About Meadow Lake Northern Pride

Meadow Lake Northern Pride

Overview

The Meadow Lake Northern Pride is a weekly community newspaper based in Meadow Lake, a small city in northwest Saskatchewan, and published by Northern Pride Publications. Reference sources describe it as a weekly newspaper serving Meadow Lake and the wider northwest region of the province — a large rural area of farms, forestry communities, First Nations and Métis settlements for which Meadow Lake is the principal service centre. The Northern Pride is the surviving newspaper of record in its community: the older Meadow Lake Progress, published from 1931 to 2013, ceased publication in 2013, leaving the Northern Pride as the city's weekly paper. The newspaper is verifiably in current production — stories sourced to the Northern Pride were appearing in news monitoring services in October 2026, covering Métis Nation–Saskatchewan programming and a local athlete's professional signing — and it is listed as a current member publication in the AdWest/AdCanada community newspaper network and in the Saskatchewan Media Directory. The paper operates from an office on Centre Street in downtown Meadow Lake. One important caution applies to its online identity: the northernpride.ca domain recorded for the paper in older listings no longer belongs to the newspaper, as detailed in the Digital Presence section below; the paper's current website, per the 2025 Saskatchewan Media Directory, is northernprideml.com.

History

Meadow Lake's newspaper history long predates the Northern Pride. The Meadow Lake Progress served the community from 1931 until 2013, an eighty-two-year run that ended when the paper ceased publication; the Progress appears on Sun Media's list of closed titles. The Northern Pride established itself as the community's other weekly voice and, after 2013, as its only one. No founding year for the Northern Pride is stated in the provincial media directory, the paper's own materials available to this profile, or other sources consulted, and this profile makes no claim about the year it was established. What the record does show is a paper embedded in the civic life of a young city: Meadow Lake was incorporated as a village in 1931 and as a town in 1936, and it became one of Saskatchewan's newest cities in 2009. The Northern Pride's reporter Phil Ambroziak appears as the paper's representative in the City of Meadow Lake's council minutes — listed among attending media in February 2024 — and bylined Northern Pride reporting was still being picked up by monitoring services in 2026. The Meadow Lake Tribal Council, the regional First Nations government headquartered in the city, has reproduced Northern Pride pages in its own newsletter, reflecting the paper's role as a shared record for both the city and the surrounding Indigenous communities. Northern Pride Publications Ltd is listed in the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce's Indigenous Business Directory as a majority Indigenous-owned business, a self-declaration the directory notes it does not independently verify.

Programming and Content

The Northern Pride covers the full round of a northwest Saskatchewan service centre. Municipal coverage includes Meadow Lake city council, where the paper sits in the media gallery, and the rural municipalities and towns of the surrounding district. Indigenous affairs are a significant and ongoing beat, reflecting the paper's readership: in October 2026, monitoring services carried a Northern Pride story on Métis Nation–Saskatchewan adding Beauval to its Ma Faamii network, and the paper's pages have been reprinted by the Meadow Lake Tribal Council for its member nations. Sports coverage mixes local leagues with the achievements of area athletes wherever they go — an August 2026 Northern Pride story covered a blind golf tournament at the Meadow Lake Golf Club, and an October 2026 story followed Meadow Lake athlete Pearson signing professionally with the On Athletics Club. The northwest economy — agriculture, the forest industry that anchors Meadow Lake, tourism around the nearby provincial park, and northern business development — supplies further subject matter, alongside schools, health, court and community event coverage and the classified and display advertising of local businesses. In a region where the nearest daily newspapers are hours away in Saskatoon and Prince Albert, the Northern Pride's reporting is frequently the first and only written account of northwest events.

Audience and Reach

The Northern Pride's audience is Meadow Lake itself and the dispersed population of northwest Saskatchewan that looks to the city for shopping, services, health care and schooling. That readership includes the city's residents, farmers and ranchers in the rural municipalities, forestry workers, and the members of the First Nations of the Meadow Lake Tribal Council and Métis communities across the northwest — a composition reflected in the paper's coverage balance between civic news and Indigenous affairs. As the community's only surviving newspaper since the Meadow Lake Progress closed in 2013, the Northern Pride holds a unique position: for many northwest stories it is the source other media and monitoring services quote, which is how its reporting surfaces in provincial and national news databases. The paper sells advertising as part of the AdWest/AdCanada network, which places it in front of regional and national advertisers buying Saskatchewan community newspapers, and it is listed in the Saskatchewan Media Directory used by governments and organisations to reach provincial media. No independently audited circulation figure for the paper was found in the sources consulted, and none is asserted here; its reach is best understood geographically — a weekly paper of record for a large, thinly populated region that no other print publication covers as its home territory.

Digital Presence

The Northern Pride's digital presence requires a correction that readers and researchers should note. The domain northernpride.ca, which circulates in directories as the paper's website, no longer serves the newspaper: when checked in October 2026, that address displayed an online casino affiliate site, evidence that the domain has lapsed and been taken over by unrelated operators. It should not be cited or linked as the newspaper's home. The paper's actual website, as recorded in the 2025 Saskatchewan Media Directory, is northernprideml.com. The Northern Pride's journalism also circulates digitally through news monitoring and aggregation services, which carried its October 2026 stories on Métis programming and local sport, and journalist Phil Ambroziak's Northern Pride work is indexed on Muck Rack, the media database that tracks reporters' published output. The combination — a functioning masthead website recorded by the provincial directory, current stories moving through monitoring channels, and network advertising listings — confirms an operating digital operation, even though the loss of the paper's original .ca domain is a genuine practical problem for readers searching for it by name. Anyone contacting the paper should use the telephone numbers, postal address or email addresses published in the Saskatchewan Media Directory rather than the repurposed domain.

Ownership and Organisation

The Meadow Lake Northern Pride is published by Northern Pride Publications, an independent local company based in Meadow Lake; the paper is not part of the Postmedia, Glacier Media or Black Press chains that own most Saskatchewan community newspapers. Northern Pride Publications Ltd is listed in the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce's Indigenous Business Directory, where businesses self-declare their ownership status; the company is listed as a majority Indigenous-owned business, and the Chamber notes that it does not verify the eligibility of businesses in the directory, so the listing is reported here as the company's own declaration. The paper's reporting is led in practice by journalist Phil Ambroziak, whose byline dominates its coverage in monitoring records, who represents the paper at Meadow Lake city council, and whose work is profiled on Muck Rack as Northern Pride reporting extending over many years. The organisation is the lean structure typical of rural weeklies: a small staff at the Centre Street office handling reporting, advertising sales and production, with dedicated published email addresses for news (pride.news@sasktel.net) and advertising (pride.sales@sasktel.net) indicating separate editorial and sales functions. The company's membership in the AdWest advertising network and its listing in the provincial media directory place it within Saskatchewan's recognised community newspaper industry.

Contact and Availability

The Meadow Lake Northern Pride is published by Northern Pride Publications at 219 Centre Street, Box 2049, Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, S9X 1Z4, according to the 2025 Saskatchewan Media Directory. The paper's telephone number is (306) 236-5353. Its published email addresses are northern.pride@sasktel.net for general contact, pride.news@sasktel.net for news, and pride.sales@sasktel.net for advertising. The paper's current website is northernprideml.com, as listed in the provincial media directory; the older northernpride.ca address no longer belongs to the newspaper and, as of October 2026, displayed an unrelated online casino site, so it should not be used. The Northern Pride publishes weekly and serves Meadow Lake and northwest Saskatchewan. News tips, advertising inquiries and subscription questions are handled through the Centre Street office using the contacts above, which the paper maintains in the Saskatchewan Media Directory for exactly that purpose.