About Les 2 Rives

Les 2 Rives

Overview

Les 2 Rives is a French-language weekly newspaper serving Sorel-Tracy and the surrounding municipalities of the Pierre-De Saurel regional county municipality in Quebec's Montérégie region. Its name — "the two shores" — reflects the geography of its territory: Sorel-Tracy stands at the confluence of the Richelieu River and the St. Lawrence, and the paper's coverage area takes in the communities on both banks of the Richelieu, from Contrecœur and Saint-Joseph-de-Sorel to Sainte-Anne-de-Sorel and the rural parishes of the region. The paper describes itself, in its own social-media biography, as "your weekly since 1978." It is published by DBC Communications inc., the Saint-Hyacinthe-based family press group led by Benoit Chartier, which acquired it from TC Media in October 2017. It publishes in print each week and online at les2rives.com.

History

The paper dates its origins to 1978. It is a comparatively recent link in a much longer Sorel press tradition documented by BAnQ, whose holdings for the city include La Gazette de Sorel (1857–1883) and Le Sorelois (1880–1965), but Les 2 Rives is a distinct, modern title rather than a continuation of those nineteenth- and twentieth-century papers. Nor should it be confused with the Sorel-Tracy Express, the free competitor launched in the Quebecor era and later held by Transcontinental, which disappeared in the mid-2010s, or with La Voix, a second Transcontinental weekly for Sorel that BAnQ records on the Eureka platform from 2013 to 2016; Les 2 Rives is the Sorel title that survived the decade's consolidation. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) catalogued the issue of 19 December 2017 as number 15 of the paper's thirty-ninth year, a volume count consistent with a late-1970s founding, and the title's modern form, Les 2 rives.com, succeeds the earlier print title 2 rives. For the first decades of its life the paper belonged to the generation of independent and chain-owned community weeklies that served Quebec's regional cities; by the early 2010s it was part of the Transcontinental (TC Media) portfolio. When the Competition Bureau approved Transcontinental's acquisition of Sun Media's Quebec weeklies in 2014, TC's own accounting of the transaction listed Les 2 Rives of Sorel among the titles it was keeping in the Montérégie, while the rival Sorel-Tracy Express was put up for sale.

The paper's modern history is bound up with Transcontinental's withdrawal from local newspapers. On 18 April 2017 TC announced the sale process for its local and regional papers in Quebec and Ontario, and on 25 October 2017 it announced the sale of Les 2 Rives, together with its related web property, to DBC Communications inc., a company presided over by Benoit Chartier. The paper's eight employees transferred to the buyer, and TC Transcontinental continued to provide printing and distribution services, as it already did for DBC's other publications. It was the second transaction between the two companies that year, following DBC's acquisition of L'Oeil Régional of Beloeil in March 2017, and the two firms had a business relationship stretching back to 1979, when Transcontinental acquired the Saint-Hyacinthe printing plant from the Chartier family. Under DBC the paper has continued as the Sorel-Tracy region's weekly, with BAnQ cataloguing both its print edition — a weekly published from Saint-Hyacinthe in tabloid format — and its online edition.

Programming and Content

Les 2 Rives is a general-interest community weekly whose journalism is organised around the municipal and regional life of the Pierre-De Saurel territory. Its reporters cover Sorel-Tracy city council and the council of the regional county municipality, the region's industrial economy — Sorel-Tracy is one of Quebec's historic metallurgy centres, home to plants such as the Forges de Sorel and food-industry employers such as the Bel Canada plant whose $3.7 million emissions-reduction investment the paper reported in March 2026 — and the agricultural life of the surrounding farmland, including the annual Expo agricole de Sorel-Tracy, whose expanded June 2026 edition the paper previewed. Court and public-safety reporting, community and cultural news, and local sport, including the region's hockey scene, round out the mix. Reporting sampled through the Muck Rack monitoring service in 2026 shows staff journalist Alexandre Brouillard covering the MRC de Pierre-De Saurel beat with interview-based local stories — a Contrecœur track athlete's national medal, a Superior Court judgment involving a Sorel-Tracy family, a Cameroonian electrician navigating federal immigration bureaucracy after settling in the region — the profile of a working general-assignment regional newsroom rather than a syndication shell. The paper also maintains a two-way relationship with its readers: its Facebook page biography notes that material posted there may be published in the print newspaper.

Audience and Reach

The paper's audience is the French-speaking population of Sorel-Tracy — a city of roughly 35,000 people — and of the twelve municipalities of the Pierre-De Saurel regional county municipality, a largely francophone territory at the eastern edge of the Montérégie. No current audited circulation figure for Les 2 Rives is published in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is asserted here; the paper had a staff of eight at the time of its 2017 sale, which indicates the scale of the operation. Within its home region it coexists with digital-native local outlets, notably the online SorelTracy Magazine, whose regional press review regularly cites Les 2 Rives' reporting — its April 2026 review, for example, carried the paper's report of a federal investment of more than $700,000 in a Sorel-Tracy company — an indication that the weekly remains one of the reference sources for the territory's news agenda.

Digital Presence

The paper's digital edition is published at les2rives.com, where its local reporting appears between print editions; the federal government's Job Bank labour-market news service cited a les2rives.com item in its digest for the week of 2 to 6 March 2026, and monitoring records show its articles indexed through 2026. BAnQ's directory of Quebec newspapers available online has listed the paper with digital editions on BAnQ numérique for 2017 to 2020 and on the Eureka platform from 2013 onward, providing an archival trail for the title's digital transition. The paper is also present on Facebook, which it treats as an extension of the print product, and its output is tracked by the Muck Rack media-monitoring service, which classifies it as a verified local French-language newspaper with a weekly frequency.

Ownership and Organisation

Les 2 Rives is owned by DBC Communications inc. of Saint-Hyacinthe, an independent, family-run Quebec press group presided over by Benoit Chartier. DBC's flagship is Le Courrier de Saint-Hyacinthe, founded in 1852 and described in Transcontinental's 2017 sale announcement as the longest-running French-language newspaper in America; the group's other titles include Le Clairon de Saint-Hyacinthe, La Pensée de Bagot, the agricultural publication Gestion et Technologies Agricoles, and L'Oeil Régional of Beloeil, acquired from TC Media in March 2017, a few months before Les 2 Rives followed the same path in October 2017. The acquisition placed the Sorel-Tracy weekly inside one of the Montérégie's established independent publishing houses, with production support — printing and distribution — continuing to be supplied by TC Transcontinental under the terms of the sale. Editorial work is carried out by the paper's own small newsroom in the Sorel-Tracy region, reporting to the DBC organisation in Saint-Hyacinthe.

Contact and Availability

Les 2 Rives is published weekly in print for the Sorel-Tracy and Pierre-De Saurel region and can be read online at les2rives.com, where its current reporting, contact routes and advertising information are posted. Its publisher, DBC Communications inc., is based in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec. The paper also interacts with readers through its Facebook page, material from which it reserves the option of publishing in the print edition.