About Spiritwood Herald

Spiritwood Herald

Overview

The Spiritwood Herald is a weekly community newspaper serving Spiritwood and the lake country of northern Saskatchewan, around Spiritwood, Shell Lake and Chitek Lake. It is a distinct masthead with its own nameplate, its own website and its own defined territory, but it is produced alongside its sister paper, the Shellbrook Chronicle: the Herald's printed masthead states plainly that it is "Published At The Shellbrook Office Every Friday Morning," and the June 2025 Saskatchewan Media Directory carries the two papers as one combined listing, "The Shellbrook Chronicle & Spiritwood Herald," under the Shellbrook address. The Herald's masthead defines its territory as eleven communities — Spiritwood, Shell Lake, Leoville, Chitek Lake, Mildred, Rabbit Lake, Medstead, Mayfair, Bapaume, Belbutte and Glaslyn — a district of farms, villages and resort lakes roughly half an hour north of Shellbrook. The Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan's library includes the combined Chronicle and Herald in its list of the province's current weekly newspapers, and a Lions Clubs district publication of March 2026 credited material to a Spiritwood Herald reporter, evidence of the paper's reporting continuing into 2026.

History

The Herald is a long-established prairie title. Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online, the University of Saskatchewan's digitisation project for the province's historic press, holds a Spiritwood Herald issue dated 17 March 1944, placing the paper in print during the Second World War, and the project's listings count more than one hundred digitised Spiritwood issues. The paper's modern mastheads carry the imprint of Pepperfram Limited Publications, the Shellbrook-based publishing division it shares with the Chronicle, and for many years the two papers have been produced as a pair from the one office: the Herald keeps its own name, its own community list and its own reporting for the Spiritwood district while sharing the Chronicle's publisher, production staff, office and Friday publication day. That arrangement reflects the economics of Saskatchewan's community press, in which a single small newsroom sustains two local mastheads for two neighbouring districts. The Herald's back issues, like the Chronicle's, are used by genealogists and local historians, and surviving copies circulate in reproduced form in community histories of the Spiritwood and Shell Lake area.

Programming and Content

The Herald covers the civic and social life of the Spiritwood district. Its pages carry town and rural-municipality council news, school reporting, farm and agriculture items, sports, and the health-region coverage that matters to a district served from Prince Albert: a June 2016 issue, for example, carried the Prince Albert Parkland Health District's meeting highlights, the kind of regional health-board reporting small papers provide their readers. Church service times for the district's congregations — Lutheran, United, Anglican, Pentecostal, Catholic, Mennonite and others across Spiritwood, Shell Lake, Glaslyn, Medstead and Belbutte — have been a standing feature of the paper, as have community notices for events such as Shell Lake's Hey Days celebrations. The lake country's seasonal rhythm shapes the paper: summer brings resort-village news from Shell Lake and Chitek Lake, regattas, ball tournaments and homecomings, while the school year brings the district's school sports and activities. Obituaries, in-memoriam notices, classifieds and letters to the editor round out the paper. Like most prairie weeklies, the Herald mixes its district reporting with syndicated provincial and national commentary, so a single issue can move from Spiritwood-area news to debates over federal policy and Senate reform. The masthead's letters policy asks writers to sign their letters and provide contact information, and reserves the right to edit for length. Local correspondents and submitted reports from the smaller villages — Leoville, Rabbit Lake, Mildred, Mayfair, Bapaume — give the Herald coverage of communities that no other news outlet reaches.

Audience and Reach

The Herald's readers are the residents of Spiritwood and the surrounding farm and lake district, including the resort communities whose populations swell in summer. It is a paid weekly, delivered by subscription and sold locally. AdCanada's 2019 network figures, published through the Saskatchewan Weekly Newspapers Association, listed the Herald's footprint circulation at 2,632 copies — a dated industry figure rather than a current audit, but a fair indication of scale for a paper serving a town of well under a thousand people and a dispersed rural district. The shared Chronicle and Herald operation is listed as a Saskatchewan news outlet in media databases such as Prowly's Saskatchewan outlet rankings. For the Spiritwood district the Herald is the local paper of record: municipal notices, school news and the social record of the community appear in its pages and largely nowhere else, which is the traditional role of the Saskatchewan weekly in the districts between the province's cities.

Digital Presence

The Herald publishes online at spiritwoodherald.com, its own domain, printed on its masthead; the Saskatchewan Media Directory lists the Chronicle and Herald websites together as the two addresses of the combined Shellbrook operation. The June 2025 directory gives the operation's news contact an address on the SaskToday provincial news platform alongside its Shellbrook editorial addresses, matching the pattern of other Saskatchewan weeklies whose reporting also surfaces through that service. The paper's older issues have an additional digital presence in the Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online collection, where its wartime-era issues can be read free of charge, and reproduced pages from more recent issues appear in community publications and histories for the Spiritwood and Shell Lake district.

Ownership and Organisation

The Herald is published by the same Shellbrook operation as the Shellbrook Chronicle. Its masthead identifies it as a division of Pepperfram Limited Publications, with C. J. Pepper as publisher, and it is produced at the Shellbrook office, Box 10, Shellbrook, sharing the Chronicle's telephone and fax numbers. The two papers are even distributed under the same Canada Post publications mail registration, No. 07621, which is printed on the Herald's masthead as well as the Chronicle's. The 2016 masthead names the paper's own district reporter, Dave Hyndman, reachable on a Spiritwood exchange, alongside the shared office team: Madeleine Wrigley in advertising sales, Kathleen Nording and Patt Ganton in composition and pagination, and Cheryl Mason in bookkeeping and reception. By June 2025 the Saskatchewan Media Directory's combined entry named Azure McGonigle as the operation's news contact. No purchase of the Herald or the Chronicle by a national or regional chain is recorded in the directories and association sources consulted for this profile; the pair present as a small, locally based, two-masthead publisher. The papers belong to the world of the Saskatchewan Weekly Newspapers Association, the provincial association of community papers founded in 1919, and the Herald shares the Chronicle's role as a vehicle for local advertising and for the public and municipal notices of its district.

Contact and Availability

The Spiritwood Herald is produced at 46 Main Street, Box 10, Shellbrook, Saskatchewan S0J 2E0 — the Shellbrook office named on its masthead — with telephone (306) 747-2442 and fax (306) 747-3000. Editorial and advertising for the combined operation are handled through the addresses published in the Saskatchewan Media Directory, chnews@sbchron.com for editorial and chads@sbchron.com for advertising; the Herald's own district reporter has been listed on a Spiritwood number, (306) 883-2398, on the paper's masthead. The masthead lists office hours of Monday to Thursday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Friday from 8 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., with an advertising deadline of Mondays at 5 p.m. The Herald is published every Friday morning and is available by subscription and in the Spiritwood district, and online at spiritwoodherald.com.