The Strathcona Standard

2026-01-05

The Strathcona Standard is now live with a website, and later this spring, you can expect to see it in print around Campbell River. 

A new print newspaper? In this day and age? 

That’s right, and it’s so crazy it just might work.

Soon you will be holding in your hands the first edition of what will become a pillar of the Campbell River community. We also plan to grow to serve communities in the Strathcona region, including Gold River, Sayward, Tahsis, Zeballos, and everywhere in between. 

But a print newspaper? Aren’t they a dying breed? 

They are, indeed. People are reading and consuming more information via the written word than ever before, but they are mainly consuming “snack size” bits of information electronically via social media. Newspapers as we remember them, as the first place people used to look for local information, have fallen behind electronic mediums. Traditional newspapers continue to shrink and close around the world. 

Way back in 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay about the beginning of this phenomenon, as the rapid spread of Internet access made it cheap and easy for just about anyone to share information on a large scale. One of his key points was that “content is king” — this has remained an important maxim for the entire evolution of the Internet up to this point and as we enter an era of AI-generated content, it’s more relevant than ever.

We are saturated with information. We must navigate an ocean of clickbait, anonymous Reddit posts, and dubious Wikipedia edits to find even the most basic answer to a simple question. Even worse, there are financial incentives for people to create and dump virtual garbage into the electronic ocean. Ad click farmers use AI to generate servers full of irrelevant and duplicated information while training bots to click those links for them, generating an automated revenue loop.

It’s an electronic version of the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902. French colonists in Hanoi, Vietnam built an extensive underground sewer system to modernize the city, but the pipes quickly became a highway and habitat for rats. Their numbers became such a problem administrators offered bounties for every rat tail, but the rat population became even worse after the bounty program started. Administrators soon realized people were farming rats for their tails to collect the bounty, and were allowing tailless rats to reproduce so they could generate new income with every litter.

Likewise, there are attractive financial rewards and few downsides from Internet “rat farming” — deliberately spreading misinformation and clickbait for financial gain — and for a regular person looking for the facts, it’s become harder than ever to find a trustworthy news source. It’s no wonder traditional publications are losing their audience. 

There is some good news: publications focusing on unique, local news content and reaching neglected demographics are thriving. We see an appetite in Campbell River and beyond for local coverage about sports, civic politics, industries and businesses powering our economy, and the issues which directly affect the daily lives of people who live here. We also want to share a diversity of views that represent our community and encourage conversations, not tell our readers what to think.

We want to have the opposite effect of social media, which separates people into different siloes of information, sorting them into smaller and smaller groups based on demographics and interests, all in the service of targeted advertising. It encourages tribalism and discourages diversity of thought and opinion. We want to bring different voices together in the broader service of the entire community, and welcome a diversity of views in our news.

We are confident a community newspaper is still the best way to accomplish these goals, assisted by modern technology and the endless possibilities of the Internet.

We will publish a print product that you can read during your lunch break or morning coffee, and use to cut out pictures and stories about friends and family to stick on your fridge. The Standard will also be a website and an app you can check for timely updates.

The need for quality local news coverage is greater than ever and we want to serve our community by meeting that need. We believe there is an appetite for something new and innovative in Campbell River, and we invite the community to help set a new standard. 

While we prepare for our print launch, please reach out with any questions or comments to grant.warkentin@standardnews.ca