About Selkirk Record

Selkirk Record

Overview

The Selkirk Record is a weekly community newspaper serving the city of Selkirk, Manitoba, and the string of communities around the southern end of Lake Winnipeg. It is published on Thursdays by Big and Colourful Printing & Publishing, the Manitoba community-newspaper company whose stable also includes The Express Weekly News in the Interlake and the Stonewall Teulon Tribune. The Record's own front page describes a service area reaching well beyond the city limits: Selkirk, Lockport, St. Andrews, St. Clements, West St. Paul, Clandeboye, Petersfield, Winnipeg Beach, Garson, Dunnottar and Tyndall — a territory that takes in two rural municipalities, the Lockport crossing of the Red River and the cottage and commuter country between Winnipeg and the lake.

The paper is an active member of Manitoba's community press. The Manitoba Community Newspapers Association's published Christmas schedule for 2025 lists the Selkirk Record among its active publishing papers, and Record stories continue to circulate through Manitoba news aggregation — a February 2025 Record item announcing Selkirk as host of the 2026 Viterra Championship, the Manitoba men's curling championship, was carried by the Manitoba News 101 service under the Record's name. That story is a fair example of the paper's beat: a mid-sized Manitoba city with a strong sporting culture, reporting its own news for its own region.

History

The modern Record carries one of the oldest newspaper names in Manitoba, though it is important to be precise about the relationship: today's paper is a revival of the name, not a continuation of the original title. The first Selkirk Record was founded on 26 November 1885 by James Stewart and Sons, publishers and proprietors, with Robert Stewart — one of the "Sons" — in charge; he would own and operate newspapers in Selkirk for nearly 50 years. The original Record was a four-page paper, published each Thursday from offices on Clandeboye Avenue and sold for a dollar a year, mixing local and country news with advertisements, a town directory, serials, correspondence and a train table.

In 1895 Robert Stewart renamed it the Selkirk Record and Canadian Fishing Gazette, rebranding the paper to appeal to Selkirk's large commercial fishing industry on Lake Winnipeg; the renamed paper grew to eight pages, still published on Thursdays at a dollar a year, with more coverage of agriculture and fishing. The title survived, in its various forms, until the aftermath of the Second World War: in 1946 the Record and its rival, the Selkirk Journal, amalgamated to form a new weekly, the Selkirk Enterprise, whose editor G. C. Kroft announced that Selkirk stood "at the threshold of a new day." The Record name then disappeared from Selkirk's newsstands for more than six decades.

The modern Selkirk Record dates its own numbering from 2010: its issue of Thursday, 7 December 2017 is marked Volume 8, Edition 49, which places its first volume in 2010 if, as is customary, its volumes run annually. Published by Big and Colourful, the revived Record restored the city's historic newspaper name as a Thursday weekly, competing for the same readers the Enterprise's successors and the separate Selkirk Journal — a different title, published by Postmedia — also serve.

Programming and Content

The Record is a full-service community weekly. Its front page organises coverage under news, sports, opinion, community, people, entertainment, events, classifieds and careers, and its reporting follows the institutions of its coverage area: Selkirk city council and the councils of the Rural Municipalities of St. Andrews and St. Clements, local courts and police, schools, and the community associations of the smaller centres on its masthead list.

The December 2017 edition illustrates the mix: its front page led on the opening night of Holiday Alley, Selkirk's downtown winter festival, with a staff photograph by Lindsey Enns, and carried reporting from the Association of Manitoba Municipalities convention, where two local councillors were calling the passage of a pair of anti-harassment resolutions a victory for municipal councils. Sports coverage is a substantial part of the paper's identity in a city whose recreation complex has repeatedly hosted the provincial men's curling championship — the event the Record reported on in February 2025 when Selkirk was named host of the 2026 Viterra Championship. The paper's own masthead in 2017 carried the claim "MCNA 2016 Best All Around Newspaper of the Year," an honour the paper attributes to the Manitoba Community Newspapers Association's 2016 awards; it is repeated here as the paper's own claim, printed on its front page.

Audience and Reach

The Record's audience is the population of Selkirk and the surrounding municipalities of the Red River corridor and the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg — a readership that includes the city itself, the growing commuter communities of St. Andrews, St. Clements and West St. Paul, and smaller centres such as Lockport, Clandeboye, Petersfield and Winnipeg Beach. Its publisher's sister paper, The Express Weekly News, covers the Interlake to the west, giving Big and Colourful a combined community-newspaper footprint across the region between Winnipeg, Lake Winnipeg and the Interlake.

Within that market the Record competes as a locally produced independent weekly: its publisher is a Manitoba community newspaper company rather than a national chain, and the paper's recognition in provincial association awards and its listing in the association's 2025 publishing schedule place it among the province's established community titles.

Digital Presence

The Record's website is selkirkrecord.ca, its online home under the paper's name. The paper's journalism also travels beyond its own site: Manitoba News 101, a provincial news aggregation service, carries a dedicated Selkirk Record channel on which Record stories — such as the February 2025 Viterra Championship announcement — are republished for a wider Manitoba audience. The paper's historic namesake is extensively documented online by the Selkirk Museum, whose newspaper histories draw on the Legislative Library of Manitoba and newspaper archives to trace the 1885 Record and its successors; those museum pages concern the historic title, and readers should not mistake the museum's 19th-century Record for the modern weekly, which is a separate, 21st-century publication that revived the name.

Ownership and Organisation

The Selkirk Record is published by Big and Colourful Printing & Publishing. News Media Canada's Manitoba stewardship listing records "Big and Colourful Printing & Publ." as the owner of the Selkirk Record, classed as a community newspaper, and lists the same company as publisher of The Express Weekly News at Gimli. The company's leadership is a matter of provincial record: the Manitoba Legislative Assembly's Hansard of 15 April 2021 names Lana Meier as the publisher of The Express Weekly News, the Selkirk Record and the Stonewall Teulon Tribune, in a statement recognising Manitoba's community newspaper publishers. Meier's involvement in the group's papers is also visible in its pages — a photograph in The Express Weekly News in January 2016 is credited "Express Photo by Lana Meier."

The inventory description of the Record as a "'Big and Colourful' weekly" is therefore confirmed by independent sources: Big and Colourful is the publisher's actual name, not a slogan. The paper is independent of the national chains — it is not a Postmedia, Glacier Media or Torstar title — and it should not be confused with the Selkirk Journal, the separate Postmedia weekly with which the historic Record amalgamated, in its original incarnation, in 1946.

Contact and Availability

The Selkirk Record is published weekly on Thursdays in Selkirk, Manitoba, by Big and Colourful Printing & Publishing, and serves Selkirk, Lockport, St. Andrews, St. Clements, West St. Paul, Clandeboye, Petersfield, Winnipeg Beach, Garson, Dunnottar and Tyndall. Its website is selkirkrecord.ca, where readers can find the paper's current contact and subscription information, and its stories are also carried on the Manitoba News 101 aggregation service. The paper is a member of the Manitoba Community Newspapers Association, whose published schedules list its holiday-week office arrangements alongside those of the province's other community papers.