The company that owns Edmonton’s oldest news outlet has put its landmark downtown headquarters up for sale. Postmedia placed the Edmonton Journal building at 101 Street and Macdonald Drive on the real-estate market a month ago with an asking price of $4,515,480. The property has long been home to the newspaper, operating out of two buildings at the address over its history: the original structure, which opened in 1921, and the current headquarters, built in stages between 1989 and 1991, which once housed more than 1,200 staff. A replica facade made from bricks salvaged from the 1921 building lines a four-storey atrium. The atrium once displayed the Pulitzer Prize the Journal received in 1938 for defending press freedom amid efforts to muzzle a journalist by Alberta’s government of the day that echoed the rise of fascism abroad. Kathy Kerr, who worked at the Journal for 25 years in a variety of editing roles before retiring as deputy editor in 2016, said the paper’s location was “ideal for a newsroom (and) for a newspaper, too.” “In terms of its connection to the city’s life, it was great to have that building in such a central location, and it really did make a difference,” Kerr told CTV News Edmonton on Thursday. “You could walk to all the major centres of power from the Edmonton Journal. You could walk to city hall. You could walk to the legislature. You could walk to the Convention Centre. As business editor, I used to spend my lunch hours walking around downtown and getting story ideas. You could see what was happening with retail and restaurant businesses, what was up, what was down and what new construction was underway.” Staff left the 148,640-square-foot building in mid-March 2020 and never returned, except years later to collect personal belongings they had left behind at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. A daycare tenant on the main floor of the five-storey building also departed soon afterward. The old Journal building was also home to Edmonton’s first radio station, CJCA, which began broadcasting from a corner of the newsroom in 1922. Over the years, the building expanded north and west, with its printing plant housed in an annex facing 102 Street until a new facility opened in the city’s east end in 1980. At one point, the Journal leased office space in the neighbouring Royal Bank tower to accommodate its growing staff. In the early 1980s, the Journal and the Royal Bank unveiled ambitious plans to redevelop the entire block bounded by 101 and 102 streets, Macdonald Drive and Jasper Avenue. The proposal included a new home for the paper in a 20-storey tower, but a recession derailed the project, eventually leading to the construction of the current building. Postmedia has sold several of its newspaper properties in recent years, including the Ottawa Citizen and Regina Leader-Post headquarters in 2018, the Calgary Sun building in 2020, the Calgary Herald in 2023, and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix in 2024. Kerr said the sale of the Journal building fills her with melancholy. “It’s very sad that it and the history it represents are going away because the history of the print newsroom is long and storied, and it was a history of collegiality,” she said. “It was about shared ideas and the creativity of putting together a newspaper every day. It was about the rush of a deadline. I think working from home, you lose a lot of that.” Postmedia has owned the Journal and several other major Canadian newspapers since 2010, when the company, backed largely by U.S. hedge funds and led by former Toronto Sun publisher Paul Godfrey, acquired the newspaper assets of the bankrupt CanWest media empire. Four years later, Postmedia purchased the Sun Media newspaper chain, including the Edmonton Sun. Sun staff moved into the Journal building in the fall of 2015, leaving their longtime east-end office on 50 Street. A few months later, Postmedia merged the newsrooms of both papers, along with those in other cities, amid significant staff layoffs. With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Noah Rishaug
