About Redwater Review

Redwater Review

Overview

The Redwater Review is the community weekly newspaper of Redwater, Alberta, a town in Sturgeon County northeast of Edmonton, in the heart of Alberta's Industrial Heartland. It is a print newspaper, published under the name The Review, and it is a distinct outlet from its better-known neighbour, the Morinville Free Press: the two Sturgeon County weeklies serve different towns, carry different nameplates, and have long been sold to advertisers as a combined buy precisely because they are two papers rather than one. The Review is demonstrably still publishing: Sturgeon Public Schools' communications reporting records a December 2025 news story about the school division that appeared in the Morinville Free Press and the Redwater Review on the same day, and the title is carried in the 2026 edition of Sources' Canadian Media Names & Numbers directory index. The paper belongs to the small Cowley publishing operation documented in Alberta media directories, the same local ownership family as the Morinville Free Press, and like that paper it is print-first, with no verified website of its own — the website address recorded for it in the WorldNM inventory is a hijacked domain with no connection to the newspaper, a point set out in the Digital Presence section below.

History

The documented history of the Redwater Review is a directory and community record rather than a published corporate history, and no founding date for the paper could be verified during the research for this profile; readers should treat any unsourced founding year for the title with caution. What the record does show is a long-established town weekly cited in its own community simply as "The Review": the Wikipedia article on Redwater, citing an August 2012 issue of the paper itself, published by Cowley Newspapers, describes The Review as "a local weekly newspaper that serves Redwater," and that 2012 issue carried the paper's reporting of the town's census population. The publisher behind both the Review and the Morinville Free Press in the directory era was Ed Cowley: a media directory of the Bowes/Great West period listed Cowley as publisher of the Free Press with the Morinville telephone number 780-939-3309, and the same operation used the contact address redwater@shaw.ca for the Redwater paper, indicating a small multi-title business centred on the Sturgeon County area. The same publisher was also listed for the Lamont Farm 'n' Friends, a neighbouring farm publication.

By December 2010 the two county papers were being marketed to advertisers by AdCanada Media as the "Morinville/Redwater Combination (Free Press and Review)," a single advertising buy across the two towns. Journalist Lorraine Poulsen worked at the Redwater Review and the Morinville Free Press before going on to edit the Viking Weekly Review — a small biographical trace, recorded in Alberta weekly-newspaper circles, of the Review's place as a working newsroom within the province's community press and of the staff movement between the two Cowley papers.

Programming and Content

The Review carries the standard mixture of a rural Alberta community weekly for Redwater and its surrounding farm district: town council and Sturgeon County affairs, school news, agricultural and Industrial Heartland industry coverage, community events, sports and the notices that make a county weekly its community's paper of record. The items of its recent content that can be verified from outside the paper itself centre on the local school division. Sturgeon Public Schools' communications reports, which log media coverage of the division, record that a December 2025 news story about the division's partnership with Unplugged Canada appeared in the Redwater Review and the Morinville Free Press on the same day — evidence both that the Review was publishing current local news in December 2025 and that the two papers continue to share some content, as sister papers under common local ownership commonly do, while remaining separate publications for separate towns.

That pattern — shared production, separate papers — is the key to reading the Review's record correctly. The two titles have been paired in advertising sales since at least 2010, their staff have moved between them, and some stories run in both; none of that makes the Review an edition of the Free Press. Redwater's readers receive their own paper, under their own town's name, reporting their own town's institutions, including the Redwater School community within Sturgeon Public Schools and the town services of a small industrial-heartland community shaped by the nearby Sturgeon Refinery and the North West Redwater Partnership upgrader project in the surrounding county.

Audience and Reach

The Review's audience is Redwater itself — a town whose population the paper reported at 2,116 residents in its August 2012 census coverage — and the surrounding Sturgeon County farm and acreage district northeast of Edmonton. The only published circulation figure for the paper comes from AdCanada Media's farm-audience research, a census-based study of rural Alberta readership prepared for farm advertisers, which recorded a footprint circulation of 4,502 for the Redwater Review, against 12,188 for the companion Morinville Free Press. Those figures come from an undated industry study rather than a current audit and describe the paper's reach as measured for agricultural advertisers; they should not be read as a present-day circulation, and no current audited circulation for the Review is published. Read together with the footprint of dwellings and farms in the study, they nonetheless show the paper's distribution extending well beyond the town limits into the surrounding county readership, which is the normal pattern for an Alberta county weekly and the basis on which the combined Morinville/Redwater buy was sold.

Digital Presence

The Redwater Review is, on the available evidence, a print-first newspaper with no verified website of its own. The website address associated with the paper in the WorldNM inventory, cosy-interior.com — the same address erroneously attached to the Morinville Free Press — is wrong and must not be followed: when it was checked on 17 October 2026, that domain served "FENDY188," an Indonesian-language online slot-gambling site with no connection of any kind to Redwater, to Alberta, or to either newspaper. The domain appears to be either an inventory error or a repurposed address, and the website field for this profile should be corrected or removed before publication so that readers are never directed to it. The Review's verifiable public presence is its printed edition, its listing in current media directories — the title appears in the 2026 alphabetical index of Sources' Canadian Media Names & Numbers — and the trail of school-division coverage recorded in its pages. A direct check for any official online presence the paper may have established should be made when this profile is published.

Ownership and Organisation

The Review is an independent local operation rather than a chain title: it does not appear among the community newspapers of Postmedia Network, which owns most of Alberta's former Sun Media weeklies. The fullest ownership record available is the directory-era one: the paper was published by Cowley Newspapers, the imprint on its own 2012 issues, with Ed Cowley listed in media directories as publisher of the companion Morinville Free Press and the contact address redwater@shaw.ca tying the Redwater paper to the same small Sturgeon County-area publishing business, which also produced the Lamont Farm 'n' Friends. The two papers' long-standing joint marketing through AdCanada Media, and their same-day shared stories as recently as December 2025, indicate that the Review and the Free Press continue to be produced in close coordination, most plausibly under common local ownership or a shared production arrangement. The name of the paper's present-day owner or publisher could not be verified from public sources during the preparation of this profile, and it is stated here as an open gap rather than guessed at: the Review is a weekly in current publication, listed in current media directories, and functions as the newspaper of record for Redwater.

Contact and Availability

The Redwater Review is available in print in Redwater and the surrounding Sturgeon County area, published weekly. The email address carried in older directories for the paper, redwater@shaw.ca, dates from the directory era of the Cowley operation and could not be confirmed as current; it is recorded here as a historical contact only. For current contact, the reliable routes are the paper's listing in current Canadian media directories and the printed paper itself. As set out above, the cosy-interior.com address attributed to the paper in some records is an unrelated gambling domain, is not a contact channel for the newspaper, and should be disregarded entirely.