About Spruce Grove Examiner

Spruce Grove Examiner

Overview

The Spruce Grove Examiner is a community weekly newspaper serving Spruce Grove, Alberta, a fast-growing city in Parkland County immediately west of Edmonton, together with the surrounding communities of the tri-area region in the Edmonton Metropolitan Region. It is a local-news title in the classic Alberta weekly mould: city council and county government, RCMP and court news, school and minor-hockey coverage, business openings, obituaries and community events, published for a readership that lives in Spruce Grove but is closely tied to the wider Edmonton commuter belt.

The Examiner is owned by Postmedia Network, which acquired it as part of the purchase of Sun Media's English-language newspapers completed in April 2015. Directory records that list the paper as a Great West Media title are incorrect: the Examiner has never belonged to the St. Albert-based Great West chain in its modern history, and its documented ownership line runs from its independent founders through Quebecor's Sun Media operation to Postmedia. Together with its sister paper, the Stony Plain Reporter, it forms the long-standing Reporter/Examiner operation that covers the neighbouring municipalities of Spruce Grove and Stony Plain and the Parkland County countryside between and around them.

The Examiner was not among the twelve Alberta community newspapers that Postmedia converted to digital-only publication in February 2023, and it continues to publish as a weekly newspaper with a full news website. Its website was carrying current locally reported stories in 2026, including an RCMP arrest story indexed in February 2026, and the paper remains listed as a member publication of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association.

History

The Examiner already existed as a small, struggling weekly when its modern history began in the mid-1970s, and its best-documented founding story is an unusual one. Randy Lennon, who went on to become a prominent Alberta media entrepreneur, has recounted in interviews and in a 2025 podcast appearance that he first published a newspaper as a high school student at M.E. LaZerte High School in north Edmonton, producing a school and community paper called The Colloquium in the early 1970s. At about eighteen he was hired by the Abby Glen Property Corporation as its publications manager, producing monthly community papers for three Edmonton shopping centres, selling the advertising and writing the stories himself.

Through that work Lennon met Terry Clements, a Barrhead newspaper owner who ran the West Web Press printing operation in Edmonton. Clements first offered the teenager the editorship of his Barrhead Leader; Lennon declined because he did not want to move to Barrhead. A few months later Clements came back with a different proposition: the Spruce Grove Examiner, a fledgling paper printed at his plant, had fallen behind on its printing bill and was going out of business. Clements proposed that the two buy it together. In Lennon's own telling, the business was valued at $10,000; the nineteen-year-old raised his $5,000 half-share by selling his car, and the partners paid him $1,200 a month plus a car allowance to run the paper. The often-repeated shorthand that Lennon "co-founded" the Examiner at nineteen refers to this rescue and relaunch of the existing title under new ownership.

The partnership prospered. By the time Lennon was twenty-two, the company had added the West Edmonton Examiner, the North Edmonton Examiner and the Commerce News, a chain of four weekly newspapers serving the Edmonton market, as Lennon's biography at Meridian Merchant Capital Canada summarises it. Lennon then made the decision he has since described with self-deprecating honesty: still set on his childhood ambition to be a police officer, he left the newspaper business in his early twenties to join the County of Parkland police force. Clements bought out his share — cheaply, Lennon admits — continued to build the company, and a few years later sold the Examiner business to Quebecor for what Lennon describes as a lot of money.

Under Quebecor, the Examiner titles sat within the Sun Media stable. Sun Media's published list of its Alberta weekly newspapers included the Spruce Grove Examiner, and when Postmedia bought Sun Media's English-language publications — a transaction cleared by the Competition Bureau on 25 March 2015 and completed the following month — the Examiner passed to Postmedia along with the rest of the chain. In January 2023 Postmedia announced that twelve of its Alberta community papers would end print publication on 27 February 2023 and continue digital-only; the Examiner was not one of the twelve, and it has continued as a weekly newspaper since.

Programming and Content

The Examiner's content is deliberately and almost exclusively local. Its news pages follow Spruce Grove City Council — a council led in 2026 by Mayor Jeff Acker — and Parkland County council, whose meetings and elections the paper has covered for decades; an October 2021 election story on county voters re-electing their entire council, written by reporter Crystal St. Pierre, ran in both the Examiner and the Stony Plain Reporter and illustrates the shared regional coverage the two papers produce. Election coverage is a long-standing staple: during the 2021 municipal campaign the paper ran a weekly series introducing candidates and interviewed county mayoral candidates, a service election-watchers in Edmonton noted at the time.

Crime and public-safety reporting drawn from RCMP releases and local incidents is a regular component, as demonstrated by the February 2026 story of an arrest following a homicide in nearby St. Albert that the paper carried under its own banner. Around the hard news sit the standard elements of an Alberta weekly: school news, community sports with an emphasis on minor hockey and school teams, business and development news in one of Alberta's fastest-growing cities, entertainment listings, a letters page, obituaries and classified advertising. The paper has also carried a shared editorial cartoon produced for the Reporter/Examiner by Stony Plain cartoonist Ralph Hagen, whose weekly page-six cartoons for the two papers dated back to 1976 and became a fixture from 1991 onward, as the Reporter documented in a 2015 profile of the artist.

Audience and Reach

The Examiner's audience is the population of Spruce Grove and the surrounding Parkland County acreage and subdivision communities — a market defined by rapid suburban growth on Edmonton's western edge and by a large commuter population that works in the capital but lives, shops, enrols its children in school and plays its sports in the tri-area. Wikipedia's profile of the city describes the Examiner as a weekly delivered to homes across the city and holding almost exclusively local news and events, a distribution model aimed at total household coverage rather than paid circulation alone.

Because the paper shares reporting with the Stony Plain Reporter, its effective news reach extends across the whole Parkland tri-area, and its stories circulate further through Postmedia's digital network, newspaper aggregators and monitoring services that index its website. The Examiner's longevity under successive national owners, and its survival of the 2023 round of Postmedia print closures that ended print editions at twelve sister titles, indicate how the publisher continues to position it: as the dedicated local title for a growing suburban market rather than a candidate for merger into the Edmonton dailies.

Digital Presence

The Examiner's digital home is its website at sprucegroveexaminer.com, which operates on Postmedia's publishing platform and is updated between weekly print editions with breaking local news, RCMP releases, council decisions and sports results. Stories from the site are routinely picked up by news aggregation and monitoring services, which is how items such as its February 2026 RCMP arrest report surface in national news feeds, and its reporters' work is archived on journalist-tracking services that list Examiner stories alongside those of its sister Reporter. The website carries the paper's obituaries, classifieds and local business content as well as its news, and functions as the always-on edition of a paper whose print rhythm remains weekly. Readers should note that the site is the Postmedia-operated publication for the Spruce Grove market; similarly named "Edmonton Examiner" titles from Randy Lennon's 1970s chain are historical and are not the current paper.

Ownership and Organisation

The Spruce Grove Examiner is owned by Postmedia Network Canada Corp. and published within Postmedia's community newspaper division. Its ownership history, documented from founder accounts and industry records, runs from the Lennon–Clements partnership of the mid-1970s, through Terry Clements' subsequent sale of the Examiner chain to Quebecor, into Sun Media, and finally to Postmedia on the completion of the Sun Media acquisition in April 2015. Listings that attribute the paper to Great West Media are outdated or mistaken, and the inventory note to that effect should not be relied on.

Organisationally, the Examiner has for many years been run together with the Stony Plain Reporter as a combined Reporter/Examiner operation covering the two neighbouring municipalities; a 2021 profile of cartoonist Ralph Hagen placed the shared newspaper office at 420 King Street in Spruce Grove and named James Miller as a former manager of both papers. Editorial staff cover both communities, with stories bylined in one paper frequently appearing in the other, while advertising and production are handled within Postmedia's regional community-paper structure. The paper is a member of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association.

Contact and Availability

The Spruce Grove Examiner publishes weekly for Spruce Grove and the surrounding Parkland County area of Alberta, Canada. Its website, sprucegroveexaminer.com, is the main point of access for current news, obituaries, classifieds and subscription and advertising information, and the paper can also be followed through Postmedia's community newspaper network. News tips, letters and advertising enquiries are directed through the contact options published on the website. The paper's print edition continues to be produced for its home market; readers outside the delivery area can read the full local report online.