About Le Guide

Le Guide

Overview

Le Guide, published in its current form under the masthead Journal Le Guide and catalogued by Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) as Journal Le guide.com, is a French-language weekly newspaper serving Cowansville and the MRC de Brome-Missisquoi in Quebec's Montérégie–Eastern Townships border country. Published by Icimédias, it is the established community weekly for Cowansville, the MRC's principal town, and covers the surrounding municipalities, including Bromont, Dunham, Bedford and the Lac-Brome area. The paper appears in print each week and online at journalleguide.com, and its death notices are carried on the InMemoriam.ca platform. It remains in active publication: obituaries credited to the Journal Le Guide were published through May and June 2026, and BAnQ's directory of Quebec newspapers lists the title as running from 2011 to the present.

History

The Guide's modern lineage is documented in the legal-deposit record. When BAnQ catalogued the title's current incarnation, it noted that Journal Le guide.com began with volume 36, number 39, dated 15 November 2017 — a volume numbering that reaches back to the early 1980s — and that it succeeded an earlier Journal Le guide. BAnQ's online holdings also list a bilingual ancestor in the same town, Le Guide = The Guide, published in Cowansville from 1974 to 1977, although the record does not establish an unbroken continuity between that 1970s paper and the modern title.

For many years the Cowansville weekly belonged to Groupe Le Canada Français, the Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu publisher of Le Canada Français and a string of Montérégie weeklies. On 3 August 2011, Transcontinental Media acquired the assets of that group — eleven weekly and monthly publications, including Le Guide, whose papers then had a combined weekly circulation of approximately 155,000, with websites that drew some 30,000 unique visitors a week. Under Transcontinental the paper's local site operated as Cowansville.enregion.ca. When Transcontinental reorganized its Quebec weeklies after the Sun Media acquisition, its September 2014 announcement listed Le Guide (Cowansville) among the titles retained in the Montérégie. The decisive change came on 8 November 2017, when TC Media sold 21 publications, Le Guide among them, to Icimédias inc., led by president Renel Bouchard and managing director Marc-Noël Ouellette. BAnQ recorded the paper's new incarnation, under the title Journal Le guide.com and the Icimédias imprint, beginning one week later, with the issue of 15 November 2017.

Programming and Content

The paper's content is the full agenda of Brome-Missisquoi life, as its recent issues deposited at BAnQ show. Municipal affairs dominate: Cowansville council meetings and by-elections — including the March 2024 by-election in the town's district 1 — Bromont's annual budget and tax rates, and the MRC de Brome-Missisquoi's taxation shares and transport by-laws, published in its pages as official public notices. Environment reporting is prominent in a territory of lakes and vineyards, from Cowansville's long debate over motorboats on lac Davignon to the campaign against common reed at lac Selby in Dunham. Community coverage ranges from seniors' theatre in Cowansville to school activities and local sports, including the town's junior hockey games, and the paper carries the classified advertising, the community bulletin board and the obituaries of the region. The table of contents of its September 2024 edition maps the paper's standing sections: news, seniors, drop-off points, culture, sports, games, classifieds, the community bulletin board, public notices and obituaries. Its late-2024 issues show the texture of that coverage: the edition of 27 November 2024 explained how a new provincial formula would raise the MRC's municipalities' share of Quebec sales-tax revenue by an average of just over 40 per cent for 2025, with the village of Brome gaining 77.5 per cent, while the issue of 11 December 2024 led on Bromont's budget passing the 50-million-dollar mark, with tax rates up about 3 per cent, and printed the MRC's formal notice of a new collective-transport by-law. In 2024 its reporting was the work of journalists Xavier Demers and Claude Hébert; Hébert's byline, with an email address at the sister Farnham paper L'Avenir et des Rivières, illustrates how the Guide's newsroom shares resources within Icimédias' Montérégie stable. A June 2024 issue even carried the group's advertisement for a new journalist for the paper, responsible for reporting in both its print and digital content.

Audience and Reach

Le Guide's own masthead in February 2024 reported a print run of 17,152 copies, distributed at that time by Distribution Transcontinental's Publi-sac Estrie and Montérégie divisions — the publisher's own figure, printed in the issue of 28 February 2024. Its readership is the population of Cowansville and the Brome-Missisquoi countryside: a mixed francophone and anglophone territory of small towns, farms, vineyards and lake communities, where the paper serves as the local medium of record for municipal notices, school and community news. The February 2024 masthead placed its office in the middle of that territory, on Cowansville's main street, with office hours every weekday.

Digital Presence

The paper publishes online at journalleguide.com, the address printed in its own pages, where its weekly reporting, classified job listings and a reader newsletter are promoted; its February 2024 issues urged readers to subscribe to its infolettre and carried its employment listings on a dedicated jobs page. Its obituaries appear on InMemoriam.ca, the memorial platform Icimédias acquired in the same 2017 transaction — notices credited to the Journal Le Guide – Cowansville were still appearing there for deaths in May and June 2026, among them residents of Cowansville, Dunham, Brigham, Farnham and Knowlton. BAnQ Numérique holds deposited issues of the current title, running through December 2024 in the copies consulted, and BAnQ's list of Quebec newspapers available online records the Journal Le Guide as available from 2011 to the present.

Ownership and Organisation

Le Guide is published by Icimédias inc., the Brossard-based regional press group headed by its president, Renel Bouchard, with Marc-Noël Ouellette as managing director. The Centre d'études sur les médias at Université Laval counted 22 Icimédias titles in its 2023 survey of the Quebec weekly press, making it the largest group in that market by number of titles. In the paper's February 2024 masthead, Chantal Lévesque was named regional editor, Éric Dupaul was advertising and layout coordinator, Karine Côté was receptionist, and the newsroom consisted of journalists Xavier Demers and Claude Hébert, the latter shared with L'Avenir et des Rivières of Farnham. The group also concluded a multi-year printing and distribution arrangement with Transcontinental when it acquired the titles in 2017, and the February 2024 masthead still showed Distribution Transcontinental handling the paper's Publi-sac distribution. Like its sister papers, the Guide acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada in its masthead. Announcing the 2017 acquisition, Bouchard said the group believed in the future of regional weekly media and was confident that weeklies are critical to the vitality and development of their communities, while Ouellette added that each weekly forms part of its community's identity — its DNA.

Contact and Availability

The paper's office is at 121 rue Principale, local 3, Cowansville, Quebec J2K 1J3, open Monday to Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. according to its 2024 masthead, and it can be reached by telephone at 450 263-5288, with classified advertising handled at 1 866 637-5236; its published newsroom email is redaction@journalleguide.com. Its 2024 masthead set the advertising deadlines at Monday at 11 a.m. for display space and Monday at 9 a.m. for classifieds, ahead of each week's issue. Le Guide appears weekly and is available across the Cowansville area and Brome-Missisquoi, with its reporting also published at journalleguide.com.