About West Nipissing Tribune

West Nipissing Tribune

Overview

The West Nipissing Tribune is a bilingual community weekly newspaper published in Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, serving the Municipality of West Nipissing. It publishes today under the combined name Tribune: West Nipissing This Week / La Voix du Nipissing Ouest — "The Voice of West Nipissing" — in English and French. That bilingual character is the paper's defining feature and reflects its community: according to the 2021 census figures summarized for the municipality, 56.2 percent of West Nipissing residents have French as their mother tongue, against 38.0 percent for English. The Tribune describes itself, in its own words, as "your bilingual source for local news and information in Sturgeon Falls, Verner, Cache Bay, Field and area for over 50 years." The Ontario Community Newspapers Association (OCNA) lists the paper — under Sturgeon Falls, West Nipissing Tribune — with a circulation of 1,013 and no publishing group. In print, the paper has been known for a distinctive physical format: as the community-storytelling project The Tale of a Town described it, it is an independently owned community newspaper that is "flipped" — English on one side, French on the other — so that a reader turns the paper over to read the other language.

History

The paper was previously called The Sturgeon Falls Tribune, taking its earlier name from the town at the western end of Lake Nipissing's north shore, midway between the cities of North Bay and Sudbury. Sturgeon Falls grew up with the railway, lumbering and pulp and paper; the municipality around it, West Nipissing, was created on January 1, 1999, through the amalgamation of seventeen and a half former towns, villages, townships and unorganized communities, and the paper's current name reflects that wider municipality.

By around 1990 the Tribune was part of Laurentian Newspapers, a northern Ontario publishing group whose other publications were in Thunder Bay, Nipigon, Terrace Bay–Schreiber and Parry Sound. Trade-press coverage of that period, concerning cuts to federal postal subsidies, identified Isabel Mosseler as the Tribune's general manager and reported that the paper had a mail circulation of more than 930, noting that, sitting midway between North Bay and Sudbury, it had to compete with the Southam-owned North Bay Nugget and the Thomson-owned Sudbury Star. Government planning processes of the era likewise treated the Tribune as the paper of record for the area: Ontario's Marten River Provincial Park management plan recorded that public notices were placed in the Sturgeon Falls Tribune alongside the Nugget. The paper has since returned to independent ownership, as The Tale of a Town recorded, while Mosseler's byline has continued to appear in its pages in recent years.

Programming and Content

The Tribune covers West Nipissing in both official languages, often publishing the same story in English and French editions of its website. Municipal government is a central beat: its reporters have covered council's deliberations over the redevelopment of the old mill site in Sturgeon Falls, PFAS testing at the town water treatment plant, the municipality's official plan review, and the February 2026 council meeting at which the Fierté Nipissing Ouest (West Nipissing Pride) committee presented its plans and met disappointment over waning municipal support. In October 2026 the paper reported on the two candidates' debates held at Marcel Noël Hall in Sturgeon Falls ahead of municipal voting.

Community life fills the rest of the paper: the West Nipissing Food Bank's spring food drive, which drew students from both École secondaire catholique Franco-Cité and the École secondaire publique Nipissing Ouest to collect at the Metro and No Frills stores, and its autumn "Une canne ça dépanne" (a can helps out) food collection; a $2,000 donation by the Club Richelieu of Sturgeon Falls to the West Nipissing Community Health Centre's youth garden program; the funding and approval of a new pavilion and gazebo at Cache Bay; the unveiling of a fifth wooden carving by the Sturgeon Falls Beautification committee; a local artisanal soda venture, Jester's Wonder Emporium; and the River & Sky music festival at Fisher's Paradise in Field, a summer meeting place for the Sudbury and North Bay arts communities. The paper also reported the Tim Hortons Smile Cookie campaign's local results — $34,427 raised for Intégration communautaire de Nipissing Ouest, surpassing the previous year's $30,714. Safety and education news also feature: after a series of incidents forced an emergency lockdown at a West Nipissing high school, reporter Suzanne Gammon's investigation for the Tribune followed the police and school-board response for the students of Northern Secondary School (of the Near North District School Board) and the École secondaire publique Nipissing Ouest (of the Conseil scolaire public du Nord-est de l'Ontario). Obituaries and community announcements are a staple, and the paper marks events such as Small Business Week / Semaine de la petite entreprise, which it covered in 2026. On the mill site story, its reporting tracked the finding that parts of the former pulp and paper site require further environmental study before redevelopment can proceed.

The Tribune's newsroom in recent years has included reporters Christian Gammon-Roy and Isabel Mosseler, and Suzanne Gammon, whose byline carries the initials IJL – Réseau.Presse: she has reported for the paper under the Local Journalism Initiative (Initiative de journalisme local), the federal program that places journalists in underserved communities and that, for French-language papers, works with Réseau.Presse, the national network of French-language newspapers in minority communities, founded in 1976 as the Association de la presse francophone. Through that network, member papers also draw on Francopresse, Réseau.Presse's national news service and digital medium covering the Canadian francophonie — official languages, education, federal politics, immigration and minority affairs — supplementing the Tribune's own local reporting with coverage of the wider French-speaking Canada to which its readers belong.

Audience and Reach

The Tribune's audience is the roughly fourteen and a half thousand residents of West Nipissing — 14,583 in the 2021 census — in Sturgeon Falls, Verner, Cache Bay, Field, Crystal Falls, Garden Village and the rural area between them. OCNA lists its circulation at 1,013 copies, and its bilingual format is aimed at a municipality where French is the majority mother tongue but where municipal business, schooling and commerce are conducted in both languages. It shares the territory with the daily North Bay Nugget and the Sudbury francophone weekly Le Voyageur, but it is the only newspaper based in West Nipissing itself.

Digital Presence

The Tribune publishes online at westnipissing.com, where stories appear in English and French under the masthead West Nipissing This Week / La Voix du Nipissing Ouest, with digital subscriptions offering access to the paper's archive. Muck Rack maintains a verified profile of the paper — listed as Sturgeon Falls, West Nipissing Tribune — describing it as a local newspaper in English and French and indexing its current stories and journalists.

Ownership and Organisation

The Tribune is independently owned, having earlier in its history — around 1990 — been operated by the Laurentian Newspapers group. It is published from Sturgeon Falls by a small local staff; its recent bylines include Christian Gammon-Roy, Suzanne Gammon and Isabel Mosseler, the latter a figure associated with the paper since at least her tenure as its general manager around 1990. Its participation in the Local Journalism Initiative through Réseau.Presse connects the paper to the wider francophone press network outside Quebec.

Contact and Availability

The West Nipissing Tribune is published weekly in Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, in print and online at westnipissing.com, in English and French.