About Le Pharillon

Le Pharillon

Overview

Le Pharillon is a French-language weekly newspaper serving the Côte-de-Gaspé and the Rocher-Percé regional county municipality at the eastern tip of Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula, published from Gaspé by Éditions Nordiques. It appears in print on Wednesdays — the edition of Wednesday, 1 April 2026 ran to 24 pages — and its content is published online by its publisher. The nameplate is one of the historic titles of Gaspésie journalism: the original Pharillon was the Côte-de-Gaspé's weekly from 1973 to 2018, and the name was restored in February 2026 when Éditions Nordiques, having acquired the region's papers through the Publications Le Soir transaction, split from its Rimouski partners and renamed its Gaspé paper once again Le Pharillon. The revived paper covers fisheries, municipal and institutional affairs, seasonal work, culture and sport across the peninsula's tip, from Gaspé and Percé to Chandler and Port-Daniel-Gascons.

History

The first Pharillon was launched in the 1970s — the regional history Encyclobec counts it among the Gaspésie weeklies founded in that decade by the Bellavance family of Rimouski, alongside Le Havre and Le Chaleur — and, as Le Soleil recounted in February 2026, it served as the weekly news paper of the Côte-de-Gaspé for 45 years, from 1973 to 2018. In its later years it belonged to TC Media. On 14 June 2017, Transcontinental announced the sale of Le Pharillon, L'Écho de la Baie and Le Havre to Radio du Rocher Percé inc., a company jointly owned by André Méthot and Claude Dauphin; eight TC Media employees transferred to the buyer.

Under Radio du Rocher Percé, the paper absorbed its sister title: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) records the merged Le Pharillon – Le Havre from volume 45, number 32, dated 14 March 2018, continuing the Pharillon's numbering, with the merged title carrying ISSN 1181-0459. The Pharillon name afterwards disappeared from the masthead altogether: the paper was replaced by Gaspésie Nouvelles and then, about a year before February 2026, by Le Soir, the unified nameplate of the Rimouski-based Publications Le Soir group. Éditions Nordiques of Baie-Comeau announced its acquisition of Publications Le Soir in February 2025. What followed, as Sylvain Desmeules, the company's vice-president of information, explained to Le Soleil on 5 February 2026, was a suspension of all the group's south-shore weeklies and then a reorganisation: Éditions Nordiques parted from Le Soir.ca — the Rimouski title retained by publisher Louise Ringuet and news director Olivier Therriault — and a legal obligation in that settlement required it to drop the Soir name. Desmeules told the paper the company had already considered restoring the old names at the time of the 2025 acquisition, before being drawn to the single Soir banner; the settlement made the decision for it, and, as he put it, the names Pharillon and Voix gaspésienne still echoed in their communities. The company chose to revive the names readers remembered: the Matane paper became La Voix gaspésienne again, and the paper serving the Côte-de-Gaspé and Rocher-Percé became, once more, Le Pharillon. The relaunched volume numbering confirms the fresh start: the 1 April 2026 issue is numbered volume 1, number 9.

Programming and Content

The revived Pharillon's pages reflect the working life of the peninsula's tip. The snow-crab fishery received extensive treatment in the spring 2026 editions, with Johanne Fournier's reporting on the 2026 quota recommendations for the estuary and gulf zones — including the historically low 1,130-tonne quota proposed for zone 17, whose stocks the paper reported at their lowest level since 2000 — drawing on Fisheries and Oceans Canada science and on the crabbers' associations, whose zone 17 president it quoted looking ahead to a recovery cohort entering the fishery in 2027. The seasonal economy is a signature subject: the April 2026 issue carried a piece on the employment-insurance position of seasonal workers, a perennial question in a region built on fishing and tourism. Institutional news is closely followed, as in the paper's coverage of the threatened strike by the roughly sixty CSN members at Gaspé's Manoir St-Augustin seniors' residence — a 120-resident home whose collective agreement had expired in April 2024 — and of a police investigation into a burned, previously stolen vehicle found at Port-Daniel-Gascons in March 2026. Culture and community life have their place — the April 2026 front page led on Gaspésie's honours at the Lauriers de la gastronomie québécoise, and the paper runs a monthly ten-question quiz on the history and geography of the greater Gaspésie. Sport is reported with local pride: the same issue followed Gaspé karate athletes selected for Team Quebec and a young Grand Gaspé boxer returning from the Canada Cup in Calgary with a silver medal. Part of the paper's reporting is supported by the federal Local Journalism Initiative, whose credit appears on its stories.

Audience and Reach

Le Pharillon addresses the francophone communities of the Côte-de-Gaspé and the Rocher-Percé — Gaspé, Grande-Rivière, Percé, Chandler, Port-Daniel-Gascons and the villages between them. At the February 2026 relaunch, Éditions Nordiques said distribution of the paper was being made through drop-off points in busy locations, with home delivery by mail under study in some sectors. The company also told Le Soleil that the seven jobs attached to the Matanie and the end of the peninsula were protected in the reorganisation, with an eighth hire planned. No circulation figure for the revived title has been published, and none is asserted here.

Digital Presence

The relaunched paper publishes online at lepharillon.info, where Éditions Nordiques posts the paper's editions — the full 1 April 2026 issue is hosted there in PDF form on the group's Publications Gaspésiennes platform. Readers should note that the domain named in older directories, lepharillon.ca, is no longer the paper's: it now serves an unrelated English-language running and fitness website that has nothing to do with the Gaspé weekly, and the website field for this profile must be corrected to lepharillon.info at publication. The historic paper is preserved by BAnQ, whose digital catalogue lists 197 Pharillon items, and the merged Pharillon – Le Havre is catalogued there from March 2018.

Ownership and Organisation

Le Pharillon is published by Éditions Nordiques, the Baie-Comeau company of the Brisson family whose president is Simon Brisson; the paper is produced under the group's Publications Gaspésiennes imprint. "We are specialists in small markets," Desmeules told Le Soleil at the relaunch, explaining the withdrawal from Rimouski and the refounding of the Gaspé and Matane papers under their historic names. Éditions Nordiques also publishes the Côte-Nord weeklies Le Manic, Le Nord-Côtier and Journal Haute-Côte-Nord, distributed from Tadoussac to Havre-Saint-Pierre, and Le Charlevoisien with its companion magazine; Le Soleil reported in February 2026 that the group's publications employed 18 journalists, a company figure given at the time. The revived Pharillon's own masthead, in its 1 April 2026 issue, names Simon Brisson as publisher (éditeur), Sylvain Desmeules as vice-president of information, Johanne Fournier as layout and web coordinator, and Dominique Fortier and Jean-Philippe Thibault as journalists, with Nelson Sergerie contributing Local Journalism Initiative reporting. The same masthead credits printing to Québecor Media and distribution to Messageries Dynamiques.

Contact and Availability

Le Pharillon appears weekly, on Wednesdays, distributed through drop-off points across the Côte-de-Gaspé and Rocher-Percé. Its Gaspé office, per its April 2026 masthead, is at 47 rue Baker, local 7, Gaspé, telephone 581 880-9980; the group's Baie-Comeau office is at 965 rue de Parfondeval, telephone 418 589-9990. Editions can be read online at lepharillon.info, and back issues of the historic title are held by Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.