A Message From The Publisher

The Valley Voice is almost three-years-old now and always striving for perfection. Help keep our information relevant and up-to-date. If you find errors or missing information in the news items, please let us know. We're here to serve you and the Chilliwack community.

The Valley Voice's mandate is to provide unbiased and independent news for Chilliwack. We are small-town-friendly and answer all of our e-mails. We're never too busy to ignore people who write us that want a voice or wish to become involved.

Local writers and shooters are welcome to submit event stories/photos. We always accept local Chilliwack news tips, story ideas, comments and photo submissions from the community. If you are interested contact me at the e-mail address below.

Community papers are about the community and my experience in the past with producing local newspapers has always involved all members of the community. Informed people who know their community.

My credentials aren't backed by stacks of degrees, nor do I need them to write coherently about what's going on in the community. I have spent a few years in the trenches writing about and living in Vancouver's infamous downtown eastside. In fact I lived 3 blocks from Main & Hastings, ground zero, for ten years and during that time carved out a passion to provide real honest news with integrity and conviction and a passion to serve the community. In the past I have written in and produced newspapers and magazines and have been published in newspapers in four languages. My interest in writing has been as much a part of me as anything else and started at BCIT writing for the SU rag in the early 80s.

I've come to know this community as well as anyone in Chilliwack. I've lived here for almost 10 of my 52-years of existence. Grandma on mother's side lived here for 75-years and raised 10 kids (Irene Armstrong) and her husband, my grandfather was a fireman in Chilliwack at one point before being badly burned. Grandpa, on my father's side, owned the old Cottonwood Corners Cafe in the 1950's (Ivor Hill) and was a great fly fisherman back when you could haul steelhead as big as a Mac truck out of the Vedder River. Grandma's (Jeanette Quesnel) gr-grandfather also on dad's side, was Jules Maurice Quesnel who trekked across Canada and then down the Fraser River and back again with Simon Fraser in 1808 and, after whom the city and river of Quesnel are named. Go back further and Jules father, Joeseph Quesnel wrote the first Canadian opera.

At this site's inception it was my intention to have an advertisement-free not-for-profit news website however the costs of running and upgrading the website's bandwidth are increasing monthly.

It might be that at some point in the future, with support from the community, we'll go to print with your news in an interesting, informative and entertaining format based on my own experience producing Spare Change newspaper in Vancouver, a grassroots, social-minded, community paper and producing magazines with industry leaders like Squire Barnes from Global TV Sports as well as working with other local community newspapers.

Thank you for visiting and I hope that you will make this a part of your daily, weekly or monthly internet itinerary.

Craig Hill, Publisher

Contact the The Valley Voice News here.

When the First Amendment was adopted, “freedom of the press” referred to the freedom to publish using a printing press, rather than the freedom of organized entities to print newspapers. Any person, citizen or person with a typewriter could publish news. Until the internet came along, news agencies always had a stranglehold on what news made it out to the community. The news was cherry picked for entertainment value and much went unreported.

The internet and web publishing programs are spawning a whole new breed of devoted citizen reporters without journalism degrees or backgrounds in writing who want to cover local news. The same people who were subject to what mainstream media told them was the truth in the past, are now are seeking out that information for themselves.

Professional journalists don't have much patience for citizen journalism because they feel that the Joe Reporters of the planet can't convey the story to the reader without being punished by years of schooling.

Noam Chomsky said, and I love this line and those who know me will attest to this, "The more education you have, the more brainwashed you are."

Pro writers think that somehow Joe Reporter suddenly becomes devoid of his or her senses and can't remember how to feel, touch, taste, smell or hear anything the second their fingers hit the keys. Or that they can't talk with people who's lives are affected by the stories that they write, the information they gather and disseminate..

The Voice is committed to seeking out news that conventional media outlets here in Chilliwack choose to ignore. Readers want to know what's going on in their community. They want the truth and in some cases, the Voice provides better coverage to the same stories simply because we're not confined so much by time constraints or copyfitting issues. We want the truth and we know that's what readers want.

The Voice is a non-traditional form of news service and is committed to hyper-journalism and grassroots journalism. Letters, opinions and submissions from people without formal journalism training is grassroots and that puts the "community" into the news. This entire website is for the community.

You'll find free photo galleries here. Unlike many other online news organizations where they charge for theirs. If you want to re-post our photos, all we ask is that you add a link and photo credit byline.