About The Casket

The Casket

Overview

The Casket is a weekly newspaper published in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, serving the town of Antigonish and the surrounding county in the province's northeast. Founded in 1852, it is one of the oldest continuously published weekly newspapers in North America, and for generations it functioned as the newspaper of record for Antigonish County and much of eastern Nova Scotia. The paper takes its distinctive name from the casket — the small chest or case in which valuables are kept — and it built its reputation as the community's storehouse of local news, announcements, obituaries and debate.

The Casket is published in tabloid format and appears weekly. It is no longer an independent or church-owned paper: today it belongs to PNI Atlantic News, the Atlantic Canadian division of the Toronto-based Postmedia Network, and its journalism is published on the shared SaltWire platform at saltwire.com alongside the division's other Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island titles. Its coverage centres on Antigonish town and county — municipal affairs, the courts, schools, agriculture, sport and St. Francis Xavier University — within a blend of local reporting and the wider regional and national content carried across the chain's platform.

History

The Casket was first published on June 24, 1852, by John Boyd, making it a contemporary of the town of Antigonish itself, which had taken its modern name only a few years earlier and saw St. Francis Xavier University founded in the following years. From its early decades the paper was closely identified with the Roman Catholic community of eastern Nova Scotia. A 1927 issue carried on its masthead the description "A Catholic Journal" alongside the declaration "Non-Partisan in Politics," and recorded that the paper was published every Thursday morning. The diocesan connection ran deep: for much of its life the paper was owned by the Roman Catholic Church through the Casket Printing and Publishing Company, and its pages documented parish life, diocesan affairs and the Scottish Catholic culture of the region alongside ordinary community news.

The paper passed through the twentieth century under Casket Printing and Publishing, growing into a small publishing and commercial printing operation based in Antigonish. Its staff over the years included Bruce MacKinnon, who worked at the paper in his youth before becoming one of Canada's best-known editorial cartoonists at the Halifax Chronicle Herald.

In July 2012 the paper changed hands in a transaction that ended its church ownership. Brace Capital, the investment firm led by Chronicle Herald owner Sarah Dennis, purchased the assets of Casket Printing & Publishing Company for an undisclosed amount. The deal included a number of commercial printing companies and two weekly newspapers: the Quad County Extra and The Antigonish Casket, as the paper was then styled. Announcing the purchase, Dennis described The Casket as a business of 160 years' standing and "one of the oldest continuous weeklies in North America," and said the buyers were happy to keep "such an important and historic piece of Nova Scotia's history in the hands of an independent Nova Scotia company."

The Chronicle Herald's community papers were folded into the expanded SaltWire Network in 2017, and The Casket became a SaltWire title. The SaltWire years were turbulent ones for the chain as a whole: the Herald's smaller publications had already seen print production consolidated during a period of cost-cutting and a bitter 19-month newsroom strike in 2016–17, and SaltWire itself filed for creditor protection in March 2024 after a lender moved to push it into bankruptcy. In February 2024, as those events unfolded, the Antigonish Heritage Museum launched a free online database of historical Casket issues — the museum holds bound volumes spanning 1890 to 2006 — with curator Dr. Barry MacKenzie noting that the paper was still being published weekly as part of the SaltWire Network.

In August 2024 Postmedia acquired SaltWire's publications, and in the first week of December 2024 it rebranded the Atlantic operation as PNI Atlantic News, restyling its websites and print editions to match the parent company's other newspapers and moving the head office to Toronto. About 30 per cent of SaltWire's staff were laid off around the takeover. The Casket remains listed among PNI Atlantic News' Nova Scotia publications, and it continues to be published from Antigonish under its historic name.

Programming and Content

The Casket's content is the classic mix of a rural county weekly. News coverage follows the town and county councils, the courts, schools and the region's farms and fisheries, while St. Francis Xavier University — one of the town's defining institutions — generates education news, sports coverage and community stories. Signature Antigonish events such as the Highland Games, among the oldest in North America, and the Eastern Nova Scotia Exhibition have long been staples of its pages. Sport, church and parish news, community announcements, classified advertising and an extensive obituaries and death notices section round out the paper; for many families in the county's far-flung settlements, The Casket has historically been the printed record of births, marriages and deaths.

Because the paper now publishes within a chain, its local reporting appears on the SaltWire platform together with provincial, national and international coverage produced elsewhere in the Postmedia network. The paper's own historical archive has also become content in its own right: the Antigonish Heritage Museum's digitization project, launched on Heritage Day, February 19, 2024, is making more than a century of issues searchable online, a resource aimed at genealogists, historians and former residents of the county around the world.

Audience and Reach

The Casket's audience is concentrated in Antigonish County and the surrounding eastern Nova Scotia counties, a largely rural readership, together with the several thousand students and staff of St. Francis Xavier University and a diaspora of former residents who follow news from home. The last widely published circulation figure for the paper is dated: advertising directories in 2012 put its circulation at about 4,101 copies, a figure that predates the SaltWire and Postmedia eras and is best read as a measure of the paper's historic scale rather than its present reach. The museum's description of the paper as the "newspaper of record" for the county and much of eastern Nova Scotia captures the position it occupied for most of its history.

Digital Presence

The Casket maintained its own website at thecasket.ca during the 2010s, where its stories and archives were published under its own branding. Under SaltWire, and now PNI Atlantic News, its journalism is published on the shared saltwire.com platform, where readers find it alongside the group's other Atlantic Canadian titles; the historic building the paper long occupied at 88 College Street in Antigonish is today described as a cultural and community space. Separately, the Antigonish Heritage Museum's online database offers searchable access to the paper's historical issues, built from its collection of bound volumes and microfilm and funded in part by the Department of Canadian Heritage and a provincial tourism digital assistance program.

Ownership and Organisation

The Casket is owned by PNI Atlantic News, the Atlantic division of Postmedia Network, formed in December 2024 from the former SaltWire Network. Its ownership history runs from founder John Boyd to the Casket Printing and Publishing Company — for much of its life an arm of the Roman Catholic Church in eastern Nova Scotia — then to Brace Capital's Brace Publishing, a division of the Chronicle Herald, in 2012. It was subsumed into the Chronicle Herald's SaltWire Network in 2017 and passed to Postmedia when that company acquired SaltWire's publications in August 2024, following SaltWire's creditor-protection filing earlier that year. Editorial and production functions are shared with the wider PNI Atlantic News operation, whose head office moved to Toronto at the December 2024 rebrand, while the paper continues to be identified with its Antigonish base.

Contact and Availability

The Casket is published weekly in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and is available to readers on the SaltWire platform at saltwire.com, where subscription, advertising and contact routes for PNI Atlantic News titles are handled centrally. Historical issues can be consulted free of charge through the Antigonish Heritage Museum's online newspaper database, and on microfilm at the Nova Scotia Archives and St. Francis Xavier University. No public business email address is published for the paper itself.