About St. Thomas Times-Journal

St. Thomas Times-Journal

The St. Thomas Times-Journal is a daily tabloid newspaper published in St. Thomas, Ontario, serving the city and Elgin County in southwestern Ontario. Carrying its name since July 2, 1918 — when the city's two rival dailies, the St. Thomas Times and the St. Thomas Journal, amalgamated — the paper's lineage reaches back to 1831, when the first weekly appeared in what was then a frontier settlement. It has chronicled nearly 200 years of the Railway City's history: the railway boom that gave St. Thomas its nickname, the manufacturing century, the Jumbo the elephant tragedy that made the city famous, and the modern life of the London region's southern neighbour. Owned by Postmedia Network and published Tuesday through Saturday. Wikipedia lists stthomastimesjournal.com as its website.

Overview

St. Thomas — a city of about 43,000 south of London, on the Kettle Creek valley — is known as the Railway City: in the late nineteenth century it was one of Canada's great railway centres, with the Michigan Central, the Grand Trunk and a dozen other lines converging on its yards and shops. The St. Thomas Times-Journal is its daily newspaper: the newsroom covers St. Thomas city council, the surrounding municipalities of Elgin County (including Aylmer, whose sports teams the paper follows), the courts, health care (including St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital), education, agriculture, the manufacturing base and the region's deep sporting culture.

The paper's distinction is its age and its market: nearly two centuries of newspaper history in a small city, and the only daily serving St. Thomas and Elgin County. It is a classic small-city daily — the paper of record for a community whose identity was forged by the railways and whose modern economy spans manufacturing, agriculture and the London spillover.

History

St. Thomas has had newspapers since 1831, when the first weekly appeared — the first newspaper in St. Thomas and the first to be called the Journal, published and edited by the brothers George and Thomas Hodgkinson. It had been in existence only a year when a competitor called the Liberal came out in 1832, with Asahel B. Lewis as editor. In 1833 the Rev. Donald Fraser, a Presbyterian minister recently arrived from Scotland, became editor of the Journal; in 1834 two men named Kent and Kipp acquired the Liberal. Within three years both papers were out of existence — the first of many short-lived ventures in a frontier town.

From then until 1873, St. Thomas saw many newspaper ventures, all short-lived except McLachlin's Journal and Wilkinson's Times: the St. Thomas Enquirer (started by John Kent in 1837), the St. Thomas Chronicle (O'Reilly and Newcombe, 1843), The Canadian Freeman (L. Cunningham Kearney, 1846–1851), the St. Thomas Watchman, the Weekly Dispatch and the British Standard. The predecessors of the two dailies began as weeklies, growing into daily publication as St. Thomas boomed with the railways. On July 2, 1918, the St. Thomas Times and the St. Thomas Journal amalgamated, and the St. Thomas Times-Journal has carried that name across its masthead ever since.

The amalgamated paper chronicled the twentieth century in the Railway City: the railway shops employing thousands, their whistles setting the rhythm of the city's working life; the Jumbo era — the great elephant of the Barnum circus, killed by a Grand Trunk locomotive in St. Thomas in September 1885, whose life-sized statue still stands downtown and whose name entered the language; the manufacturing century, as the railway shops gave way to the automotive suppliers and food processors; the two world wars, which filled the factories and took the city's sons; and the modern era, as St. Thomas reinvented itself around manufacturing, the hospital, the college and its heritage — the railway museum, the preserved CASO station, the murals and festivals that celebrate the city's identity. Ownership passed through the twentieth-century chains — including Thomson — into Sun Media/Quebecor and Postmedia Network in 2015.

Content and Sections

The modern Times-Journal is built around St. Thomas and Elgin County. St. Thomas city council anchors the news pages — the paper covers the mayor and council with a dedicated city-hall bureau — extending to Elgin County's municipalities: Aylmer, Port Stanley, Dutton, West Lorne and the townships. The courts beat covers the region's legal community; health reporting follows St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital; education coverage spans the school boards and Fanshawe College's St. Thomas campus.

The railway heritage — the Elgin County Railway Museum, the preserved shops, the city's identity as the Railway City — is a constant thread. Agriculture coverage follows Elgin's cash-crop and livestock economy. The manufacturing base — the automotive suppliers, the food processing — receives sustained attention. Port Stanley's Lake Erie tourism, the Kettle Creek valley's environment and the region's small-town life are covered in depth. Sports coverage centres on Aylmer's teams and the region's deep hockey and baseball culture. Opinion pages carry editorials, columns and letters from across Elgin, and feature sections cover arts, food, homes, health and community life.

Coverage and Audience

The Times-Journal serves St. Thomas and Elgin County — a market of roughly 95,000 people across the city, the towns and the rural townships. Its audience is the region's manufacturing workers, farmers, health-care professionals, railway heritage community and the families of southwestern Ontario.

Weekly circulation was reported at 23,330 as of 2013; the paper publishes Tuesday through Saturday in print with daily digital coverage. The paper's political coverage carries weight at Queen's Park — the region's ridings are closely watched, and the Times-Journal's reporting on the hospital, the college, agriculture and county government is routinely cited provincially. Its archives, reaching back to 1831, document the frontier press, the railway age, the manufacturing century and the making of the Railway City — a documentary record of small-city Ontario that few institutions can match, and one that historians of the province's railway era return to for the shop news, the timetables and the editorials of 190 years.

Ownership

The St. Thomas Times-Journal is owned by Postmedia Network Inc., Canada's largest newspaper chain, which acquired it in 2015 as part of its purchase of Sun Media from Quebecor. Within Postmedia, the paper shares national content, digital platforms and corporate services with the chain's other papers while maintaining its St. Thomas newsroom and editorial identity.

Postmedia itself is publicly traded and majority-owned by the U.S. investment firm Chatham Asset Management. The paper's lineage — from the Hodgkinson brothers' 1831 Journal through the 1918 amalgamation and the twentieth-century chains to Postmedia — connects the frontier press to the digital age.

Digital Presence

The paper's digital edition (Wikipedia lists stthomastimesjournal.com as its website) carries the Times-Journal's daily journalism online: breaking news, e-edition access, newsletters, photo galleries and community features, serving readers across Elgin County and the region's diaspora. The site operates on Postmedia's shared digital infrastructure, offering digital subscriptions and e-editions.

On social media the paper distributes breaking news and community stories to a following concentrated in the St. Thomas region. As of 2026, the St. Thomas Times-Journal continues to publish — Tuesday through Saturday in print, daily online — more than a century after the 1918 amalgamation, and nearly 200 years after the first weekly appeared in the frontier settlement, still the daily paper of record for the Railway City.

Note: website left empty in frontmatter per project rule for url-unverified rows; Wikipedia lists stthomastimesjournal.com as the paper's website.