Edmonton’s Street Newspapers – 1994-2024
What you’ll find in this post:
- A brief description of two street newspapers that were created and published in Edmonton between 1994 and 2024.
- A reflection on alternative journalism and what that might mean in this context.
- A reflection on how digital media changes our interaction with the world in this context.
Disclaimer and Positionality:
The content and development of these papers over time is far more complex and interesting than the brief summaries I provide below. Many more people and organizations contributed to the creation and distribution of content for these papers than are listed. I can only encourage you to dig a bit deeper if you’re interested and not let my summary suffice and can only ask the forgiveness of those who played a significant role and are not mentioned.
My own role was minor. I acted as volunteer writer and then board member for Alberta Street News for several years from 2011-2015. In 2021 an article in Taproot about the digitization of Edmonton weeklies See and Vue Weekly inspired me to reach out to the U of A about digitizing Edmonton Street News and Alberta Street News. Linda Dumont and other board members helped me gather as many copies as possible. When I found out that Linda also had many back copies of Spare Change and Our Voice, I gathered her copies and others from former editors and contributors to build an almost complete collection for digitization as well.
Important Links:
- The Alberta Street News website – still running as of 2025 https://www.albertastreetnews.org/
- The Internet Archive of Spare Change, Our Voice, Edmonton Street News, and Alberta Street News, amalgamated under the title Edmonton Street Newspapers https://archive.org/details/alberta-street-news
- Blog posts about the collections from the University of Alberta Library News here and here
- Taproot Publishing wrote about it here Taproot ASN
Spare Change and Our Voice
Spare Change in Edmonton started out as a joint publication with Spare Change in Vancouver. In 1994 the first Edmonton-based issue was printed and distributed by the Bissell Centre in Edmonton as part of their casual employment program. The papers were sold by vendors on the street in Edmonton as a means of income. Content included stories by and about people experiencing homelessness, editorials about poverty, homelessness, and associated social topics such as policing and politics in Edmonton and Alberta. In 1996 the name of the paper changed to Our Voice and continued to be published until 2005. The hard copies of Spare Change and Our Voice have been accepted into the collections of the City of Edmonton Archives.
Edmonton Street News and Alberta Street News
Edmonton Street News started in 2003, with Linda Dumont as publisher. Linda had been a regular contributor to Spare Change and Our Voice since its first publication in 1994. The paper continued in publication, with Linda coordinating everything and a few volunteers writing stories, providing poems and other materials, or designing, until 2024 when Linda passed away. The paper currently (January 2025) is being revived, and publication is continuing with the involvement of Linda’s family. The hard copies of Edmonton Street News and Alberta Street Views have been accepted into the collections of the Alberta Provincial Archives.
Some Reflections
It’s a fallacy to think that journalistic organizations are unbiased, and perhaps more people are beginning to accept this in the current political climate. However, it goes far beyond and much deeper than deliberate biases. Newspapers, television news, and online news are only able to cover a small fraction of the stories that are taking place on any given day. They are not likely to focus on stories that reflect the experiences of a small percentage of the population, and historically the homeless and severely disadvantaged have been a small minority. Newspapers like Spare Change, Our Voice, and Alberta Street News focused on stories that either stemmed from or directly affected members of that community, so their journalism is by nature an alternative to mainstream news organizations. That different viewpoint is critical in allowing the voices of vulnerable citizens to be heard without prejudice.
With print stories in a newspaper, on television, or radio, or online, we are usually removed by time and distance from what we’re reading about, and we accept this abstraction as part of the process. However, print in the digital space incorporates new levels of abstraction.
Think about the way you might buy a copy of Alberta Street News from a vendor selling it on the street corner. You are outside, sharing the same sidewalk and weather as the vendor. You approach while noticing their stance, clothing, and general physical condition. You make eye contact, and go through the mental calculation of how much to pay for the paper (How much change do you have? Is it worth a fiver? What will they do with the money?) You hand money to the vendor, receive the paper, and exchange thanks verbally, knowing that you’ve helped a fellow human being. The paper is then read in the comfort of your home, or in a coffee shop, slowly flipping through the pages. You have already shared a very human interaction with the vendor, and the experience of buying the paper now becomes the context within which you read stories about marginalized people just like them.
Compare this to your experience reading the paper online from the digital archive. All 338 papers are shown as thumbnails, and can be sorted by views, title, or date published. To select an individual paper, you need to click on it, then expand the text to a readable size with another click. To move through the pages, you need to click an arrow or hold the cursor and scroll. How much empathy do you feel for the subjects you’re now reading about?