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As Newspapers Shutter in Newfoundland, a Student Publication Steps Up

Memorial University’s Muse is attracting readers on and off campus

Local papers from every corner of Newfoundland and Labrador have folded over the years: the Charter in Placentia, the Packet in Clarenville, the Coaster in Harbour Breton—the list goes on. In 2017, many of the province’s remaining papers were purchased by Nova Scotian publishing company SaltWire Network Inc., including its last remaining daily newspaper, the Telegram. SaltWire entered creditor protection in 2024 shortly before being acquired by American-owned media conglomerate Postmedia. That same month, the Telegram shifted from daily to weekly distribution, and Postmedia announced layoffs of 30 percent of the paper’s staff. In 2023, independent paper Wreckhouse Press, based on the west coast of the island, won gold at the Atlantic Journalism Awards for its reporting on Hurricane Fiona. Ten months later, it published its final issue.

Establishment networks, like the CBC, NTV, and VOCM, and online outlets, like The Independent and allNewfoundlandLabrador, keep the news ships sailing across broadcast, radio, and digital. But St. John’s, the province’s capital, has not been immune to the bleed, seeing the closure of alternative outlets like the Scope, which folded in 2013, and the Overcast, which had a run from 2014 to 2019.

In January, in its seventy-fifth year, Memorial University of Newfoundland’s student paper the Muse released its first print issue in nearly a decade. The one-off issue is a celebration not only of the history of student journalism at Canada’s easternmost university, the paper’s editor-in-chief John Harris tells me, but of its recent resurgence as a source for news both on campus and across the city of St. John’s. In an industry defined by decline, the Muse has found room to grow.

A student-run paper at a university without a journalism school, the Muse is not built to compete in the marketplace. But with a modern approach to a twenty-first-century problem, it has begun to fill the........

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