In September 1995, after 4 years with the Sunshine Coast News, I went to Powell River to start Northern Light Publishing Inc., a bi-weekly community style newspaper (9,500 copies) in a 6 column 11.5″ x 17.5″ tabloid format distributed FREE through the mail to the northern Sunshine Coast including Texada Island.
This paper was done while cut and paste was still active. Hand cut colour separations, paste up on blue line pages….. Memory was still too expensive and processors too slow. Ram memory sticks were $80.00 per megabite. I started with a mac llsi with 5 megs of ram (could only max out to 32 megs), an 80 meg hard drive with a 16 megahertz processor. Ads were printed for paste up and saved to floppies to make room on the hard drive for more ads. By my 3rd issue I aquired a 100 meg external drive ($400.00 expense)….. This was cutting edge at the time.
After the printing of my 4th issue, “The Powell River Peak”, which was backed by the Lower Mainland Newspaper Group, moved in and immediately got into a price war with the “Powell River News”, the other establish paper. Northern Light was caught in the cross fire and had to close. Shortly after, I moved to my present location, Grand Forks BC