About Wetaskiwin Times

Wetaskiwin Times

Overview

The Wetaskiwin Times is the community newspaper of Wetaskiwin, a small city in central Alberta roughly 70 kilometres south of Edmonton. It covers the city and the surrounding County of Wetaskiwin, and directories also describe its coverage area as including the nearby town of Millet and the surrounding area. The Times is one of two local newspapers serving the community, alongside the Pipestone Flyer, in a local media market that also includes a Wetaskiwin-licensed radio station, CKJR, which broadcasts a sports format from studios in Edmonton. The Times publishes local news, council coverage, courts and police reporting, business news, sports and community features in print and online at wetaskiwintimes.com.

Although the outlet is sometimes described in listings as an independent weekly, its ownership record tells a different story. The Wetaskiwin Times was part of Sun Media's group of Alberta weekly newspapers and passed to Postmedia Network when Postmedia acquired Sun Media's English-language newspapers in a transaction that closed on April 13, 2015. It remains a Postmedia community newspaper today, and its reporting continues to appear through 2025 and 2026.

History

The Times is one of Alberta's older community newspapers. The University of Alberta Library's Peel's Prairie Provinces collection records the Wetaskiwin Times as beginning in 1901, and holds 1,287 digitized issues from 1901 to 1933; individual early issues, including one from November 24, 1921, are also preserved through the Internet Archive. A surviving issue dated Thursday, December 10, 1925 — then in its twenty-fifth volume, with Y. C. French named as publisher — shows the paper already well established in the town's early decades, carrying municipal district notices, court reporting, farm auction advertisements and Canadian Press wire stories about provincial affairs of the day, including Edmonton's celebrated "newspaper war" between rival dailies.

The Peel collection's bibliographic record traces the title's later path: the paper continued under the shortened name Times through runs from 1958 to 1966 and from 1968 to 1979, and in July 1983 the Times merged with the News-Advertiser to form the Wetaskiwin Times Advertiser. Media directories, including the Canadian Media Names & Numbers index, still list the paper under that longer merged name, while the paper itself publishes today under the Wetaskiwin Times name and website.

By the early 2010s the Times was one of the Alberta weeklies in the Sun Media chain — Sun Media's published roster of Alberta weekly newspapers listed the Wetaskiwin Times alongside titles such as the Whitecourt Star, the Sherwood Park News and the Vermilion Standard — and it moved with that chain to Postmedia in April 2015. In December 2020, Postmedia included The Wetaskiwin Times in its launch of more than 80 redesigned community newspaper websites, an investment the company promoted as part of its local news strategy. When Postmedia moved twelve of its Alberta community papers to digital-only publication in a transition completed on February 27, 2023, the Wetaskiwin Times was not among them; the title converted in that round in the Wetaskiwin area was the separate Leduc-Wetaskiwin County Market publication, a distinct Postmedia title serving the Leduc and Wetaskiwin counties.

Programming and Content

The Times' editorial mix is the standard diet of a central Alberta community weekly, anchored in municipal government. Its reporters cover Wetaskiwin city council in detail: the paper reported council's approval of the city's 2026 operating and capital budgets — a combined total of about $53.8 million — including a 3.87 per cent tax increase trimmed from the 4.35 per cent originally proposed, along with the service-level debates behind the numbers, from recreation centre hours to library funding. It also followed the running story of Mayor Joe Branco, reporting that council had set conditions for the mayor's return to City Hall while declining to say publicly what those conditions were.

Beyond council, the paper covers courts and policing — including an Alberta RCMP report on a pedestrian killed on a Wetaskiwin roadway in July 2026 — local business, such as the opening of a new children's clothing and lifestyle store in the Wetaskiwin Mall, and regional politics, profiling candidates in the Wetaskiwin area during the 2025 federal election campaign. Sport is a substantial part of the mix: the paper covers the NASCAR Canada Series weekend at Edmonton International Raceway, which is located in Wetaskiwin, including the 2026 NAPA 300 race meeting, with its reporters photographing and reporting the races — Christina Max's photo of Kevin Lacroix's victory lap after the Dorman Products 150 accompanied the paper's coverage of the series' 2026 Wetaskiwin stop. Reporter Christina Max has been a regular byline on the paper's local coverage through 2025 and 2026.

Audience and Reach

The Times serves readers in the city of Wetaskiwin, the town of Millet and the rural County of Wetaskiwin, an agricultural and energy-service region in central Alberta within commuting distance of Edmonton; its coverage also reaches toward the Maskwacis First Nations communities south of the city, whose residents appear regularly in its police and community reporting. Its audience is the community audience typical of a Postmedia Alberta weekly: residents following city and county councils, school and community news, local sport and the obituaries, classifieds and announcements that bind a small market together. Wetaskiwin is a two-paper market, with the Times sharing local coverage duties with the Pipestone Flyer, which is published from Millet and serves as the County of Wetaskiwin's official weekly newspaper, while the Times is the city-based title. No current audited circulation figure for the paper was published in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here.

Digital Presence

The paper's digital home is wetaskiwintimes.com, published on Postmedia's community newspaper platform, which the company relaunched across its community titles in December 2020. Stories from the site are syndicated and indexed across news aggregation services — journalist-tracking services maintain author pages for its reporters built entirely from Times stories — and the paper's local reporting is routinely picked up by monitoring services tracking Wetaskiwin city council and regional news, which is how its council, court and sports coverage reaches readers well beyond its home market. The Times also maintains the social media presence typical of Postmedia's community titles.

Ownership and Organisation

The Wetaskiwin Times is owned by Postmedia Network, Canada's largest newspaper publisher, which operates more than 130 print and digital news titles across the country. The paper was part of Sun Media Corporation's Alberta weekly group before Quebecor Media sold Sun Media's English-language newspapers and digital properties — a $316-million transaction covering some 175 publications, announced in October 2014 — to Postmedia; the sale was approved by the federal Competition Bureau on March 25, 2015 and closed on April 13, 2015. Approximately two-thirds of Postmedia's equity is held by the American hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. Day-to-day, the paper operates as part of Postmedia's Alberta community newspaper group, with local reporting produced in Wetaskiwin — Christina Max is among the reporters bylined on its 2025-26 coverage — supported by the chain's shared production, design and digital operations.

Contact and Availability

The Wetaskiwin Times publishes online at wetaskiwintimes.com, where readers can find its current local news, sports and community coverage and information on subscriptions and advertising. The paper's print edition continues to serve Wetaskiwin, Millet and the surrounding county area, in a publishing tradition that stretches back to the Thursday weeklies preserved from the 1920s in the University of Alberta's Peel collection.