About Vermilion Standard

Vermilion Standard

Overview

The Vermilion Standard is the community newspaper of Vermilion, a town of just under 4,000 people in east-central Alberta, at the junction of Highway 16, the Yellowhead route, and Highway 41, roughly 60 kilometres west of Lloydminster and 192 kilometres east of Edmonton. Founded in 1909, it is one of the oldest continuously published weeklies in the province. Directory listings sometimes describe the Standard as an independent community weekly, but that is not the case: the paper is a Postmedia Network title, published in tabloid format during its print era, and since February 27, 2023 it has been a digital-only publication — one of twelve Alberta community newspapers whose print editions Postmedia ended on that date. The Standard continues to publish online at vermilionstandard.com, is still carried on Postmedia's list of current brands in the company's 2025 annual report, and remains a member paper of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association. Media-monitoring records show stories sourced to the Vermilion Standard appearing throughout 2026, including items dated in September and October 2026.

History

Vermilion's first newspaper was the Vermilion Signal, founded in 1906 by William Blaisdell Cameron, a survivor of the Frog Lake Massacre of 1885; the Signal suspended operations after a year or two. In 1909, Sextus R. P. Cooper, who had arrived in the Vermilion district in 1907 from Baldur, Manitoba, where he had published another weekly, founded the Vermilion Standard. Cooper operated the Standard until 1953, when he turned it over to his four sons — Ashley, Vernon, Doug and Percy — making the paper a two-generation family business. The Elk Point Historical Society's survey of district weeklies records that the Standard operated continuously for decades under the Coopers, carried news from outlying districts such as Elk Point in its early years (its Elk Point coverage from 1909 to 1928 is excerpted in the society's archives), and had passed out of Cooper family ownership by the time that account was written in the 1990s. The exact date and buyer of the family's sale are not documented in the public sources consulted.

The paper later became part of the community newspaper group that Postmedia assembled, and it was among the more than eighty community newspaper websites Postmedia relaunched with redesigned sites in December 2020. In January 2023, Postmedia announced a transformation plan under which a dozen of its Alberta community titles would move to digital-only publication; the Vermilion Standard was one of the twelve, and its print edition ended with the transition on February 27, 2023. The masthead itself survived: publishing continued on its website without interruption.

Programming and Content

The Standard covers the town of Vermilion and the County of Vermilion River: town and county council, the Vermilion RCMP detachment, agriculture and the region's oil and gas activity, schools, and Lakeland College, the Vermilion institution founded in 1913 as the Vermilion School of Agriculture, one of the province's original agricultural colleges. Sports coverage ranges from local minor and school teams to the college's Rustlers programs, alongside the national and international sports, news and opinion feeds shared across the Postmedia network. In its Cooper-era decades the paper's district coverage reached well beyond the townsite: the Elk Point Historical Society preserves the Standard's Elk Point columns from 1909 to 1928, full of the texture of pioneer community life — a 1917 campaign to connect Elk Point to Vermilion by telephone, Red Cross fundraising lunches for soldiers at the front, and Dominion Day picnics at Lake Whitney. The town the paper served was itself young: Vermilion was incorporated as both a village and a town in 1906, the year its first newspaper appeared, and it rebuilt after a fire on April 10, 1918 destroyed twenty-eight stores and business blocks. The district's agricultural fair, organised by the Vermilion Agricultural Society, also dates to 1906 and remains a fixture of the calendar the Standard covers. An example of the paper's local reporting travelling far beyond the county came in 2019, when the Standard reported how a visiting tourist, Stephen Mills, guessed the combination of a roughly 900-kilogram safe at the Vermilion Heritage Museum that had been locked for some forty years — a story picked up by outlets around the world. Like other Postmedia community sites, the Standard also publishes obituaries, classified advertising and public notices for its district, and its digital pages carry the network's standard sections for news, sports, life, entertainment and opinion.

Audience and Reach

The Standard's audience is the town of Vermilion — population 3,948 in the 2021 census — together with the farming and ranching households of the County of Vermilion River and readers in nearby communities along the Yellowhead corridor. During its print century the paper was the district's paper of record, delivered by subscription and sold locally; since 2023 its reach is entirely digital, through vermilionstandard.com and the referral and social channels of the Postmedia network. No current audited circulation or readership figure for the Standard has been published, and none is claimed here. Its membership in the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association keeps it in front of regional advertisers buying across Alberta's community press.

Digital Presence

The Standard's home is vermilionstandard.com, part of the Postmedia community newspaper platform relaunched in December 2020, when Postmedia announced the redesign of more than eighty community newspaper websites as an investment in local news; the Standard was named in the company's announcement of the relaunched titles. The site is updated on a continuous news cycle rather than a weekly print schedule: monitoring services recorded Vermilion Standard-sourced stories on July 27, 2026 (coverage of the Gordie Howe International Bridge opening), August 15, 2026, September 9, 2026 and October 9, 2026, among others. That flow mixes locally originated Vermilion material with Postmedia News and Canadian Press content shared across the network, the same model used by the company's other digital-only Alberta titles since the February 2023 transition. For readers, the practical effect is that a newspaper founded as a once-a-week print journal in 1909 now publishes daily, while keeping the Vermilion nameplate, web address and local focus it has carried for more than a century.

Ownership and Organisation

The Vermilion Standard is owned by Postmedia Network, Canada's largest newspaper publisher, whose majority shareholder is the U.S.-based Chatham Asset Management. Postmedia lists the Standard among its community newspapers, in tabloid format, and the title appears in the Alberta section of the company's 2025 annual report brand list. The paper sits within Postmedia's community publications division alongside the company's other Alberta weeklies and former weeklies, including the Airdrie Echo, Hanna Herald, Pincher Creek Echo, Cold Lake Sun, Cochrane Times, Whitecourt Star and Drayton Valley Western Review — most of which made the same February 2023 move to digital-only publication. Production, technology and national advertising are handled centrally by Postmedia, while the Standard's identity, web address and local coverage remain distinct to Vermilion.

Contact and Availability

The Vermilion Standard is available online at vermilionstandard.com, where readers can browse current news, sports, obituaries and classifieds for the Vermilion district. It no longer publishes a print edition, print having ended on February 27, 2023. Enquiries for the paper are handled through the contact channels published on its website and through Postmedia's community newspaper offices; the paper is also listed, with its website address, in the current member directory of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association.