About Midland Today

Midland Today

Overview

Midland Today is an online news website published by Village Media for Midland, Ontario, and the surrounding southern Georgian Bay communities of Penetanguishene, Tiny Township and Tay Township. From midlandtoday.ca, the site delivers breaking news, municipal politics, policing, health, schools and community coverage to a market of roughly 52,000 year-round residents — 17,817 in Midland itself at the 2021 census, with Penetanguishene (10,077), Tiny (12,966) and Tay (11,091) making up the balance — in a part of North Simcoe whose population swells well past 100,000 in the summer cottage season. The outlet describes itself, in its Muck Rack profile, as "an exclusively online news and information site that provides breaking news to you, our reader, as fast as you want it, wherever you are."

History

News in Midland was long a print business centred on the Midland Mirror, later the Midland Penetanguishene Mirror, a Metroland Media weekly. The Mirror was still listed in the Ontario Community Newspapers Association's market reporting in April 2022, when its market population was given as 53,705, but Metroland's decision to end print editions of its community newspapers in September 2023 closed that chapter; by October 2024, a Penetanguishene municipal document could refer to the Midland Mirror simply as "no longer in circulation." Village Media's MidlandToday became the area's digital-first successor. The company has not published a formal launch date for the site in its reachable materials, and none is asserted here: MidlandToday is documented operating by 2022, when file photography credited to the site was circulating in local coverage and the company's December 2022 bulletin pictured the MidlandToday crew — Derek Howard, Lise Turcotte, Jennifer Wilson and Andrew Philips — at the CLH Foundation's annual Bon Spiel fundraiser. The site's community profile has been sustained since: its team returned to the CLH Foundation Bonspiel Bonanza at the Midland Curling Club in November 2024, helping raise more than $12,000 for the foundation's Commitment to Care initiative, and its sponsorships run from The Guesthouse Shelter and the Georgian Bay Cancer Support Centre to Huronia Historical Parks' Pumpkinferno at Discovery Harbour and the Georgian Bay General Hospital Foundation's Power of Giving in September 2025.

Content and Coverage

MidlandToday's distinguishing feature is the breadth of its municipal beat: a single small newsroom working four separate councils. Reporter Derek Howard, the site's most prolific byline, files from Midland town hall on the waterfront redevelopment and its 37 recommendations, a tree-conservation bylaw, a short-term rental registry with an accommodation tax, and the contentious question of an 18.5 percent pay increase for the next mayor, approved only after a chaotic do-over vote. From Tiny Township he has covered road-project tenders, Balm Beach Canada Day festivities and near-frozen school funding; from Tay, a 2026 budget built on a blended 3.74 percent tax increase, a $29.5-million federal-provincial grant for the Victoria Harbour wastewater plant, and budgets for the three-branch library system; from Penetanguishene, four new community safety zones, provincial funding to offset cancelled automated speed enforcement, skepticism about a proposed OPP detachment base, and the town's Winterama, whose 78th edition in 2026 Howard reported as the longest-running winter carnival in Ontario. The coverage extends to the Southern Georgian Bay OPP, Georgian Bay General Hospital, the area's French-language and Catholic school communities, and features with an occasional long reach — in 2025 the site carried a Tiny Township couple's first-person account of witnessing cartel violence while vacationing in Puerto Vallarta. Community Leaders Program partnership stories, an extensive obituaries section, Village Report wire coverage and an events calendar anchored by venues such as the Midland Cultural Centre and Sainte-Marie among the Hurons complete the mix. A May 2024 edition of its newsletter, preserved in the campaign archive, shows the human-interest side of that package: a Midland teenager chasing a baseball scholarship in the United States, an environmental champion award at St. Theresa's school, and a volunteer's work with the Askennonia seniors centre, alongside listings for Sainte-Marie's opening day and live music at Rawley Resort. The site's sponsorships also reached the area's Indigenous Arts & Culture Week as early as September 2022.

Audience and Reach

The site's audience is the North Simcoe readership the Mirror once served in print: about 52,000 permanent residents across four municipalities, joined seasonally by the owners of more than 8,000 cottages and the visitors drawn to Georgian Bay's 30,000 Islands, the Wye Marsh and the Sainte-Marie among the Hurons historic site. Summer audiences in the area are commonly estimated at more than double the winter population, which shapes both the site's news cycle and its advertising market. No independently audited readership figure is published for MidlandToday itself. Village Media reports network-level numbers only: its own 2026 industry profile credits the company with more than five million monthly readers, over 450,000 daily newsletters and 33 publications, while its chief executive cited roughly 40 million monthly page views network-wide in 2023. Those figures are the company's own and are not a measure of this site's traffic.

Digital Presence

MidlandToday publishes only online, on Village Media's Villager content platform — the publishing system the company built in Sault Ste. Marie and licenses to hundreds of other media sites. Its daily email newsletter, archived publicly in the network's campaign archive, opens with local headlines and obituaries and carries Village Report provincial and national stories, Community Leaders Program features and a local events listing. The site is further distributed through the Village Media mobile apps, launched across the network in February 2023, through its social channels, and on Spaces, the localized social platform the company introduced in 2024. Howard's council reporting also travels within the network: his Midland traffic-calming coverage, for example, has been published by The Trillium, Village Media's Queen's Park politics outlet. Independent re-publication tracking shows the site filing current municipal stories through 2025 and 2026, including coverage of how area councils are choosing voting methods for the October 2026 municipal elections.

Ownership and Organisation

MidlandToday is owned and operated by Village Media Inc. of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, where the company is headquartered at 298 Queen Street East. Village Media grew from SooToday, founded in 2000 by Dick Peplow, who turned a Sault Ste. Marie coupon and directory site into a hyperlocal news operation after regional television news was cut back; BayToday followed in North Bay in 2003. After Peplow's death in 2007, investor Jeff Elgie took control and became chief executive, and the company took the Village Media name in 2013 before expanding across Ontario's mid-sized communities, often where a legacy paper had closed or retreated — the pattern Midland fits. Day to day, MidlandToday is produced by a small local team: Derek Howard is its principal reporter, and Village Media has not publicly identified a single site editor for the outlet in its reachable materials, so none is named here. Commercial roles are documented locally — Rick Gordon, for instance, joined as a MidlandToday account executive in January 2023 — and the site is financed by advertising and community sponsorships rather than subscriptions, with readers paying nothing.

Contact and Availability

Midland Today is free to read around the clock at midlandtoday.ca, with a free email newsletter each morning and stories available through the Village Media app and the site's social media accounts. News tips, community announcements and advertising inquiries can be directed through the contact channels on the website; Village Media's head office is at 298 Queen Street East, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.