EDITORIAL PAGE — A milestone for The Miner

This issue of The Northern Miner marks the first in our 81st year of weekly publication. It also marks another milestone, the opening of a new editorial bureau in Denver, Colorado, and the launch of The Miner as “North America’s Mining Newspaper.”

During the past 80 years, The Northern Miner has chronicled the coming of age of Canada’s mining industry. We’ve never missed an issue, and because of the vibrant and dynamic nature of our industry, we’ve never suffered from a shortage of discoveries and mine developments to cover.

From Cobalt to Kirkland Lake, Highland Valley to Hemlo, Eskay Creek to Lac de Gras, The Northern Miner’s reporters have been on site to detail new discoveries and to monitor the size and scale of new mines.

We have always been Canada’s mineral newspaper, and we will continue this commitment well into the next century. Canada will remain our primary focus, as we believe many more important mineral deposits are waiting to be found and developed in this country.

In the past decade, however, our reporters have also spent time in the United States, visiting the huge gold mines at Carlin, Nevada, and a variety of projects being explored and developed by Canadian companies south of the border. This expansion has been a two-way street, as many American companies have taken a keen interest in Canadian opportunities. Good geology knows no boundaries.

We believe that our editorial bureau in Denver will enable us to provide more of the type of coverage we have always strived to provide: full, fair and factual reporting which our readers can trust. Since its inception, this newspaper’s motto has been “On the Level,” and we will continue living up to its spirit and intent.

Mining and exploration companies based in the U.S. are invited to fax or mail information on their activities to our Denver address (listed above), to the attention of our new staff writer, geologist Ted Worthington. Our weekly stock tables will now include a few dozen more mining companies listed on American stock exchanges, such as New York and NASDAQ. We have also included, for the benefit of our many American subscribers, a conversion chart which will allow them, at a glance, to convert grams of gold into ounces, hectares into acres and metres into feet. (Look for this weekly on page 10.)

With reporters based in North America’s key mining centres — Toronto, Vancouver and Denver — our goal is to increase first-hand coverage of North American-based companies and their activities. Indirectly, this will enable us to strengthen our coverage of another growing area: international projects being explored, financed and developed by companies based in Canada and the United States.

During the past few years, our reporters have visited exploration projects in the jungles of Panama, the deserts of Chile and Argentina, and the historic gold districts of West Africa. Most of those projects were either discovered or acquired by Canadian companies. We expect this trend will continue, which means The Northern Miner will be providing more first-hand coverage of foreign projects.

North America may be our base, but the world is our beat.