The Superior Sentinel is a new newspaper for Thunder Bay — one that looks for the good in our city while reporting honestly on public safety.
Thunder Bay is a hard place to sum up. It sits on the north shore of Lake Superior, carries a long and complicated history, and is held together by people who coach teams, run events, check on their neighbours, and quietly do the work that keeps a community going. Our distance from everywhere else has its costs, but it also means people here still know each other. We want to cover that city, not a caricature of it.
What we stand for
We don't traffic in division. We won't hand a megaphone to people whose main interest is setting neighbours against each other. Thunder Bay has always done better when it works across its differences.
We also won't pretend problems away. Public safety matters, and residents deserve clear, factual reporting so they can make sense of what's happening around them. But crime and hardship are not the whole story, and we refuse to write as if they were.
What we'll do
Report public safety with context. When something happens, we'll give you the facts, track how things change over time, and offer perspective instead of panic.
Cover the people who make the city better — the volunteers, coaches, artists, business owners, and ordinary neighbours who step up. This is the part of Thunder Bay most worth knowing.
Take our history seriously, from its ancient Indigenous roots dating back to 7500 BCE, the migration of the Anishinaabe and Settler peoples; from the fur-trade, to the Victorian and Booster eras, the World Wars, through the joining of Port Arthur and Fort William, to the city we are now.
Our standards
- Accuracy first, including important context
- Respect for victims of crime and their families
- A positive outlook for the future of the community
- Independence — we answer to Thunder Bay readers, no one else
Thunder Bay has incredible beauty, as well as real problems, and we believe the path to improvement is by facing those problems honestly.