The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
It's the end of an era and the start of something new. For the first time in our nearly 60-year history, The Reminder is no longer "serving Flin Flon and district daily," but three times a week. It's a time of mixed feelings. A number of our readers welcome the conversion to a tri-weekly. Some felt that the amount of news coming out of the district simply doesn't warrant a daily publication. Others wanted larger papers with more local content, both of which this new format will deliver. But others are disappointed, if not saddened. The Reminder is one of the very few small-town daily newspapers on the continent. The daily news style has long been a part of Flin Flon life. Oldtimers will recall that at one time our fair city even had two daily papers, The Flin Flon Daily Reminder and the Flin Flon Daily Miner. When news happened, it showed up on your doorstep the very next day. As staff writer, I see both sides of the coin. On the one hand, I certainly like the idea of having more time to work on articles and follow up leads. I'm also a fan of bigger pages, as our unique 14" by 9" "comic book style" often meddled with plans to squeeze in all the stories and photos we would have liked. However I, like many of you, loved the immediacy of the daily newspaper. I always took pride in the fact that the public didn't have to wait long to get the goods on various happenings. There have even been times over the years when we beat, at least by one day, the gargantuan Winnipeg papers to some hot stories. I'm going to miss that. Yet at the end of the day, Flin Flon must still be considered fortunate. Many communities of our size and larger Ð Swan River, Dauphin, La Ronge and Nipawin among them Ð have only a weekly newspaper. Our neighbours in The Pas get their news twice a week. Thompson, a city with more than double our population, seems to have the only other tri-weekly in the vast northern region of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The Reminder has evolved plenty of times over the years. What started out out as a series of text-only pages stapled together has grown into one of the most successful, circulation wise, publications in the North. We've also kept up with the technological times, as evidenced by our web site and e-mail subscription availability. Our changeover to a three-day-a-week paper is merely the latest shift. A part of our culture has undoubtedly been altered, but change, as they say, is not always a bad thing.
