About Le Placoteux

Le Placoteux

Overview

Le Placoteux is a French-language community weekly newspaper published in Saint-Pascal, Quebec. It serves the Kamouraska and L'Islet regional county municipalities, the stretch of the south shore of the St. Lawrence River known as the Côte-du-Sud, in the Bas-Saint-Laurent administrative region. The paper bills itself, in the catalogue record of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), as "l'hebdomadaire de la Côte-du-Sud" — the weekly of the South Shore — and its website presents it as the news source for the Kamouraska and L'Islet sectors, covering local news, sports and cultural life. It is one of the small independent community papers that form the backbone of local information in rural Quebec, and it is the journal of record for public notices across much of its territory.

History

Le Placoteux is a long-established paper, although no founding announcement survives in the public sources consulted for this profile. BAnQ's holdings document its modern run: the issues catalogued by BAnQ Numérique carry volume 39 in November 2016 and volume 41 at the start of 2018, a numbering sequence that points back to a start in the late 1970s. The paper's existence as a community institution is independently attested for the early 1980s: Marcel Thiboutot, who founded the community paper L'Écho d'en Haut in Saint-Pamphile, recalled in a 2023 interview that during his years teaching in Saint-Pascal he had come to know "le journal communautaire Le Placoteux" and had seen the sense of belonging such a paper could create — an experience that inspired his own foundation. Along with L'Attisée of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Le Placoteux was one of the Côte-du-Sud community papers that a generation of local-press founders took as a reference point.

Over the following decades the paper remained rooted in Saint-Pascal while serving a territory that extends well beyond its home town. Its annual tourism supplement, the Cahier du tourisme, has been published since 2003 according to the Bibliographie du Québec, succeeding an earlier tourism publication titled Kamouraska-L'Islet. In 2009 the paper moved early into digital publishing for a rural weekly, launching an Internet portal that a regional showcase of innovative projects described that year as the first daily news portal for Kamouraska and L'Islet, designed to put citizens at the centre of the news by letting them contribute to and comment on it. BAnQ's digital collection holds the paper's print issues from 2013 onward.

Programming and Content

Le Placoteux reports on the municipal and community life of the Kamouraska and L'Islet territories: town and village councils, the two regional county municipalities, schools and the Cégep de La Pocatière, local businesses, agriculture and the biofood sector, community organizations, sports and cultural events. Its archived and indexed coverage ranges from school events such as the Secondaire en spectacle finals at the École polyvalente La Pocatière and the Cégep de La Pocatière's open house, to federal funding announcements for Kamouraska manufacturers and the concerts and shows staged at La Pocatière's Salle André-Gagnon. Community organizations across the territory treat it as their bulletin board: the annual reports of bodies such as the Centre d'action bénévole and the mental-health organization La Traversée record articles published in Le Placoteux as part of their public outreach, and a Kamouraska mushroom-growing association directs its readers to the paper's reporting on its annual meeting. It carries the region's vital community information, including parish and community announcements of the kind visible throughout its archived issues — its pages have carried, for example, the Holy Week schedules of the parishes of the whole Côte-du-Sud.

A distinctive feature of the paper is its heritage coverage. The historian Yves Hébert, identified by the media-monitoring service Muck Rack as a Le Placoteux journalist, has contributed a long-running body of historical columns on the Côte-du-Sud: parish origins in his "Aux origines de…" series, the region's manors and old houses, the era of the wooden schooners of Kamouraska, rum-running during Prohibition, the Taché family of surveyors and cartographers, and the geological curiosities of the Kamouraska hills known as cabourons. These columns give the weekly an archival, memory-keeping role alongside its news function.

The paper also performs a formal legal function. Municipalities across the MRC de Kamouraska publish their public notices in its pages: the regional county municipality's notice for its 2026 council calendar, issued in December 2025, states that the public notice would be published in Le Placoteux on behalf of the towns of Saint-Pascal and La Pocatière and of every municipality in the MRC. In March 2026 the council of Saint-Roch-des-Aulnaies, in the neighbouring L'Islet territory, likewise directed that a public call for tenders be published in "un journal hebdomadaire régional, le Placoteux de Saint-Pascal."

Audience and Reach

The paper's audience is the population of the Kamouraska and L'Islet RCMs — a largely rural, francophone territory of small towns and villages strung along the St. Lawrence shore and through the Appalachian foothills behind it, including La Pocatière, Saint-Pascal, Kamouraska, Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pocatière, Saint-Alexandre, Saint-Pacôme, Rivière-Ouelle, Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Saint-Pamphile and Saint-Roch-des-Aulnaies. Its role as the designated newspaper for official public notices across the MRC de Kamouraska gives it a reach into every municipality of that territory. No audited circulation figure for Le Placoteux is published in the sources consulted, and the paper's influence is better measured by its institutional position — as the community paper of reference for local governments, community organizations and residents of the Côte-du-Sud — than by any print-run number.

Digital Presence

The paper's website, leplacoteux.com, carries its news, sports and cultural coverage for the Kamouraska and L'Islet sectors and serves as the online face of the print weekly. The paper's commitment to digital publishing dates to 2009, when its Internet portal was presented as the first daily news portal for its territory. Journalists' monitoring services index the site's content, and BAnQ Numérique preserves digitized issues of the print paper from 2013 onward, including the 2016 to 2018 volumes. A snapshot of the paper's work dating from 2013, when its staff produced the Kamouraska–L'Islet chamber of commerce magazine, names Bruno Lacroix in the writing role, Édith Lévesque in advertising, and Ginette Lavoie, Manon Brousseau and Marjorie Ouellet in layout and production — the small-team structure typical of a community weekly.

Ownership and Organisation

Le Placoteux is published in Saint-Pascal under its own name: BAnQ's catalogue records list the publisher of record simply as "Le Placoteux" of Saint-Pascal, and peer accounts describe it as a community newspaper rather than a title of one of the province's large publishing chains. It operates as an independent local paper, produced by a small team combining editorial, advertising and production roles, and it has remained in Saint-Pascal throughout its documented history. The imprint address recorded by the Bibliographie du Québec in the early 2000s was 491, avenue D'Anjou, C.P. 490, Saint-Pascal, Quebec G0L 3Y0.

Contact and Availability

Le Placoteux is published weekly in Saint-Pascal, Quebec, and serves the Kamouraska and L'Islet territories of the Côte-du-Sud, in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region. It can be read online at leplacoteux.com. Readers should note that the paper's territory is the Côte-du-Sud of Bas-Saint-Laurent — not the Gaspésie, a separate region further east, with which the paper is sometimes incorrectly associated in directory listings. Current office and subscription details should be confirmed on the paper's website, as its historic imprint address dates from the early 2000s.