About New Tecumseth Times

New Tecumseth Times

Overview

The New Tecumseth Times is a weekly community newspaper based in Beeton, Ontario, serving the Town of New Tecumseth in southern Simcoe County. The municipality it covers is made up of the urban centres of Alliston, Beeton and Tottenham together with the surrounding rural countryside, and the Times reports on the full life of that municipality: town council and planning decisions, local schools, minor and junior sports, agricultural and community events, faith life, anniversaries, obituaries and the everyday milestones of a fast-growing part of the Greater Toronto Area's northern fringe. It is one of the smallest newspapers in the Ontario Community Newspapers Association (OCNA) directory, which currently lists its circulation at 1,100 copies, yet it remains the dedicated print voice of record for the communities of New Tecumseth. The paper is published from Beeton, one of the town's historic village centres, and is part of a small family of community weeklies whose business offices have long been shared between Beeton and nearby Bolton.

History

Beeton has a newspaper tradition far older than the Times itself. The Town of New Tecumseth's Downtown Beeton Heritage Conservation District Study records that printer D.A. Jones was persuaded to move his newspaper to Beeton because the village needed an outlet for local advertising, and that Jones's paper, the Beeton World, remained in print until 1968. The Times is a separate and much later publication. Surviving issues reproduced online show the paper well established by the early 2010s: the edition of Thursday, July 17, 2014 was numbered Volume 40, Issue 29, a volume count pointing to origins in the mid-1970s, and single copies then sold for $1.50. That 2014 masthead gave the paper's weekly circulation as 2,000 and carried a Publications Mail Agreement return address at 34 Main Street West in Beeton. It also acknowledged the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage, a federal program that supports Canadian print magazines and non-daily newspapers. A 2013 masthead from its sister paper, the King Weekly Sentinel, identifies the publisher as Simcoe-York Printing & Publishing Limited, publisher of the New Tecumseth Times, the King Weekly Sentinel and the Innisfil Scope, working alongside Caledon Publishing Ltd., publisher of the Caledon Citizen. The OCNA's current member directory groups the Times under London Publishing. Through the 2010s the paper's advertising and administration head office remained at 34 Main Street West in Beeton, while the group's business offices operated from 25 Queen Street North in Bolton, an office shared with the Caledon Citizen.

Programming and Content

The Times follows the classic Ontario community weekly formula of council-first local journalism. Its news pages are built around New Tecumseth council and committee meetings, municipal services, road and water works, development proposals and the decisions of Simcoe County and the school boards that serve the area. Coverage extends to Canadian Forces Base Borden, the large military base just west of the town: in August 2026 the paper reported on the change of command at the base, when an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran took over as commander on July 29. Community reporting covers events such as the Tottenham Bluegrass Festival and the Beeton Fall Fair, church and religion columns, school news and reader milestones. Sports coverage centres on local teams and athletes from Alliston, Beeton and Tottenham. Opinion and feature writing are part of the mix, including regular columns by contributors drawn from across the publishing group; in October 2026, for example, columns by Mark Pavilons, the editor of the King Weekly Sentinel, and a seasonal column by Brock Weir appeared under the Times' banner, reflecting the shared editorial resources of the sister papers. The paper has also hosted a reporter under the Local Journalism Initiative, the federally funded program administered for community media: News Media Canada's list of host organizations describes the New Tecumseth Times position as a "New Tecumseth Hyper Local Community Newspaper Reporter," and reporter Brian Lockhart has covered the community under that program, including arts and entertainment reporting recognized by the OCNA.

Audience and Reach

The Times circulates within the Town of New Tecumseth, whose population is concentrated in Alliston, the municipality's largest and fastest-growing centre, with smaller communities in Beeton, Tottenham and the rural concessions between them. Distribution figures have changed over time: the paper's own masthead stated a weekly circulation of 2,000 in 2014, while the OCNA's member directory currently lists the Times at 1,100 copies per edition, placing it in the association's smallest circulation class. The same 2014 masthead advertised a combined weekly circulation of 49,000 across the publisher's titles, a group figure rather than a measure of the Times alone. Despite its small scale, the paper's standing in the industry is documented by the OCNA's Better Newspapers Competition: Brian Lockhart was a finalist in the Premier Award for Arts & Entertainment writing at the 2025 competition for his work in the Times, and OCNA's published general excellence results placed the paper sixth in its class for newspapers with a circulation of 1,500 and under. The paper also continues to serve as a vehicle for official notices; it appears in the Ontario Courts' list of newspapers and publications for the Beeton and New Tecumseth area, and it was included in a March 2026 Government of Ontario advertising placement covering community newspapers across the province.

Digital Presence

The Times publishes online at newtectimes.com, where its local stories, columns and community coverage are posted for readers beyond the print run. Its reporting is tracked by the media-monitoring service Muck Rack, which carried Times items dated through October 2026, and its stories are picked up by news aggregation services, confirming that the website is actively maintained alongside the print edition. The digital edition extends the paper's reach to former residents and to the growing number of New Tecumseth households in new subdivisions around Alliston and Tottenham who follow municipal news online.

Ownership and Organisation

The publisher of record on the paper's print mastheads is Simcoe-York Printing & Publishing Limited, and the OCNA directory currently lists the Times under the London Publishing group, alongside sister weeklies that include the Caledon Citizen, the King Weekly Sentinel and others in the Bolton-area family of papers. The group's structure is that of a classic small-chain operation: a head office in Beeton handling advertising and administration for the Times, shared business offices in Bolton, and editorial staff whose work appears across more than one title. Mark Pavilons, editor of the King Weekly Sentinel, is among the group's senior editorial figures whose columns appear in the Times. In the mid-2010s the group's mastheads listed advertising, graphic design and business staff working across the titles from the Beeton and Bolton offices, including designers Lisa Clendening and John Speziali and business office staff Janice Coté, Sylvia DeShane and Mary Speck. The paper is a member of the Ontario Community Newspapers Association and has participated in national community newspaper programs, including the Canada Periodical Fund and the Local Journalism Initiative.

Contact and Availability

The New Tecumseth Times is published weekly in print and distributed in Alliston, Beeton, Tottenham and the surrounding area of the Town of New Tecumseth, with current stories also available on its website. Its head office address, as printed in its masthead, is 34 Main Street West, Beeton, Ontario. The telephone numbers published by the paper are 905-729-2287 and the toll-free line 1-888-559-2287. Readers can reach the wider group's business office in Bolton through the shared numbers long printed in the sister papers' mastheads. Story ideas, community announcements and advertising inquiries are handled through the Beeton office and the paper's website.