Sherry Rioux and Brianna Freitag are marking one year since their purchase of Up Here returned the northern magazine to NWT ownership.
The magazine, which covers Canada’s North, was Yellowknife-based for decades before Yukon’s North of Ordinary Media bought it in 2024.
Just half a year later, Rioux and Freitag – who each worked for Up Here – bought it back and assumed control.
Saturday is the first anniversary of the paperwork going through.
“It feels really surreal,” said Rioux, who grew up in Inuvik and read the magazine as a young NWT resident before joining its sales team in 2020.
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“A year later, I think we’re just excited and happy about what we’ve accomplished.”
Rioux, who knew the sales and administrative side of the magazine, said she has had to quickly learn the editorial and publishing side of the operation. She believes Up Here is now moving in the right direction.
“I want people to open the magazine and see the people they know or the places they’ve been and have that familiarity,” she said this week.
“We’ve had a lot of positives in distribution across the three territories, improving that, and we’re growing our digital base.
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“People are so burnt out from digital that they are now picking up and reading magazines, right? People want a slower unwind to their day, and a magazine is that release.”
Moving into 2026, one new publication on Up Here’s radar is an Inuvik tourism guide. Rioux said there are another “couple irons in the fire” to develop the company.
Asked what she would be doing on Saturday for the anniversary, she said: “I’m probably going to be working.”
“When we bought the company, it was Friday the 13th, so we thought that was pretty interesting,” she said.
“We used to have a tradition at the old Up Here – every Friday the 13th, we’d all go out for lunch together. So we thought it was suiting that that was our day.”
