About Sherbrooke Record

Sherbrooke Record

Overview

The Sherbrooke Record — known to its readers simply as The Record — is the English-language newspaper of Sherbrooke and Quebec's Eastern Townships. Launched on February 9, 1897, as the Sherbrooke Daily Record, it spent well over a century as a daily newspaper and, with the Montreal Gazette, was one of only two English-language dailies left in Quebec. It is a community-focused daily-turned-weekly: its reporting concentrates on Sherbrooke and the Townships rather than on comprehensive national and world coverage. In April 2026 the paper told subscribers it would end weekday print publication and produce a single print edition each Friday, while continuing to publish news online every day.

History

The Record's roots reach back to the Sherbrooke Examiner papers of the late nineteenth century, including The Weekly Examiner, which BAnQ holds from 1879 onward. The modern paper was launched on February 9, 1897, by businessman Leonard S. Channell under the name Sherbrooke Daily Record, and Channell served as its first editor until 1899. Over the following decades it passed through the hands of a succession of editors — Victor E. Morrill, Harry Logie, Gordon Miller and Alfred Wood among them — and became the established voice of the Townships' English-speaking community. In its later ownership by Toronto Telegram interests, editors such as Arnold Agnew and George McFarlane were sent down from Toronto for experience, and Hugh Doherty, who edited the paper from 1963 to 1968, left a detailed memoir of the era. The paper is published in compact format and carries ISSN 0841-6869.

The paper occupies a notable place in Canadian press history as a starting point for two future media barons: John W.H. Bassett, later of the Toronto Telegram, got his start in newspaper ownership with the Sherbrooke Daily Record, as did Conrad Black. In the spring of 1969 Black, together with partners Peter White and David Radler, bought the newspaper, cut staff and shortened its name to The Record — the first step in what became Black's international media empire. Long-serving editor Charles Bury led the newsroom from 1981 to 1996. A consortium of local businessmen headed by lawyer George MacLaren bought the paper in 1977, and Quebecor acquired it in the late 1980s. In January 1999 a fire gutted the paper's Delorme Street building, destroying its presses and forcing a temporary move to nearby Lennoxville; Black and his partners re-acquired the paper in September 1999, and in June 2000 it moved back to Sherbrooke, to its own press and permanent premises on Galt Street East. After years under Hollinger, the paper was purchased in January 2006 by the Alta Newspaper Group, a partnership of Glacier Ventures International and former Hollinger executive David Radler. Sharon McCully, who had been the paper's editor from 1996 to 2006, later returned as its publisher.

Programming and Content

The Record's content is the daily life of the Eastern Townships' anglophone community and of the wider, predominantly French-speaking region around it. Its news pages cover Sherbrooke municipal affairs, the surrounding MRCs and small towns, courts, schools, health care and the environment, reported by its own journalists, including reporters working under the federal Local Journalism Initiative. Its Friday print edition carries "Talk of the Townships," a long-running weekly insert devoted to television, arts and culture, and the paper has also published a Townships Weekend supplement, catalogued by BAnQ from 2022. A companion publication, the Brome County News, serves the Knowlton and Brome County area: it continued to be produced and distributed on Tuesdays after the Record's 2026 print change and is also included in the Friday Record. Community material fills out the mix: its coverage of the Sherbrooke Christmas Bird Count, for example, recorded 64 species in the Sherbrooke circle in the most recent count it reported — the second-highest total in nearly 70 years of counting — alongside agricultural fairs, school news and the anniversaries and milestones of Townships institutions, reflecting the paper's role as a community newspaper for a linguistic minority. Reporting by the Montreal media blog Fagstein on the 2026 print change noted that the paper's non-Friday editions had recently run to only about 12 pages, underlining how weekly in character the weekday product had already become.

Audience and Reach

The Record serves the English-speaking minority of the Eastern Townships, a community spread across Sherbrooke and the region's smaller towns and farmland, including a substantial readership in communities such as Lennoxville, Knowlton, Magog, North Hatley and Stanstead. For most of its existence it was the region's only English-language daily newspaper, and one of just two in the province. Its circulation was audited at 4,049 copies daily in 2011, according to Audit Bureau of Circulations figures for the six months ending September 30, 2011 — a figure that illustrates both its small scale and its durability in a market where French-language competitors, including Sherbrooke's La Tribune, are far larger. Publisher Sharon McCully has represented the paper in national discussions of support for official-language minority media, testifying before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages about the challenges facing minority-language community newspapers.

Digital Presence

The Record publishes continuously online at sherbrookerecord.com, with breaking news and daily reporting appearing between print editions; its stories are also syndicated through the Quebec Community Newspapers Association's platform. The paper has stated explicitly that the end of weekday print editions is not a reduction in news, with breaking coverage continuing on the web. BAnQ's digital collections hold long runs of its predecessor and earlier forms — The Weekly Examiner, The Sherbrooke Examiner, the Sherbrooke Daily Record from 1911 to 1969, The Sherbrooke Record from 1969 to 1979 and The Record itself from 1979 to 2019 — making more than a century of Townships history searchable online.

Ownership and Organisation

The Record is owned by the Alta Newspaper Group, the partnership of Glacier Ventures International and David Radler that acquired it from Hollinger in January 2006. The paper is led by publisher Sharon McCully, a journalist who began her career in the Gaspé — where she helped start an English-language newspaper in 1977, there being then no English media in that region at all — and whose association with the Record began in 1988; she served as its editor from 1996 to 2006 before later returning as publisher, and she signed the April 2026 letter to subscribers announcing the move to a Friday-only print schedule. Matthew McCully has served as editor since 2019. The newsroom is based in Sherbrooke, and the paper is a member of the Quebec Community Newspapers Association.

When the change to Friday-only print was announced in April 2026, the publisher pointed to practical causes, including the loss of shared distribution arrangements with the Montreal Gazette, which forced the paper to rely on Canada Post and raised its delivery costs — the same cost pressures that had already pushed Sherbrooke's French-language daily, La Tribune, to abandon print entirely.

Contact and Availability

The Record's offices are at 1195 rue Galt Est, Sherbrooke, Quebec J1G 1Y7. Its print edition appears each Friday, including the Brome County News and the paper's weekend material, and the Brome County News is also distributed on Tuesdays. News, subscriptions and advertising are available through its website, sherbrookerecord.com, which is updated daily, and print copies reach subscribers by mail through Canada Post.