About Taber Times

Taber Times

Overview

The Taber Times is the community weekly newspaper of Taber, Alberta, and of the villages and hamlets of the surrounding Municipal District of Taber in the province's irrigated southern farm belt. It publishes on Wednesdays. Despite the way it is sometimes catalogued, the Times is not an independent newspaper: it is published by the Alta Newspaper Group Limited Partnership and belongs to the group marketed as Southern Alberta Newspapers, alongside the Lethbridge Herald, the Medicine Hat News and sister weeklies in Coaldale, Vauxhall and Bow Island. Its reporting is correspondingly shared, with Times stories carried across the group's titles and group reporters filing into the Times. The paper is a member of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association and of News Media Canada, the national community newspaper association.

History

The Times traces its lineage to February 1907, when the Taber Free Press began publishing; the University of Alberta's Peel's Prairie Provinces collection dates the Free Press run from 21 February 1907 to August 1910, with a suspension over the winter of 1909-10. In 1910 the paper was renamed the Taber Advertiser, a title it carried for about a year. The first issue of the Taber Times itself was published on 13 May 1911, the date the paper's own published history gives. After several changes of hands, the Times came under the control of Arthur Avery in 1927, and Avery served as both publisher and editor for the next forty years.

The paper's own history records a genuine technological milestone: the issue of 20 January 1955 ran two picture pages that are believed to have been the first offset-printed pages in a newspaper in Western Canada, and perhaps in all of Canada, an experiment the paper credits with setting the stage for the adoption of offset printing in the newspaper business. The paper's own published profile states its aims plainly: to present an accurate and interesting reflection of community affairs and a forum for public opinion, and it reports that market surveys have shown high readership as local residents take an avid interest in the affairs of the community. The same profile records that, over the years, the paper and its staff have won awards for their reporting, editorials, design, photography, columns and general excellence; those are the paper's own claims, presented here as such. In the 1970s the Times, the oldest of the southern Alberta weeklies, itself assembled the regional chain of newspapers that later passed to Hollinger and then to the Thomson Corporation. During Thomson's ownership the Herald in Lethbridge was paired with the Medicine Hat News, the Taber Times chain of weeklies in the nearby suburban and rural communities, and the Lethbridge Sun Times. Thomson sold the Lethbridge-Medicine Hat group, the Times included, to David Radler's Horizon Publications in September 2000, and in 2006 the holdings were reorganised as the Alta Newspaper Group Limited Partnership, in which Vancouver-based Glacier Media took an ownership interest that it later raised to 59 per cent. Alta itself was formed out of a subsidiary of Horizon Publications, the company through which Radler had assembled his Canadian holdings at the end of the 1990s.

Programming and Content

The Times covers Taber town council and the Municipal District of Taber, the Horizon School Division, agriculture and irrigation, minor and school sport, and the community's busy calendar of fundraisers and festivals. Its local reporting in 2026 has included Heather Cameron, the paper's Local Journalism Initiative reporter, whose August 2026 stories covered the Taber Lost Paws Society's fencing fundraiser and the Stewart Genes Scholarship for local students entering health-care studies. School coverage runs from board announcements — the Times carried the Horizon School Division's July 2026 announcement of a new principal for D.A. Ferguson Middle School — to classroom and campus news across the division. Sport is a group strength: Garrett Simmons, a Southern Alberta Newspapers reporter, filed the Times' August 2026 coverage of the Taber Rugby Association's youth camp and its reporting on Raymond's provincial rugby titles, and group photography, such as Justin Seward's July 2026 coverage of two Taber sisters selected for Alberta's under-18 women's football team, appears under the Times masthead. A regular heritage feature, Samantha Johnson's "From the Archives of Western Newspapers," republishes notable items from the region's early press, among them an account of the June 1886 fire that destroyed the six-week-old city of Vancouver. In late summer the paper's pages reflect the district's signature crop, with the return of Taber corn a standing seasonal story, and regional explainers produced for the whole group, such as a May 2026 assessment of Alberta river flows and snowpack, run in the Times alongside the purely local material.

Audience and Reach

The Times serves the town of Taber and the rural communities of the Municipal District of Taber, an irrigation-farming district known across Alberta for its corn and its sugar beets. The paper's own published profile gives a paid weekly circulation of 3,322 copies per issue; that is the publisher's figure, reproduced in business directories, and no more recent audited number is published. Readership is bolstered by the paper's role as the district's newspaper of record for municipal notices, school news and obituaries.

Digital Presence

The Times publishes online at tabertimes.com, where its stories appear alongside material from the other Southern Alberta Newspapers titles, and its reporting is indexed by the standard aggregation services: items under the Taber Times masthead are recorded there from May, June, July and August 2026, confirming the paper's continuing weekly cycle. The group's early newspaper heritage is also preserved digitally; the Peel's Prairie Provinces collection at the University of Alberta holds 122 digitised issues of the predecessor Taber Free Press from 1907 to 1910, and the commercial NewspaperArchive service holds some 1,144 issues of the Taber Times itself, roughly 25,600 pages spanning some twenty-three years of the paper's run.

Ownership and Organisation

The Taber Times is published every Wednesday by the Alta Newspaper Group Limited Partnership. Alta, also styled Alberta Newspaper Group or Southern Alberta Newspapers, is one of the two Canadian newspaper companies associated with David Radler, and Glacier Media holds a majority ownership interest, recorded at 59 per cent. The group's Alberta properties together cover Lethbridge and Medicine Hat and the Municipal District of Taber, Cypress County, the County of Forty Mile No. 8 and Lethbridge County: two dailies, the Lethbridge Herald and the Medicine Hat News; the weeklies at Taber, Coaldale (the Sunny South News, Tuesdays), Vauxhall (the Advance, Thursdays) and Bow Island (the Commentator, Tuesdays); the Lethbridge Sun Times; and the Prairie Post farm publications. Alta has made no major acquisitions since 2006, and as of 2015 the Herald's Lethbridge plant printed the Times among its six newspapers. An Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association media listing named Greg Price as the Times' editor, with the same contact serving the sister Vauxhall Advance; that listing is dated and is given here as a matter of record rather than as the current masthead.

Contact and Availability

The Taber Times publishes in print on Wednesdays and online at tabertimes.com. Business directories list the paper's Taber office telephone as 403-223-2266. Subscriptions, advertising and news tips are handled through the paper's Taber office and the Southern Alberta Newspapers group; the paid print edition is sold by subscription and at local outlets in Taber and the surrounding district.