About Prince Rupert Northern View

Prince Rupert Northern View

Overview

The Northern View is a weekly community newspaper serving Prince Rupert, the port city of 12,300 people (2021 census) on Kaien Island on British Columbia's North Coast. Founded by Black Press in 2006, it became the city's only newspaper in 2010, when its publisher bought the rival Prince Rupert Daily News and closed it days later. The View appears in print on Thursdays — editions dated October 9, December 4 and December 18, 2025, are preserved in the publisher's digital archive — and online at thenorthernview.com. That website is shared: the same domain is also the online home of the Haida Gwaii Observer, a separate weekly masthead serving the Haida Gwaii archipelago across the Hecate Strait, so the site carries two distinct community newspapers under one Black Press platform (see Digital Presence). The Northern View is produced from offices at 21-342 3rd Ave W in Prince Rupert, with regional editor Thom Barker overseeing editorial content for Black Press titles in northwest British Columbia. Melissa Ash was the paper's publisher in 2024. The paper is a member of the National NewsMedia Council.

History

Black Press founded The Northern View in 2006 as a local weekly for Prince Rupert, launching it the same year as the Northern Connector, a regional weekly covering the Prince Rupert, Kitimat and Terrace areas. In its early years the View described itself on its masthead as "a politically independent community newspaper" and a division of Black Press Group Ltd., published every Wednesday at 225 Third Street in Prince Rupert. Its founding placed it in direct competition with the Prince Rupert Daily News, the city's daily since 1911. That contest ended in July 2010, when Black Press purchased a block of Glacier Media's British Columbia papers — a deal Glacier would only make as a group sale — and acquired the Daily News along with them. Black Press closed the Daily News within days, on July 16, 2010, together with the Nelson Daily News and two weeklies; the company's chief operating officer, Rick O'Connor, said the closed papers had lost $1 million in the previous year. The closures left the four-year-old Northern View as Prince Rupert's sole newspaper, a position it has held since. The paper later moved its publication day from Wednesday to Thursday and its office to 3rd Avenue West, while retaining the same Prince Rupert phone number, 250-624-8088, it listed in its earliest mastheads. In April 2024 the View reported that it had been nominated for general excellence in the Ma Murray community newspaper awards, and that its Local Journalism Initiative reporter Seth Forward had been honoured with a nomination for business writing for his three-part series on how cruise ships would affect Prince Rupert's future.

Programming and Content

The Northern View covers the working life of a port city: Prince Rupert city council, the Port of Prince Rupert and its expansion, the commercial fishery, BC Ferries and Alaska Marine Highway connections, health care, schools and the courts. Its December 2025 editions reported, for example, on council's decision at its November 24 meeting to waive the professional business licence fee for individual physicians to support doctor recruitment and retention — the kind of granular municipal coverage that is the paper's staple. School and community life fill out the edition: the paper's community events guide lists performances such as the Charles Hays Secondary School theatre production at the Lester Centre of the Arts, and readers are invited to submit event details two weeks in advance. Opinion pages carry editorials, letters and syndicated and regional columns, including commentary by regional editor Thom Barker. Regional coverage extends beyond the city: a December 18, 2025 edition carried detailed reporting on the North Coast Protection Declaration signed on November 5, 2025, and the position of Haida Nation president Jason Alsop — coverage reflecting the View's North Coast brief and its shared platform with the Haida Gwaii Observer. Advertising, classifieds and public notices complete the weekly package.

Audience and Reach

The View's audience is Prince Rupert and its surrounding coastal communities: a census agglomeration of 13,442 people in 2021, of whom roughly 40 per cent identified as Indigenous in the wider agglomeration, with the city serving as the ferry, rail and air gateway for Haida Gwaii, the Alaska panhandle and the Inside Passage. Since 2010 the paper has been the only locally produced newspaper in the city, following the closure of the Daily News. Through its shared website, its reach extends across the Hecate Strait to Haida Gwaii readers of the Observer. As part of Black Press Media, the View sits within a group the company describes as publishing 150 daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and websites with a print reach of more than 4.5 million readers across Canada and the United States, and its journalists' work is distributed across the group's northwest British Columbia titles, including the Terrace Standard, the Kitimat Northern Sentinel and the Smithers Interior News.

Digital Presence

The Northern View publishes online at thenorthernview.com, a Black Press platform site that functions as the shared digital home of the group's North Coast weeklies. Alongside The Northern View's own Prince Rupert coverage, the site carries the Haida Gwaii Observer — a genuinely distinct publication, not a section brand of the View. The Observer is a weekly newspaper for the Haida Gwaii archipelago founded in 1969 as the Queen Charlotte Islands Observer by Doug and Mabel Leach, who started it in the living room of their Tlell home; the Leaches sold it in 1985 to Jeff and Dianne King, who ran it for 29 years before selling to Black Press in 2014. Black Press publishes the Observer's reporting under its own masthead within the same website, and journalists' work appears across both titles — reporter Rod Link's stories, for instance, have been featured in both the Haida Gwaii Observer and the Prince Rupert Northern View. Complete print editions of the View, including its December 2025 issues, are preserved in the publisher's digital pages archive, confirming the paper's continuing weekly production schedule.

Ownership and Organisation

The Northern View has been a Black Press title since its founding in 2006. Black Press was founded in 1975 by David H. Black with the purchase of the Williams Lake Tribune and grew into one of North America's largest community newspaper companies. The group filed for protection under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act on January 15, 2024; its sale to Canso Investment Counsel, Deans Knight Capital Management and Carpenter Media Group was completed on March 25, 2024, and it emerged from CCAA protection Canadian-controlled under chief executive officer Glenn Rogers, with David Black retiring. In Prince Rupert the paper operates from 21-342 3rd Ave W. Its October 2025 masthead lists Thom Barker as regional editor, Joe Griffith as regional general manager and Terry St. Pierre responsible for distribution in British Columbia's northwest. Melissa Ash was identified as the paper's publisher in 2024. The View is a member of the National NewsMedia Council, the self-regulatory body for Canada's newspaper industry, and prints the council's complaints process in its pages.

Contact and Availability

The Northern View is published weekly, on Thursdays, in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, from 21-342 3rd Ave W, Prince Rupert, B.C., and can be reached by phone at 250-624-8088. Readers can contact the publisher at publisher@thenorthernview.com, the editor at editor@thenorthernview.com, advertising at advertising@thenorthernview.com and circulation at circulation@thenorthernview.com; community event listings should be submitted to the publisher's email two weeks in advance. The paper is mailed under Canadian Publications Mail Product Agreement No. 477761. The current edition and continuing coverage are available at thenorthernview.com, which also hosts the Haida Gwaii Observer's reporting for readers on the archipelago.