Sun turns 135 with a legacy of keeping the community linked in

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This article was published 19/01/2017 (3424 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The halls of The Brandon Sun’s downtown office building serve as a shrine to the community newspaper’s 135-year history.

The first edition of The Brandon Sun rolled off the printing press on Jan. 19, 1882 — 135 years ago today, kicking off the newspaper’s legacy of keeping the community linked in.

More specifically, linked into the local events and issues that strengthen a community and the insight and nuances that hold local decision-makers to account like no other news source can.

The Tuesday, June 6, 1944, edition, proudly displayed in The Brandon Sun’s lunchroom, features various pertinent news items coming out the Second World War battlefront in Normandy, but the newspaper’s leadership still found a sliver of Page 1 space to highlight the City of Brandon’s latest revenue report.

It’s in the local news — sharing the stories of Westman — that has earned The Sun enough community support to help it become the city’s longest-lasting publication.

Brandon University archivist Christy Henry is a big fan of the printed word, and with The Brandon Sun the area’s longest-lasting publication, its massive archives are the first place she goes for local historic insights.

The older editions are more akin to confetti than newspaper, with a collection of editions from 1900 to 1917 the university gave Manitoba to microfilm and put online destroyed during the process.

Although the physical print editions were not built to last, with the chemical composition in the paper breaking down over time, microfilm has a shelf life of about 500 years.

There’s a parallel to be made here, with publisher Jim Mihaly pointing to The Brandon Sun’s adaptation to a changing business climate as key to its continued longevity in our digital age.

Improvements will be made to The Sun’s website within the next few months that will make it easier to read and subscribe to the digital editions.

“Our paper product is a priority for us, and it will be for the future, but online is certainly a component of our businesses and we need to make sure our readers aren’t frustrated with it and it’s user-friendly,” Mihaly explained.

“It gives us more opportunity in areas where we don’t deliver, and can’t deliver just because of where houses are located.”

The Brandon Sun’s local focus will remain central in whatever efforts push the news organization further into the digital age, Mihaly affirmed.

Local has always been the newspaper’s strength and focus, Henry said, noting that regardless of the editorial room of the day, “it speaks to things that people were interested in at the time and concerned with.”

The first person who set out to share Brandon’s local stories in this manner was Will J. White, who at the age of 31 travelled by rail, steamboat and foot to reach Brandon from Exeter, Ont., in order to establish the city’s first newspaper.

In Exeter, he’d met with Thomas Greenway, the future premier of Manitoba, who told White there was promise out west.

Like The Brandon Sun’s current newsroom, constantly out to get the scoop before deadline, White found himself racing against the clock to get a newspaper set up in what would later be known as the Wheat City.

Word has spread of someone trying to beat him to the punch by opening up their own newspaper, so he took a faster, but more difficult, route to Brandon that included a 75-mile walk between Portage la Prairie and Grand Valley, where a ferry carried him across the river to Brandon, which would only be chartered as a city a few months after the debut edition rolled off the presses on Jan. 19, 1882.

When White first arrived, Brandon was nothing more than a few buildings and a city of tents at that time, but White held out hope that it would soon progress into a city that could support his dream of publishing a newspaper.

His optimism paid off, with Brandon growing rapidly over the subsequent years; a story captured every day in the publication White founded.

White stuck around for about 14 years, minus a brief interruption as he sought additional financial backing. During that time, the daily publication was suspended and The Sun eventually became a weekly. White eventually gained control of the paper again until 1897.

But it wasn’t until 1905 that J.B. Whitehead stepped up to the plate, kicking off three generations of the Whitehead family legacy as owners of The Brandon Sun.

In its 135 years, the paper has changed hands a number of times, most recently when former owner Thomson Newspapers Ltd. sold the newspaper to FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership, alongside the Winnipeg Free Press, in 2001.

Many competitors have come and gone, with the Brandon Mail, Brandon Blade, Times, Vindicator, Independent, Optimist and other newspapers opening up shop and closing.

Despite having outlasted many competitors over the years, Mihaly noted that a bright history does not necessarily ensure a bright future, and that one must never rest on their laurels.

With 42 full-time staff members, five part-timers and 175 people in distribution, he points to a wealth of people devoted to the news organization’s continued success.

The recently renewed Westman This Week free regional weekly publication is one such recent success story, he said. Like The Brandon Sun, its success is closely tied to the locally relevant stories that fill its pages.

“We’ll continue to be providing local news that they can’t get anywhere else, and that hasn’t changed over the years,” he said. “We need to continue that and listen to our readers; be engaged in our readers.”

» tclarke@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @TylerClarkeMB