I was barefoot on a beach in Tofino when an email came in that forever altered the course of my life.
It was from former Pique editor Clare Ogilvie, asking me if I was interested in a reporter job with her publication in Whistler.
I was skeptical. I had never been to Whistler; had never heard of Pique Newsmagazine. I assumed it was some run-down rag on the cusp of collapse, like so many other print publications seemed to be.
But being in the general vicinity, I drove up to interview in person.
I was blown away—by the breadth and quality of Pique Newsmagazine, the passion and enthusiasm of its editor, and by Whistler itself.
They say the average adult makes more than 30,000 decisions every day—most of them benign and inconsequential, like deciding what to eat or wear.
Some carry more weight. But it’s rare we get to see the diverging life paths ahead of us so clearly before we make the call.
Yet there I was, at a clear crossroads: take the print reporter job with the weird little newsmagazine in Whistler, or accept a job with CTV Regina, which had promised me a path to the anchor desk.
Two wildly different career paths, in markedly divergent markets; one big choice to make and no idea how it would turn out.
You can guess the rest. Less than 24 hours after that fateful interview, I had accepted the job with Pique. A month later I was moving to the West Coast.
I didn’t know what I was getting into. I remember telling myself that first summer in Whistler that I didn’t know how long it would last; looked around at the imposing mountains and the old-growth trees and promised I wouldn’t take a single day in this incredible place for granted.
That was more than 10 years ago. I’m still not taking any of it for granted.
But as we prepared this week’s cover feature marking Pique’s 30th anniversary, I realized the outsized impact this funny little newsmagazine has had on me. My 10-and-a-half-year tenure under the Pique masthead represents more than a quarter of my life.
And it’s strange to find your existence so intricately tied to an inanimate object like a newspaper. But then, Pique has never been some bland, run-of-the-mill publication. If it was, I doubt I’d still be here after all these years.
I say it to every applicant, and to anyone who will listen, because it’s true: Pique is one of the very best weekly newspapers in Canada, and possibly North America.
From its stunning visual design (shout-out to art director Jon Parris) and award-winning weekly long-form features down to its robust reporting on local news, arts and sports, there are simply not many papers left like Whistler’s.
We are all so lucky to have it.
Things have changed since 2014, of course. The page counts are smaller, the team itself a bit leaner. We’re no longer on Facebook (good riddance, I say). But we’re still here, still profitable. Still keeping our finger on the pulse and our eyes and ears open to what matters most to the community.
Pique is still your source for local news—one still resisting municipal spin and the rosy, polished outlook of tourism boosters.
Some people in town don’t like that. They think Pique should only report positive developments in the community, only say nice things in the opinion pages.
To them we say: too bad.
Yes, we want Whistler to succeed. But at the end of the day, Pique’s only editorial allegiance is to the truth—the ugly, uncomfortable, necessary truth. So we will always call it as we see it—warts and all.
That is nothing new. One of the benefits of working for a newspaper is having instant access to the archives—a week-by-week glimpse into a robust and revelatory time capsule.
Pique’s legacy and role here in Whistler is apparent in the thousands of bound pages lining the shelves in our Function Junction office, hundreds upon hundreds of issues documenting the community’s trials and tribulations, its dramatic victories and deflating defeats, its heroes and its villains.
Along the way, Pique has been both enthusiastic booster and harsh critic; a purveyor of basic information and a dissector of the deeper context.
That will never change.
I don’t imagine I’ll still be here when Pique celebrates its 40th anniversary—but then, when we put out our issue marking 20 years way back in the fall of 2014, I would have laughed if you’d told me I’d be the editor for the 30th.
Life is funny that way—big, weird, unpredictable, challenging, messy and wonderfully beautiful, all at once. It zigs and zags, throws us unexpected curveballs, challenges us and our beliefs, forces us to learn and grow, even when we don’t want to.
In that sense, a weekly newspaper is like a rock in the unending current; a stable, predictable pillar standing tall in the muck.
Pique isn’t perfect; nothing is. We are all just humans after all.
But I’m grateful every day for it, and for the community that reads it every week.
Keep sending your story ideas, your photos, your criticisms and your poorly spelled insults.
We cherish every one of them.
And we don’t take any of it for granted.
