Richard Roediger
Richard Roediger was born in New York. He and William McIntyre, from Simcoe, Ontario knew each other from working at the Tacoma News, in which Roediger acquired a large interest. Roediger ran the newspaper until 1898, when he and McIntyre left for the Klondike where established the Dawson News.1)
The first Dawson News Publishing Company sheets were composed by hand during the first winter of operation. William and Henry Steel from Pennsylvania started for the Klondike in 1899 and brought a newspaper plant.2) The first issue came out on 31 June 1899. By this time, Roediger was acting as the editor while McIntyre retained his interest.3) In 1901, Roediger acquired a Mergenthaler linotype machine and brought in an operator, Harold Malstrom, from Tacoma. Malstrom was the linotype operator until 1924.4)
In 1902, a competing newspaper, Yukon Sun, ran into financial difficulties and Henry Woodside, its old editor, claimed that most of the debt was owed to Roediger. In November 1902, the Sun ran an editorial announcing that R.H. Prichard had purchased Roediger and McIntyre’s one-third interest in the Sun and that now all the shareholders were British subjects.5)
McIntyre and Roediger sold their interest in the Dawson Daily News in October 1908.6) The new owners were a consortium of former employees.7) The November 2nd, 1908 issue of the paper announced that it was now Canadian-owned and there would be no change in their non-party editorial policy. The new management took a strong anti-Congdon stand in the 1909 election that was fought over personalities rather than issues. Roediger had long opposed Congdon. Congdon won the election, and the News called on all to accept the result. The years of contentious Dawson journalism seemed to be at an end.8)
The Yukon Sun and the Yukon World, could not survive Dawson’s declining population and were gone by August 1909, leaving the News as Dawson’s only paper. The men behind the publication were revealed in March 1924 as editor Arthur Hazelton Dever (American by birth), and a trio of managers: Charles Reed Settlemier, Harold Malstrom, and Otto Frederick Kastner. In October 1924, the newspaper reduced publication from a daily to a tri-weekly and was renamed the Dawson News. In 1946, the paper became the Dawson Weekly News. In 1953, the Yukon capitol shifted to Whitehorse, the News lost its government patronage, and in March 1954, the paper ceased publication.9) Harold Malstrom retired in 1954 and sold the newspaper’s resources to Helmer Samuelson for a dollar.10)