Yukon Star closes after 4 months due to lack of capital

After just four months in business, the Yukon Star is closing up shop.

The locally-owned and operated news outlet published online, in print, and even started a podcast. It began in May with a flurry of excitement that resulted in a successful crowdfunding campaign and four local investors pitching in.

The outlet opened in the wake of the Whitehorse Star's closing and hired several of its reporters and its editor, with the goal of carrying on its legacy of local journalism.

The now-former Yukon Star publisher, Max Fraser, said the new company had been pleased by its sales and readership progress but that it lacked enough operating capital to be able to continue paying staff until it became profitable.

"If there was a mistake made, it was not seeing that there would need to be a fair chunk of working capital to carry us through what were predictably going to be a number of months of losses, which is common for any startup."

"Donations, which were very strong at the beginning, had tapered off during the summer months," he said.

Quick pivot

The initial plan based on the money assembled had been for the Yukon Star to buy out the Whitehorse Star's owners, keep its staff employed, and "transform it over time." But the Whitehorse Star declined the Yukon Star's offer, Fraser said.

The company pivoted quickly and decided to develop a new outlet from the ground up, and hired the recently laid off journalists before they went elsewhere for work, Fraser said.

"My motivation there was to keep the staff employed because the heart of that newspaper is its staff."

But Fraser said he never found the money to keep it running through its first year.

"Between all of the things that needed doing — the quest for that sizeable chunk of finance? Ultimately [it] wasn't successful."

Emotional toll of closing shop

Jim Butler, editor of the Yukon Star said it's painful to see the new outlet close. Butler was also the editor at the Whitehorse Star.

"I feel very, very badly about this, especially for my colleagues," he said.

Jim Butler is the longtime editor of the Whitehorse Daily Star newspaper. He was hired as the editor of the new publication Yukon Star, along with four other Whitehorse Star employees. (Vince Fedoroff/Whitehorse Daily Star)

The outlet had eight staff full time and four part time, Butler said.

"We all worked extremely hard trying to build our little enterprise from scratch in a very short time frame."

The Yukon Star began as an online publication and soon began offering a print version with full-coloured photos. It tried to differentiate itself from other publications in several ways, Butler said. This included a focus on local events and entertainment, opinion pieces, and publishing "some extremely talented Yukon writers who didn't necessarily have a forum in print."

Feedback from readers and the community was good, Butler said.

"But unfortunately and sadly for everybody, including the community, I think the economics just weren't there."

Now that this chapter at the Yukon Star is ending, Butler said he's going to take a few weeks to reflect on what's next for him.

"I have been involved in the death of two newspapers now in three months and ... it's kind of a challenging for the psyche, to say the least."

Looking out at the retracting media landscape, with outlet closures and journalist layoffs a repeating story, Fraser said he's worried about the future of journalism and democracy.

"There's this global trend of lack of accountability and it is members of the fourth estate — members of the media — who hold governments, corporations, etcetera to account."

Whitehorse, he said, needs more journalists, not less.