2/2 Personally, much of what I've achieved in my life traces its roots back to the things I learned after I started the Kanata Kourier. Thank you to everyone who supported a kid with a dream in 1982 and who then kept that dream alive for 35 years. pic.twitter.com/1Nf2Zxcf7m
— Alex Munter (@AlexMunter) November 27, 2017
Susan Krashinsky Robertson reports in the Globe and Mail:
It felt like a death in the family, of an elderly relative he’d spent time with in childhood.
That’s how Alex Munter describes hearing that the newspaper he founded in his parents’ basement 35 years ago will print its final pages next month.
Last week’s deal between Postmedia Network Canada Corp. and Torstar Corp. to swap 41 papers, and their decision to close most of them, means that many communities are saying goodbye to their own publications – some more than a century old. The Kanata Kourier-Standard is one of them, and while not as aged, the paper serving the Ottawa suburb has a unique history.
Far from the whisky-soaked stereotype of the newspaperman, Mr. Munter started the Kanata Kourier before he could legally drink.
In 1982, 14-year-old Alex Munter secured startup money from his parents and printed his first, eight-page issue of the Kanata Kourier.
It was 1982, he was 14 years old and he commandeered the family Ping-Pong table to lay out the pages.
…
Marianne Wilkinson, now an Ottawa city councillor representing Kanata North – and the first mayor of the former City of Kanata – says she has fielded calls from citizens in tears over the paper’s closure. Ms. Wilkinson wrote for the Standard, the paper that later merged with the Kourier, beginning in 1969, just before her political career started.