About Rimbey Review

Rimbey Review

Overview

The Rimbey Review is a weekly community newspaper serving Rimbey, a town in Ponoka County in central Alberta, and the surrounding farm country. It is published every Tuesday and sold by subscription, with a website at rimbeyreview.com. Although some directories have described it as an independent weekly, the Review is a Black Press Media title: its own masthead states that it is published by PNG Prairie Newspaper Group — Black Press's Prairie division — and its editions are carried in Black Press's official online page archive, including issues dated January 13, January 20, February 3, March 3, March 31 and April 14, 2026, which verify that the paper continues to publish on its weekly cycle.

The Review is a young paper by prairie standards, founded in 1997, but it stands in a line of Rimbey newspapers stretching back to 1919 and is the direct successor of the Rimbey Record, the town's newspaper of record for most of the twentieth century. Its office is on Rimbey's main street, at 5001–50 Avenue, and its masthead gives its mailing address as P.O. Box 244, Rimbey, Alberta T0C 2J0, with the telephone number 403-843-4909.

History

Rimbey's first newspaper was the Rimbey Pioneer, established in 1919 and published for about a year. It was followed by the Rimbey Advance in 1921, which ended in 1922 when its printing plant burned. The town's durable paper was the Rimbey Record: the Town of Rimbey's heritage walking tour records that newspaper publishing began on the site of the later Record office in 1930 under W. J. Good, that the building burned on February 18, 1936, and that the paper was back in print by April of that year from a new building that housed the Record office from 1936 into the late 1990s. The Record earned a footnote in Canadian journalism history in 1937, when it was cited for its assistance with an Edmonton Journal series that won the Journal a Pulitzer Prize. Record Publishing Ltd. carried on until 1997, when the company failed after an attempt to take it public on the Vancouver Stock Exchange.

The Rimbey Review was founded on January 27, 1997 by Barry Hibbert, owner of the Sylvan Lake News, who brought in Rob Gilgan to manage the new paper from Rimbey — the founding is documented in the Provincial Archives of Alberta's records for the Review. Its launch came in the same year that Record Publishing Ltd. failed, so Rimbey passed directly from its old newspaper to its new one. In 2004 a group of Rimbey business owners, together with Gilgan, tried to buy the Review and failed; later that year Hibbert sold the paper to Black Press Group Ltd., and it has been a Black Press title since. Within the group it now appears under the Prairie Newspaper Group banner, and group staff work across its titles: some stories in the Review are credited to the staff of the Ponoka News, its sister paper to the southeast.

Programming and Content

The Review's content is the standard repertoire of a central-Alberta community weekly: town council and Ponoka County coverage, school news, agricultural reporting, local sports, RCMP items — an April 2026 edition, for example, carried a Rimbey RCMP reminder urging residents to secure vehicles and property — opinion, editorials and a letters page, for which the paper publishes the address reporter@rimbeyreview.com. Its letters policy, printed in its January 2026 editions, asks writers to sign their letters and include a telephone number for verification, and reserves the paper's right to edit for length and libel — the conventional terms on which small weeklies keep their correspondence columns open. It also carries syndicated and shared material from within the Black Press Prairie group, including stories credited to the Ponoka News staff, a pooling arrangement that lets two small newsrooms cover a wider stretch of central Alberta than either could manage alone.

The paper's January 13, 2026 masthead sets out the commercial terms of the print edition: subscriptions are $65 plus five per cent GST for one year anywhere in Canada, and $3 per week for delivery to the United States, with subscription cheques payable to Black Press. Advertising is handled through the number 780-288-5680 published in the masthead. The masthead also states the paper's publishing identity plainly: "Published every Tuesday by PNG Prairie Newspaper Group."

Audience and Reach

The Review serves the town of Rimbey and the rural households of the surrounding part of Ponoka County, in a district whose economy rests heavily on agriculture and the oil and gas activity of central Alberta. Unlike some of its Black Press sisters, which are delivered free, the Rimbey Review is a paid-circulation paper: its subscription prices are published in its masthead, and its readership is built on subscribers in Canada and a small number in the United States. No audited circulation figure for the Review is published in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here.

Digital Presence

The paper's online home is rimbeyreview.com, and its print editions are preserved in Black Press Media's online page archive, where the full text of its 2026 editions — including mastheads, subscription information and letters pages — can be read. The archive is also the most direct public evidence of the paper's current publishing schedule, showing Tuesday editions appearing week after week through the first months of 2026. Group content-sharing runs in both directions online and in print: the Review carries stories credited to the Ponoka News staff, and an April 2026 first-person column by Ponoka News editor Emily Jaycox about changes in the group's newsrooms appeared in the Review's own pages, an illustration of how the Prairie group's small staffs now write for several mastheads at once.

Ownership and Organisation

The Rimbey Review is owned by Black Press Media and published by PNG Prairie Newspaper Group, the company's Prairie division; the masthead of its January 13, 2026 edition names Daria Zmiyiwsky as president, the executive who heads Black Press's Prairie division. The paper is therefore not an independent weekly, the description carried in some directories, but part of one of Canada's largest community-newspaper companies. Black Press was founded by David Holmes Black, who bought the Williams Lake Tribune in British Columbia in 1975; in January 2024 the company filed for creditor protection and announced a restructuring sale, which closed on March 25, 2024 to Canso Investment Counsel, Deans Knight Capital Management and Carpenter Media Group, leaving the company Canadian-controlled. The Canadian Press reported that Black Press published about 150 daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and websites in Canada and the United States and employed roughly 1,200 people.

At the group level, an Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association citation records that the Prairie Newspaper Group's senior regional administrator, Marlene Conibear, held responsibilities for the weekly papers in Stettler, Bashaw, Castor, Rimbey and Ponoka — the cluster of central-Alberta titles to which the Review belongs.

Contact and Availability

The Rimbey Review is published every Tuesday in Rimbey, Alberta. Its office is at 5001–50 Avenue (Main Street), P.O. Box 244, Rimbey, AB T0C 2J0, telephone 403-843-4909; letters to the editor go to reporter@rimbeyreview.com, and advertising inquiries use 780-288-5680. Print subscriptions cost $65 plus GST per year in Canada. Current and recent editions can be read online at rimbeyreview.com and in Black Press Media's online page archive.