The owner of two local television stations in Lloydminster closed them on Tuesday, abruptly ending the work of 19 employees and ending more than 60 years of local transmission.
Stingray Group, a media conglomerate with several dozen radio and television stations throughout the country, announced the closure of CKSA-TV and CITL-TV at a staff meeting on May 13. A former employee who lost his work on Tuesday on social networks that there was no advanced notice of closures. The stations closed that day, denying workers the opportunity to send a farewell transmission.
CKSA began transmitting in 1960, while Citl was launched in 1976. Both were affiliated for larger means, including CBC, Global and CTV.
Steve Jones, president of Stingray Radio, said that the financial situation of the points of sale had deteriorated for years and became especially serious after the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It was an absolutely agonizing decision,” he said. “The fragmentation of audiences on different digital and transmission platforms, and far from air television, has been an important factor. The migration of some advertisers to the digital has also been a factor.”
According to Jones, stations revenues decreased by more than 50 percent in the last six years.
Jones said that Stingray spent months trying to find a buyer for the stations and that the regional manager of the company for Alberta spoke with the mayor of Lloydminster about the closure.
But Mayor Gerald Aalbers played that statement.
“This was a total surprise,” Aalbers said. “I would certainly have welcomed the opportunity to at least try to change your mind if that opportunity had given me. But it wasn’t. So I was as in the dark as the employees who received their news on Tuesday morning.”
Aalbers said that people in Lloydminster, which extends to Horcajadas on the border of Alberta-Asakatchewan, and surrounding communities will now have to trust Edmonton and Saskatoon for local news.
“It was deeply sad from the perspective that we are losing an icon in our city,” Aalbers said. “The community’s fabric really shakes.
“How will the community information be shared? How are sporting events for the future being recorded and captured? Simply opens a lot of things from the perspective of the city’s communications.”
Aalbers also said that the loss of stations is indicative of the broader problem of the decrease in local news in Canada.
“There has been a lot of conversation in the country about how we try to maintain the content of the Canadian media,” he said. “Certainly, CBC, CTV, Global has provided great coverage throughout Canada, but who fed that information with an important event here in Lloydminster? It was our local television station.”
Lloydminster continues to have at least one local newspaper, the source of Meridian, and still houses several local radio stations, including a property of Stingray Radio. Jones said there were no plans to close any of Stingray’s radio stations in the area.
‘Lloydlove’: former reporters weigh
CKSA and CITL were known for promoting journalists at the beginning of their careers, and generated a diaspora of prominent reporters that were coming throughout the country.
“I really don’t think I would be in TSN if it weren’t for CKSA and Lloydminster,” said the head of the TSN office Ottawa, Claire Hanna. “I could sink my teeth in many different sports, but also in so many different jobs within that, that I learned that I like to inform and like to anchor.”
Hanna, whose first full -time work was in CKSA, told her that she is worried that the decline of hunger local television stations to young reporters of opportunities to learn before moving to larger stations.
“Young people who enter this industry will not have a place to put their teeth, train, what is needed to be a journalist,” he said.
“Are we going to start throwing them into the air in TSN without much experience? And that worries me about the quality of journalism that we are going to deliver nationwide.”
The head of the Ottawa office of TSN, Claire Hanna, is one of the many experienced journalists who cries the loss of the Lloydmin Citl and CKSA television stations, abruptly closed this week. Hanna reflects on how he got the work and what he learned from him.
“It was a wonderful place,” said Brian Mudryks, who now works as a host of Sportscentre and game announcer for game for the Canadians of Montreal, but made a period on CKSA at the beginning of the race.
“Young people who were learning to transmit could do a lot, and obviously make mistakes, but improve and learn the trade.”
Station closures are still years of local stations that close throughout the country. According to the Canadian Center for Policies Alternatives, almost 2.5 million Canadians now live in a postal code with one or zero local media, twice the number in 2008.
Private radio and television points have decreased by nine percent since 2008, with CTV and Corus closures promoting a particularly strong decrease in 2024.
For communities with less than 100,000 people, each province and territory, except Ontario, has seen an absolute decrease in the number of local media.
“It is really sad for me for young journalists, and it is also really disappointing for those communities because I know how much what we did mean for them too,” said Carly Agro, a former Sportsnet presenter who launched her sports report career from CKSA.
“We were doing those communities and those people a really important service. We were telling them the stories and showing them the things that really mattered to them,” he said.
“If we were not doing it, those things would not receive the attention they deserved.”
