About Nanaimo News Bulletin

Nanaimo News Bulletin

Overview

The Nanaimo News Bulletin is the community newspaper of Nanaimo, British Columbia, the Vancouver Island harbour city that counted 92,004 residents in the 2016 census. Published by Black Press, it appears in print on Wednesdays and continuously online at nanaimobulletin.com. Since January 2016 it has been the city's only newspaper, a role it inherited not by founding a new title but by outlasting its rivals: when Black Press closed the 141-year-old Nanaimo Daily News that month, it kept the News Bulletin publishing, and the Bulletin has carried the city's council chambers, courts, schools, sports and neighbourhoods on its own ever since.

The Bulletin is one of the largest community newspapers in British Columbia. It won the BC and Yukon Community NewsMedia Association's Ma Murray General Excellence Award in the largest circulation category — 31,000 copies and over — in 2024, the first time it had taken that honour since 2011, along with individual awards for its publisher and reporters. Its journalism is staff-written and local: city hall reporting, RCMP and court coverage, development proposals, education, arts and the letters of Nanaimo readers fill its pages each week.

History

The News Bulletin began as one of Black Press's free community papers, launched to compete with the established paid daily in markets across Vancouver Island. Trade coverage in Editor & Publisher in 2005 documented Black Press already publishing free "News Bulletin" non-dailies in Nanaimo and elsewhere against CanWest's dailies. The Bulletin name was the spearhead of an aggressive free-paper strategy: after testing free dailies in Kelowna and Vernon in February 2005, Black Press launched seven more free daily editions that spring, Nanaimo among them, each built on the local News Bulletin weekly's name. "All the papers take their name from the chain's News Bulletin weeklies and simply add the word Daily," Jim Tighe, president of Black Press's Island Publishers subsidiary, told Editor & Publisher, explaining that the idea was to build brand awareness for the weeklies and give advertisers more ways to buy space. The daily experiment was short-lived, but the free weekly behind it endured. For most of its life the Bulletin published twice a week; Mitch Wright was its editor by 2008, when he represented the paper on the committee forming Nanaimo's sports hall of fame.

The Bulletin is a distinct and much younger paper than the title it eventually replaced. The Nanaimo Daily News traced its own lineage to the semi-weekly Nanaimo Free Press, founded by George Norris in 1874 and converted to daily publication fourteen years later; the Bulletin has no connection to that 19th-century line, and its history is entirely that of a Black Press creation of the modern free-paper era.

The paper's position was transformed by the consolidation of Vancouver Island's newspaper industry. In 2015 Glacier Media sold all of its island papers except the Victoria Times Colonist to Black Press, a deal that handed Black Press the Nanaimo Daily News and the weekly Harbour City Star alongside its own News Bulletin — three titles in one city. The Star was closed in April 2015, and in January 2016 Black Press announced the Daily News would also close, saying it could not develop a sustainable business model for the paid daily; its final edition appeared on January 29, 2016, ending a run that began in 1874. The Bulletin, by contrast, was expressly kept: as the Daily News staff put their last paper to bed, Black Press confirmed the News Bulletin would continue, and it absorbed the role of the city's newspaper of record.

In the decade since, the Bulletin has consolidated from twice-weekly to a single Wednesday print edition while its website publishes daily. Its standing in the industry was confirmed in the spring of 2024, when the BCYCNA's Ma Murray Awards named it the province's best community newspaper in the largest circulation class; publisher Sean McCue won the Ad Design Award at the same ceremony, and reporter Karl Yu placed third for Best Sports Photo.

Programming and Content

The Bulletin's news report is built around Nanaimo's institutions. Reporters such as Chris Bush and Jessica Durling cover city council and regional district decisions, the courts and RCMP files — a February 2026 edition, for instance, followed a tugboat break-in and standoff at Cameron Island Marina through to the suspect's rearrest — along with development applications, like the six-storey rental building proposed for Terminal Avenue in October 2026, and community history; a January 2026 feature explored a new book drawn from a decade of local history columns. Municipal business is a structural feature, not a filler: the Regional District of Nanaimo places its monthly updates in the Bulletin on the first Wednesday of every month, and city public hearing notices run in its pages.

Around the news sit the fixtures of a community weekly: an active letters page, opinion and editorials, weather, a weekly quiz, classified advertising, obituaries and special sections such as its Remembrance Day supplement, which placed third in its Ma Murray category in 2024. Sports coverage runs from the junior hockey and lacrosse beats traditional in Nanaimo to community athletics, the work that earned its photographer a top-three provincial sports photo finish. Its year-in-review edition each December names the Bulletin's own choice of the ten stories that made headlines in Nanaimo over the past twelve months, written by its staff writers as a record of the year in the harbour city.

Audience and Reach

The Bulletin is distributed across Nanaimo and its surrounding area. A court-filed listing of Black Press publications issued in August 2025 records the paper — listed there as the Nanaimo Daily Bulletin — with a circulation of 29,136, published weekly on Wednesdays. That figure has come down from the audited 33,000 copies twice a week reported in earlier years, reflecting its consolidation to one print day, but it remains one of the biggest community newspaper circulations in the province, in the same 31,000-and-over class in which it won general excellence in 2024.

Digital Presence

The paper's website, nanaimobulletin.com, publishes stories daily, well beyond the Wednesday print cycle: news monitoring services recorded Bulletin stories on October 14 and 15, 2026, and community aggregators in the city draw on its feed in near-real time. Black Press's digital pages archive preserves its complete print editions, including those of January 14, February 11 and April 8, 2026, giving the weekly a permanent public e-edition trail that verifies its continuing publication.

Ownership and Organisation

The News Bulletin is published by Black Press, the community newspaper group founded by David H. Black in 1975. Black Press filed for protection under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act on January 15, 2024, and completed its sale to Canso Investment Counsel, Deans Knight Capital Management and Carpenter Media Group on March 25, 2024, emerging from CCAA Canadian-controlled under chief executive officer Glenn Rogers. Locally, the paper's publisher is Sean McCue, and its office is at 777 Poplar Street in Nanaimo. It operates within Black Press's Vancouver Island division alongside sister papers in communities up and down the island.

Contact and Availability

The Nanaimo News Bulletin is available in print every Wednesday and online at nanaimobulletin.com throughout the week. The paper can be reached through its office at 777 Poplar Street, Nanaimo, BC V9S 2H7, and by phone at 1-866-865-4460. Story ideas and letters go to the newsroom at editor@nanaimobulletin.com; publisher Sean McCue can be contacted at sean.mccue@nanaimobulletin.com. Classified advertising and obituaries are handled through the paper's classifieds service, advertised in each edition.