About Beauce Media

Beauce Media

Overview

Beauce Média — styled Beauce média.ca in its current form — is a French-language weekly newspaper published at Sainte-Marie, in the Nouvelle-Beauce sector of Quebec's Chaudière-Appalaches region. It serves the cluster of municipalities along the upper Chaudière valley north of Saint-Georges, a territory its publisher defines as eighteen communities, including Sainte-Marie itself, Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce, Scott, Saint-Bernard, Saint-Isidore, Vallée-Jonction and Tring-Jonction. The paper is owned by Icimédias inc., the independent Quebec press group formed in November 2017, and it appears in print each week alongside a continuously updated website at beaucemedia.ca.

A note on geography is warranted, because directories have not always been consistent about this title. Beauce Média is sometimes filed under Saint-Georges, the Beauce's largest city, but the paper has never been a Saint-Georges publication: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) records its place of publication as Sainte-Marie throughout its catalogue run, its newsroom and offices are in Sainte-Marie, and its circulation territory is the northern Beauce — the MRC de La Nouvelle-Beauce and neighbouring parishes — rather than the Saint-Georges area. Saint-Georges has its own separate weekly press tradition, represented by L'Éclaireur Progrès. Beauce Média is likewise a distinct title from Édition Beauce, the former Journal de Beauce-Nord whose print edition was closed by TC Media in 2014, and from the digital outlet EnBeauce.com.

History

BAnQ's holdings document Beauce Média as a Sainte-Marie weekly across several decades. The national library's digitized collection holds the title from 1995 to 2017, succeeding an earlier form styled Beauce média, la vallée de la Chaudière, and its issues from the 1990s — dated on Saturdays in the copies preserved from 1995 and 1999 — show a paper already operating at regional scale. In September 1996 the paper relaunched with a radically redesigned square format and layout, an editorial in that issue explaining that the change followed the example of Quebecor's regional newspapers of the 1990s, which situates Beauce Média within Quebecor's community-press network during that decade. By the mid-2010s its issues were dated on Wednesdays: the edition of Wednesday 16 November 2016, in its 36th volume year, printed a distribution figure of 25,121 copies on its front page — the paper's own figure at that date, quoted here as such rather than as an audited total.

The paper's ownership followed the great consolidation and break-up of Quebec's weekly press in the 2010s. As a Quebecor (Sun Media) title, it passed to TC Media on 1 June 2014, when Transcontinental completed its acquisition of Sun Media's 74 Quebec weekly newspapers. It then left the Transcontinental group in the divestiture programme TC announced in April 2017: on 8 November 2017 TC Media sold 21 Quebec publications, Beauce Média among them, to the newly formed Icimédias inc. BAnQ's Bibliographie du Québec records the transition precisely — the successor title Beauce média.ca begins with volume 38, number 44, dated 15 November 2017, published by Icimédias inc., one week after the sale closed. The paper has remained an Icimédias title since, keeping its Sainte-Marie base, its weekly print cycle and its name through the change of ownership.

No founding date for Beauce Média is stated in the governing catalogue sources, and none is asserted here: BAnQ's preserved run begins in 1995 under a predecessor title form, while the volume numbering — in the high thirties by 2017 — points to origins considerably earlier than the digitized collection alone would suggest. What the record supports is a paper with roots of several decades in the Nouvelle-Beauce, publishing continuously through the Quebecor, TC Media and Icimédias eras.

Programming and Content

Beauce Média is a general-interest community weekly, and its content follows the classic structure of the Quebec rural hebdo: municipal council coverage from Sainte-Marie and the surrounding parishes, MRC de La Nouvelle-Beauce affairs, school and health-network news, agriculture and agri-food business in one of Quebec's most intensively farmed regions, community and parish life, culture, sports and obituaries. Its publisher's territory description underlines the local anchoring the group markets across all its titles — detailed knowledge of each market and each community served — and Beauce Média's eighteen-municipality patch gives it a defined beat of small towns and villages where it is the dedicated print news source.

The paper also functions as part of the region's civic infrastructure. It appears alongside the Beauce's other local outlets — EnBeauce.com, L'Éclaireur Progrès, La Voix du Sud and the region's radio stations — in community campaigns such as Moisson Beauce's Guignolée des médias food drive, whose organizers list Beauce Média among the media partners of the drive's 25th edition. Its business directory presence through the Chambre de commerce et d'industrie de Nouvelle-Beauce similarly records it as the Sainte-Marie-based newspaper for the sector, with offices at 1078 boulevard Vachon Nord, suite 707, in Sainte-Marie.

Audience and Reach

The most current reach figures available are the publisher's own, published by Icimédias on its title page for Beauce Média and quoted here as the publisher's claims. Icimédias states that Beauce Média distributes 18,013 copies per week across a territory population of 37,988 — 16,863 copies delivered by mail and 1,150 copies through drop points — figures that describe a free-distribution weekly reaching most households in its patch. For the digital edition, the same publisher page claims 24,227 monthly unique visitors and 72,177 monthly page views on the paper's online platform. These numbers are the publisher's marketing data, not independently audited circulation, and they are presented on that basis.

The historical comparison is instructive: the 25,121-copy distribution the paper printed on its own front page in November 2016 was likewise a publisher-stated figure, and the movement from that number to Icimédias' current 18,013 weekly copies mirrors the contraction experienced by Quebec community weeklies generally over the decade, while still leaving Beauce Média with household-level penetration of its Sainte-Marie-centred territory.

Digital Presence

The paper's digital home is beaucemedia.ca, the address the title has carried since at least the mid-2010s — it is printed on the front page of the November 2016 issue preserved by BAnQ — and the current Beauce média.ca title form adopted at the Icimédias transition builds the web address into the nameplate itself. The site carries the paper's local news for its eighteen-municipality territory in the standard Icimédias platform format, alongside the print edition. Readers and advertisers can also reach the paper through Icimédias' corporate site, icimedias.ca, which maintains a dedicated page for the title with its territory and audience data. A visual check of the live site and current masthead remains part of this profile's publish-stage quality review, in line with the checks applied to its sister titles.

Ownership and Organisation

Beauce Média is published by Icimédias inc., the company formed in November 2017 when Renel Bouchard and Marc-Noël Ouellette acquired the 21 TC Media publications in a single transaction, a deal that made Icimédias, by its own account, the largest independent weekly-press group in Quebec. The group today presents itself as the province's largest independent press group, regrouping 23 local newspapers and multimedia platforms, and has continued to expand, acquiring Cornwall's Seaway News in 2019, L'Écho de Frontenac in 2024 and the Faste Communication agency in February 2025. Within that structure, Beauce Média is the group's Nouvelle-Beauce title, produced from Sainte-Marie, where the Chambre de commerce et d'industrie de Nouvelle-Beauce's current directory lists the paper's office at 1078 boulevard Vachon Nord, suite 707, Sainte-Marie, with the telephone number 418 387-8000.

Contact and Availability

Beauce Média is published weekly in print in the Sainte-Marie and Nouvelle-Beauce area of Chaudière-Appalaches, Quebec, and continuously online. Its website is beaucemedia.ca, and its publisher is Icimédias inc., whose title page for the paper sets out its territory, distribution and advertising information. The paper's office, per the Nouvelle-Beauce chamber of commerce directory, is at 1078 boulevard Vachon Nord, suite 707, Sainte-Marie, Quebec, G6E 1M7, telephone 418 387-8000. Print distribution, per the publisher, is principally by mail to households in its eighteen-municipality territory, supplemented by drop points.