The owner of two local television stations in Lloydminster shut them down on Tuesday, abruptly terminating the jobs of 19 employees and ending more than 60 years of local broadcasting.
Stingray Group, a media conglomerate with several dozen radio and television stations across the country, announced the closure of CKSA-TV and CITL-TV in a staff meeting on May 13. A former employee who lost her job on Tuesday said on social media that there was no advanced notice of the shutdowns. The stations were closed down that day, denying the workers the opportunity to send out a farewell broadcast.
CKSA began broadcasting in 1960, while CITL launched in 1976. Both were affiliates for larger outlets including CBC, Global and CTV.
Steve Jones, the president of Stingray Radio, said the financial situation of the outlets had been deteriorating for years and became especially dire after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was an absolutely agonizing decision,” he said. “The fragmentation of audiences across different digital and streaming platforms, and away from over-the-air television, has been a big factor. The migration of some advertisers over to digital has been a factor as well.”
According to Jones, the stations’ revenues declined by more than 50 per cent over the last six years.
Jones said Stingray spent months trying to find a buyer for the stations and that the company’s regional manager for Alberta spoke to the mayor of Lloydminster about the closure.
But Mayor Gerald Aalbers disputed that claim.
“This was a total surprise,” Aalbers said. “I would have certainly welcomed the opportunity to at least try and change their minds if that opportunity had been given to me. But it wasn’t. So I was just in this much in the dark as the employees who got their news Tuesday morning.”
Aalbers said people in Lloydminster, which straddles the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, and the surrounding communities will now have to rely on Edmonton and Saskatoon for local news.
“It was deeply, deeply saddening from the perspective that we’re losing an icon in our city,” Aalbers said. “It really rips the fabric of the community.
“How is community information going to be shared? How are sporting events being recorded and captured for the future? It just opens up a whole bunch of things from the perspective of the city’s communications.”
Aalbers also said the loss of the stations is indicative of the wider problem of local news decline in Canada.
“There’s been a lot of conversation in the country about how we try and maintain Canadian media content,” he said. “Certainly CBC, CTV, Global have all provided great coverage across Canada, but who fed you that information with a major event here in Lloydminster? It was our local TV station.”
Lloydminster continues to have at least one local newspaper, the Meridian Source, and is still home to several local radio stations, including one owned by Stingray Radio. Jones said there were no plans to shut down any of Stingray’s radio stations in the area.
CKSA and CITL were known for fostering journalists at the beginning of their careers, and spawned a diaspora of prominent reporters that fanned out across the country.
“I truly don’t believe I would be at TSN if it wasn’t for CKSA and Lloydminster,” said TSN Ottawa bureau chief Claire Hanna. “I was able to sink my teeth into so many different sports, but also so many different jobs within that, that I learned that I like to report and I like to anchor.”
Hanna, whose first full-time job was at CKSA, said she’s worried the decline of local television stations will starve young reporters of the opportunities to learn before moving on to larger stations.
“Young people who are entering this industry won’t have a place to put their teeth in, train, learn what it takes to be a journalist,” she said.
“Are we just going to start throwing them on air at TSN without a lot of experience? And that concerns me for the quality of journalism that we’re going to be delivering at a national level.”
How TSN’s Claire Hanna got her first job at Lloydminster TV station, now shuttered
“It was just a wonderful place,” said Brian Mudryks, who now works as a SportsCentre host and play-by-play announcer for the Montreal Canadians, but did a stint at CKSA at the beginning of career.
“Young people that were learning how to broadcast could do a lot, and obviously make mistakes, but get better and learn the craft.”
The station closures follow years of local stations shutting down across the country. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, almost 2.5 million Canadians now live in a postal code with either one or zero local news outlets, double the number in 2008.
Private broadcasting outlets in radio and television have gone down by nine per cent since 2008, with closures at CTV and Corus driving a particularly strong decline in 2024.
For communities with fewer than 100,000 people, every province and territory except Ontario has seen an absolute decline in the number of local news outlets.
“It’s really sad to me for the young journalists, and it’s also really disappointing for those communities because I know how much what we did meant to them too,” said Carly Agro, a former Sportsnet Host who launched her sports reporting 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 they really cared about,” she said.
“If we weren’t doing it, those things wouldn’t get the attention that they deserved.”
