The Lethbridge Herald Marks 120 Years of Local Storytelling

By Lethbridge Herald on November 21, 2025.

The Lethbridge Herald

Alberta had been been a province for just over two months when the Lethbridge Herald first appeared in November of 1905. Lethbridge was a mining town of about 3,000 people, already being served by the Lethbridge News, which had just begun daily publication after 20 years as a weekly paper. 

Two Cranbrook men, Fred E.Simpson and A.S. Bennett, introduced the Lethbridge Weekly Herald, which published its first issue Nov. 8, 1905.  Its first home was in a building that used to house a Chinese laundry on what is now 5 Street South. just south of Festival Square. 

An editorial in the first issue carried a proclamation that, “As long as there is paste in its pot or lead in its pencil, The Herald will bow to no one and endeavor to do justice to all. It will spare no effort to obtain legitimate news from whatever source it might come.”

The debut issue also featured a story about a CP Rail survey being carried out with an eye toward the building of a new railway bridge spanning the river valley. Today, the High Level Bridge is a nationally recognized historic structure. 

Shortly before The Herald’s birth, a young newspaperman from Ontario arrived in Lethbridge on a bleak, blustery October day. William Asbury Buchanan visited Calgary, where he made an unsuccessful attempt to purchase an interest in a newspaper called the Albertan (later to become the Calgary Sun).  He also failed in a bid to land a job with the Edmonton Bulletin. 

He returned to Lethbridge, which had not provided Buchanan with a favourable first impression, with a chinook kicking up dust and debris. Nevertheless, Buchanan decided to buy a half interest in the newly launched Lethbridge Weekly Herald. 

His name first appeared on the paper’s masthead on Dec. 27, 1905 and within a year, he became the paper’s sole owner. Under Buchanan’s trained eye, sharpened by his previous work with newspapers in Ontario, the look of The Herald changed, with serious news pushing the society news and poetry off the front page. The Herald began with a staff of six and managed an average circulation of 300 that first year.

Buchanan launched the Daily Herald on Dec.11, 1907 (the Weekly Herald continued as a separate publication until 1950) and it wasn’t long before its competitor, The News, went out of business.

In 1925, Buchanan was named to the Canadian Senate in 1925. He remained a senator for 29 years and while he was forced to divide his time between Ottawa and Lethbridge, “his thoughts never strayed too far from his paper,” Lethbridge historian Georgia Fooks wrote in her book The History of the Lethbridge Herald, 1905-1975.

The Herald weathered the Great Depression in the 1930s with the staff, from Buchanan on down, agreeing to take a pay cut until conditions improved. One year The Herald reported a net profit of just $138. 

The war years of the 1940s presented another challenge because key materials such as newsprint and type metal were in short supply.