About The Jasper Local

The Jasper Local

Overview

The Jasper Local is an independent digital news outlet serving Jasper, Alberta, the small mountain town set inside Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies. It covers the life of a community of a few thousand year-round residents whose town exists within one of Canada's most visited national parks: municipal government, Parks Canada decisions, housing, tourism, the environment, schools, arts and sport, together with the outdoor culture that defines the place. Published by Raven Community Media and edited by its founder, Bob Covey, it is Jasper's locally owned source of original reporting, published entirely online through its website and app.

The outlet describes itself as an independent news and lifestyle journal exploring social, health and environmental issues in and around Jasper. Its reporting is unapologetically local. A typical week brings coverage of council budget debates and Parks Canada campground policy alongside stories about ultramarathons on mountain trails, grizzly bear encounters on hiking routes, school playground fundraising and the town's folk music festival. Since July 2024, when a wildfire swept into the townsite and destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses, a large part of its work has been documenting Jasper's long recovery: interim housing, debris removal, rebuilding, insurance and infrastructure questions, and the arguments about how a town inside a national park should prepare for a more fire-prone future.

History

Bob Covey, a journalist who graduated from journalism school in 2002 and specialised in community media, established The Jasper Local in 2013. For its first six years it was a print publication: a twice-monthly alternative newspaper, laid out by an art director and printed at Gazette Press in St. Albert, the press operated by Great West Newspapers. The print paper combined news reporting with features, opinion and the work of Deke, Jasper's editorial cartoonist, who came on board in 2013 after working for three different newsrooms since 1995 and whose cartoons on small-town bureaucracy, park visitors and wildlife became a fixture of the publication.

The print edition eventually went on hiatus. In the spring of 2019 Covey began discussions with Andrea Ziegler, a digital media executive who had led companies including Workopolis and Puretracks and had developed an interest in community media while working at Torstar. Ziegler founded Raven Community Media to build a sustainable digital model for local journalism, and The Jasper Local became its proving ground. On 7 February 2022 the publication relaunched in an all-digital format, delivered through the web and an app built with technology partner Innocode, a Norwegian company whose platform serves community media outlets in the Nordic countries. Ziegler became publisher and Covey continued as editor-in-chief. Going digital allowed stories to be published as they happened rather than on a twice-monthly print cycle.

The relaunch's timing proved significant. When the Jasper wildfire complex forced the evacuation of the town in July 2024 and fire entered the townsite, The Jasper Local was positioned to report the disaster and its aftermath as a digital publication, and recovery coverage — reconstruction progress, housing programmes, funding announcements and the politics of rebuilding — has remained a central thread of its journalism through 2025 and 2026.

Content and Coverage

The Jasper Local's coverage is organised around the institutions and preoccupations of the town. Municipal affairs are a staple: council meetings, budgets, tax questions, paid parking, transit planning and the town plan all receive close, sometimes sceptical attention. Parks Canada, which administers the national park and much of the land around the townsite, is the other dominant institution in its pages, from campground reservation policies and trail management to conservation programmes such as caribou breeding in the Tonquin Valley.

Environment and wildfire coverage runs deep, reflecting the town's setting and recent history. The outlet has reported extensively on headwaters protection, coal mining proposals in Alberta's Eastern Slopes, wildlife management and the science and politics of wildfire readiness. The post-2024 recovery file includes infrastructure repairs, interim housing for displaced residents, government funding commitments and the gradual transition from emergency recovery to normal municipal operations.

Alongside hard news, the publication carries community and lifestyle journalism: school news, arts and music coverage, outdoor sports from trail running to backcountry skiing, local history features drawn from the Jasper Yellowhead Museum and Archives, personal essays and a lively opinion section. Covey writes frequent commentary under his own byline, taking positions on local and provincial questions, and guest contributors and freelance reporters add features and columns. Election coverage is thorough, including candidate questionnaires for municipal and federal contests. Reporting is supported by a Local Journalism Initiative reporter, Peter Shokeir, whose byline appears on much of the outlet's municipal and recovery coverage; the Local Journalism Initiative is a Canadian federal programme that funds reporters in underserved communities.

Audience and Reach

The audience is Jasper itself: the town's permanent residents, its large seasonal workforce, and the wider circle of former residents, second-home owners and park enthusiasts who follow the community from elsewhere. The publication has existed for more than a decade and describes itself as a home for Jasper's conversations. It does not publish audited audience figures; its reach is best understood in community terms, as the outlet of record for a small town whose affairs — a national park gateway with millions of visitors a year — are of interest well beyond its population. Its stories are carried and republished through news aggregation services, extending individual articles to provincial and national readers, and its coverage of the wildfire recovery has been a reference point for outside media following the rebuild.

Digital Presence

The Jasper Local is a digital-only publication. Its website, jasperlocal.com, is updated throughout the week with news, features and opinion, organised into sections — including dedicated categories for outdoor pursuits such as hiking, climbing and fishing — and supported by a searchable archive reaching back to its print-era beginnings in 2013. Its articles also circulate through online news aggregation and e-edition services, which carry its reporting to readers beyond its own site. An accompanying app delivers the same content to mobile readers, and stories are promoted through social media channels. The site carries local advertising, which the publication identifies as its main revenue source, and a support page invites readers to make one-time contributions toward the cost of local reporting, arguing that a small town's advertising market alone cannot sustain the volume of stories Jasper generates. Reader contributions are processed online, with no paywall: the journalism itself remains freely accessible.

Ownership and Organisation

The Jasper Local is published by Raven Community Media, the company founded by publisher Andrea Ziegler to develop digitally sustainable community media. Ziegler, who has built and led digital media businesses for over twenty years, serves as publisher. Bob Covey, who established the publication in 2013, is editor-in-chief and its principal reporter and commentator. The small core team is supplemented by freelance reporters and contributors, a Local Journalism Initiative reporter, and editorial cartoonist Deke. Technology is provided by Innocode as the outlet's platform partner. The publication is independent: it is not part of a newspaper chain and is not owned by any of the large Canadian media groups.

Contact and Availability

The Jasper Local publishes continuously online at jasperlocal.com and through its mobile app, and its full archive is freely searchable on the site. Readers can contact the newsroom through the website, and the publication's support page explains how to contribute financially or advertise. Its office function is centred in Jasper, Alberta, and its coverage area is the Municipality of Jasper and Jasper National Park, with regional reporting extending into the surrounding West Yellowhead region of Alberta.