About Morinville Free Press

Morinville Free Press

Overview

The Morinville Free Press is the community newspaper of Morinville, Alberta, a town in Sturgeon County immediately north of Edmonton. It is a printed weekly newspaper, and it is demonstrably still publishing: Alberta's Natural Resources Conservation Board (NRCB) records public notices carried in the Free Press on 5 March 2025 and again on 14 January 2026, and the Sturgeon Public Schools division's media logs cite stories and notices from its printed pages through the autumn and early winter of 2025. The Free Press is a member of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association (AWNA), which lists it among its current member papers. It is a print-first newspaper with no verified website of its own — a point explained in the Digital Presence section below, because the website address recorded for it in some directories, cosy-interior.com, was checked during the preparation of this profile and found to serve an unrelated gambling site, and it has no connection with the newspaper. The Free Press works in tandem with the neighbouring Redwater Review: the two Sturgeon County weeklies have long been sold to advertisers as a combined buy, and they carry some of the same stories on the same day.

History

The early history of the Morinville Free Press is not well documented in publicly available sources, and no founding date for the paper could be verified during the research for this profile; readers should treat any unsourced founding year for the title with caution. What the record does show is a long-established Sturgeon County weekly. A media directory of the Bowes/Great West era listed the paper with Ed Cowley as its publisher, a Morinville telephone number (780-939-3309), the contact address morinville@shaw.ca, and a Wednesday publication day; the same publisher was listed for the Lamont Farm 'n' Friends and used the contact redwater@shaw.ca, indicating a small multi-title operation centred on the Redwater–Sturgeon County area. An older Alberta government directory of community papers listed the Free Press as having no website, reachable by telephone only. By December 2010 the paper was being marketed to advertisers by AdCanada Media as part of a "Morinville/Redwater Combination (Free Press and Review)," pairing it with the Redwater Review as a single advertising buy across the two towns. The paper should not be confused with the Morinville Mirror, a separate Morinville newspaper with its own website (morinvillemirror.com), nor with the historical Morinville Journal, a much earlier title that was merged into an early St. Albert newspaper in 1953. Journalist Lorraine Poulsen worked at the Redwater Review and the Morinville Free Press before going on to edit the Viking Weekly Review, a small biographical trace of the paper's role as a working newsroom within Alberta's weekly-newspaper community.

Programming and Content

The Free Press carries the standard mixture of a rural Alberta community weekly, and the items of its content that can be verified from outside the paper itself illustrate that range. It is a vehicle for statutory public notices: the NRCB's decision summaries for confined feeding operation applications in Sturgeon County record that public notice of the applications was given by advertisement in the Morinville Free Press, the newspaper in circulation in the affected community, in March 2025 and again in January 2026. It covers the local school division closely — Sturgeon Public Schools' communications reports log Free Press coverage including the division's Notice of Nomination Day in September 2025, its Notice of Election in October 2025, and a December 2025 news story about the division's partnership with Unplugged Canada. That December story appeared in the Free Press and the Redwater Review on the same day, showing the two papers sharing content as well as an advertising package. Around this documented core, the paper serves Morinville and Sturgeon County readers with the municipal, agricultural and community coverage expected of a county weekly, sold to advertisers precisely on the strength of its farm and small-town readership.

Audience and Reach

The Free Press's audience is Morinville, the surrounding Sturgeon County farm district, and — through its combined advertising package with the Redwater Review — the neighbouring Redwater trading area northeast of Edmonton. The only published circulation figure for the paper comes from AdCanada Media's farm-audience research, a census-based study of rural Alberta readership, which recorded a footprint circulation of 12,188 for the Morinville Free Press, against 11,868 footprint dwellings and 713 farms in its distribution area; the companion Redwater Review was recorded at 4,502. Those figures come from an undated industry study rather than a current audit and describe the paper's reach as measured for farm advertisers; they should not be read as a present-day circulation, and no current audited circulation for the Free Press is published. The paper's standing in its market is nonetheless corroborated by officialdom's continued use of it: provincial regulators and the county's school division both placed legally significant notices in its pages in 2025 and 2026, which they do only in a newspaper genuinely in circulation in the community.

Digital Presence

The Morinville Free Press is, on the available evidence, a print-only newspaper. Older Alberta directories listed it explicitly as a paper with no website, and no official Free Press news website could be verified during the preparation of this profile. The website address associated with the paper in the WorldNM inventory, cosy-interior.com, is wrong and must not be followed: when it was checked on 17 October 2026, that domain served "FENDY188," an Indonesian-language online slot-gambling site with no connection of any kind to Morinville, to Alberta, or to the newspaper. The domain appears to be either an inventory error or a repurposed address, and the website field for this profile should be corrected or removed before publication so that readers are never directed to it. The paper's verifiable public presence is instead its printed edition, its current listing in the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association's member directory, and the trail of official notices and school-division coverage recorded in its pages. Anyone needing to reach the Free Press should do so through the AWNA member listing or local Sturgeon County channels rather than through any website currently attributed to it, and a direct check for any official online presence the paper may have established should be made when this profile is published.

Ownership and Organisation

The Free Press is an independent local operation rather than a chain title: it does not appear among the community newspapers of Postmedia Network, which owns most of Alberta's former Sun Media weeklies, and its documented history is one of small-scale regional publishing. The fullest ownership record available is the directory-era listing of Ed Cowley as publisher, with contact details tying the paper to Redwater — the same publisher and telephone line were associated with the Lamont Farm 'n' Friends — which points to a small Sturgeon County-area publishing business running several neighbouring titles. The paper's long-standing joint marketing with the Redwater Review through AdCanada Media, and the two papers' same-day shared stories in 2025, indicate that the Free Press and the Review continue to be produced in close coordination, most plausibly under common local ownership or a shared production arrangement. The name of the paper's present owner or publisher could not be verified from public sources during the preparation of this profile, and it is stated here as an open gap rather than guessed at: the paper is an AWNA member in good standing, publishes weekly in print, and functions as the newspaper of record for Morinville.

Contact and Availability

The Morinville Free Press is available in print in Morinville and the surrounding Sturgeon County area. Its publication day has historically been Wednesday — a media directory of the Bowes/Great West era recorded a Wednesday weekly — and that pattern is consistent with every dated 2025–26 issue reference found during this research: the NRCB notices of 5 March 2025 and 14 January 2026 and the Sturgeon Public Schools items of 10 and 17 September, 8 and 15 October and 3 December 2025 all fall on Wednesdays. The telephone number and email address carried in older directories (780-939-3309 and morinville@shaw.ca) date from that earlier period and could not be confirmed as current, so they are recorded here as historical contacts only. For current contact, the reliable routes are the paper's listing in the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association member directory and the printed paper itself. As set out above, the cosy-interior.com address attributed to the paper in some records is an unrelated gambling domain, is not a contact channel for the newspaper, and should be disregarded entirely.