Newspapers

How do you and your family find out what’s going on in your community and the world?

Before there was social media or TV or even radio, we had newspapers created by some pretty colourful characters. Sometimes those reporters and editors made governments so mad, like the publishers of Quebec’s Le Canadien, they got thrown in jail.

Sometimes they did new and courageous things, like the unstoppable reporter Kit Coleman (special thanks to Barbara Freeman for her help with this story).

Early Canadian newspapers weren’t just in English or French. A few were in Indigenous languages like the Chinook jargon. Many were published in languages migrants to Canada brought with them — see if you can figure out which one we made up in this issue’s History Mystery.