The Kipling Citizen is relatively young, when compared with the town itself. The newspaper was started in 1936 by the Davis brothers, Chisholm (Chris), Ralph and Harry, who came from Wawota. They later acquired The Canora Courier and The Kamsack Times. During the 1940s The Citizen was operated in Kipling for the Davis brothers by Muriel Hutton, who sent the copy to Canora to be printed there.

In November 1946, Thomas Kearns, discharged from the armed forces in April of that year, bought the paper from the Davis brothers. The Citizen at that time published from a building owned by the late D.J. Devine, located next to his hotel annex on Sixth Ave., and since demolished.

Thomas was a skilled writer. His column “Tomitorial” was widely quoted and also served to sow many seeds of progress for Kipling and area.

Kearns and his wife Emily (Kay) bought the former butcher shop building on Main Street from E.J. Bill, made some renovations and updated the equipment somewhat by buying some second-hand equipment, including a linotype and printing press, from Portal, North Dakota.

This printing was done by the “hot metal”, or letterpress process, with lead as the principal metal. In 1954 Kearns became interested in a process new to the newspaper printing industry, known as “off-set”. This was a type of rotogravure printing from light-sensitive plates, which when treated with chemical and water accepted or resisted ink. After much correspondence with experimenters in the U.S. and in Eastern Canada, the bold move was made in January of 1959. A trip to Winnipeg was made to locate a printing press suitable for newspaper work, along with a camera which used 12′ x 18″ film, vital to the process. And so it came to pass that The Kipling Citizen became only the second newspaper in Saskatchewan and perhaps in Western Canada to adopt the offset method of printing. This method, at first vigorously opposed by oldtime printers, is now used almost exclusively in various forms by newspapers everywhere.

At first it was all rather primitive. The pages became smaller because of press sizes and the right-hand edges of the columns of type were uneven. Mrs. Kearns and Mrs. Hutton became typesetters on “newfangled machines” - electric typewriters. Mrs Kearns was also noted as the author of one of the most popular columns ever carried in the newspaper “Tea Leaves and Apron Strings“.

In the changing years there were many employees at the small plant, quite a few of whom stayed with “the craft”. Many school children were able to earn some spending money for part time work in the years when the newspapers had to be gathered and folded by hand.

Sons Michael and Scott Kearns moved back to Kipling in the early 1970s and joined Thomas and Emily in the business.

In 1975 the present building was built and more sophisticated equipment was brought into use. Another innovation was beginning to take a hold on the industry: electronic typesetting machines which had computerized memories and used a photographic procedure. The Citizen was once again one of the first to embrace this technology.

The Citizen did, and does, commercial printing of many different kinds in the plant at 521 Main St. But as the newspaper itself grew in both circulation and the number of pages, it became too large for the plant’s own press capacity. As most papers now do, The Citizen is printed by contract at a large city plant, although all of the Pre-press production is still carried out at Kipling.

Today a modified “desktop publishing” method is used in the preparation of the pages, with articles supplied by electronic means in addition to those prepared by staff, correspondents and contributing writers. Tom and Emily retired in the 1980s. Present day operations are owned by Michael and Jane, his wife.