For my first day at the Whitehorse Daily Star, I wore a sweater and dress. I’d interned at dailies down south and thought I knew the attire: business casual. In the second-floor newsroom, I met my boss, editor Jim Butler. He was wearing jean shorts, tall, thick socks, and hiking boots. That was my first indication that working at a small, Northern paper would be a unique experience.
I started at the Star in June 2014, back when it published five times a week. I’d moved up to Whitehorse from Hamilton, Ontario, for the job, one of a long line of reporters—many of them young and from southern Canada—who’d filled the paper’s pages since its inception in 1900. The Yukon became a territory in 1898, so the Star offered a nearly complete documentation of its existence. Reporting stretched from the first fully elected legislature in 1909 to the capital moving from Dawson City to Whitehorse in 1953 to the signing of the framework for Yukon First Nations’ land claims and self-government agreements in 1993.
