ numérique preserves the paper's digital editions from 2014 to the present, giving its recent archive a permanent public home. Within its group, Le Nord-Côtier also benefits from Éditions Nordiques' wider digital activity, which since 1 September 2026 includes the Événements Côte-Nord regional events platform launched by the publisher.

Ownership and Organisation

Le Nord-Côtier is published by Les Éditions Nordiques, the Brisson family's Baie-Comeau publishing company, whose president is Simon Brisson and whose vice-president for information is Sylvain Desmeules. The group publishes three Côte-Nord and Charlevoix weeklies — Le Nord-Côtier, Le Manic and the Journal Haute-Côte-Nord — together with Le Charlevoisier, a continuous news site and the monthly Magazine Charlevoix; Le Soleil reported in February 2026 that these publications together employ 18 journalists. The group expanded in February 2025 by acquiring Publications Le Soir.

In Sept-Îles, the paper's own March 2022 edition named Karine Therrien as its publisher (éditrice). Its reporting in 2025 was bylined by journalists including Sylvain Turcotte, who covered the municipal election and local sports, and Vincent Rioux-Berrouard, who covered the city-hall injunction, the water-treatment change and Port-Cartier events. Business directories list a regional director of information for the Côte-Nord within Éditions Nordiques, reflecting the group's practice of sharing editorial management across its Côte-Nord titles.

Contact and Availability

Le Nord-Côtier is published in Sept-Îles, where business listings place its office at 719 boulevard Laure; the paper's own editions have published the telephone number 418 960-2090 for its Sept-Îles operation. The print edition appears on Wednesdays — its editions of 25 February 2015, 10 January 2018, 16 March 2022 and 4 October 2023 were all Wednesday editions — and current stories are available between editions on its website. Readers outside the distribution area can consult its recent editions through BAnQ numérique, which holds the paper from 2014 onward.