About North Grenville Times

North Grenville Times

Overview

The North Grenville Times is a locally owned weekly community newspaper serving Kemptville and the Municipality of North Grenville in eastern Ontario, south of Ottawa. Delivered free to homes across the municipality every Wednesday, it covers North Grenville council, community events, schools, local business, agriculture and sport in one of the faster-growing rural municipalities on the edge of the National Capital Region. The paper is published by North Grenville Times Inc. from Kemptville, the municipality's largest community, and it operates alongside a sister weekly, the North Dundas Times, serving the neighbouring municipality of North Dundas.

The Times had its beginnings not as a commercial newspaper but as a monthly community newsletter, and it retains the ethos of that origin. Its long-time editor, David Shanahan, described its founding idea to the Rotary Club of Kemptville as "a truly local community paper" — local in content and open to the community — and summed up its role as "the voice of the people." That formula has carried the paper from a newsletter into an award-winning weekly recognized nationally for its editorial writing.

History

The North Grenville Times grew out of a monthly newsletter co-founded by Marguerite "Maggie" Boyer, a Kemptville community builder whose role in starting the publication was later cited by the Municipality of North Grenville when it named her its 2026 Citizen of the Year: she "co-founded the North Grenville monthly newsletter and helped grow it into the now valued weekly newspaper, the North Grenville Times." The paper was in print by November 2013, when the North Grenville Historical Society was already citing its back issues as a record of local events, and by August 2014 it had become a weekly.

In August 2014, editor David Shanahan told the Rotary Club of Kemptville about the ups and downs of running the paper and how it had become a weekly publication. At that point, he reported, about 7,000 papers were distributed each week, the paper employed four to five paid staff, and it was paying for itself. In November 2024, the Rotary Club marked its own 90th anniversary by presenting Paul Harris Fellowships to Shanahan and Boyer for their ongoing support of the club and the community through the Times.

The model developed in Kemptville was later extended south. In November 2020 the company launched the North Dundas Times, a sister weekly for the neighbouring municipality of North Dundas, produced by the same Kemptville-based team; when the younger paper opened a public office in the North Dundas Business Centre in Winchester after nearly three years of publication, it noted that its sister paper in North Grenville had by then been serving Kemptville and area for over ten years. The two papers share staff and resources, and their combined operation is run from the North Grenville Times' Kemptville base. Their community role extends beyond reporting: after a fire destroyed the House of Lazarus food bank in South Mountain in April 2023, the Times joined the local recovery effort with a $1,000 donation, explaining that because the paper serves both municipalities, it was important for it to be part of the recovery as well.

Programming and Content

The Times' editorial content is built around the civic life of North Grenville. Council and municipal affairs are a staple, alongside coverage of community organizations, service clubs, schools such as North Grenville District High School and the Kemptville Campus, local business openings and closings, agricultural news from the surrounding farm country, minor sports, and the round of fairs, fundraisers and celebrations that structure small-town life. Letters to the editor and guest columns give residents a direct route into its pages, in keeping with its community-newsletter roots.

Two features distinguish the paper. The first is its editorial page. Editor David Shanahan's editorials have been recognized at the national level: at the 2025 CCNAwards, presented by News Media Canada, the North Grenville Times took second place in the Best National Editorial class for papers of its circulation size with Shanahan's "Reconciliation: more than one day a year," and third place in the Best Local Editorial class with his "Homeward bound." The second is its attention to local history: Shanahan writes historical features drawing on the area's past — settlement-era council politics, the coming of the railway, the history of Canada Day itself — that connect present-day North Grenville to its nineteenth-century roots as the village of Kemptville and the township of Oxford-on-Rideau. Reporters such as Brandon Mayer, who was identified as editor of the Times in 2023 and whose reporting appears in both the North Grenville and North Dundas editions, round out the newsroom's coverage of day-to-day events in both municipalities.

Audience and Reach

The Times is distributed free of charge across the Municipality of North Grenville, delivered every Wednesday. The Ontario Community Newspapers Association's member directory lists its circulation at 8,300 copies per edition, with no publishing group — the mark of an independent, locally owned paper. A decade earlier, the paper itself reported distributing about 7,000 copies a week. No independently audited figures are published for the paper, so the directory listing and the paper's own earlier account are the available measures of its reach.

Its market is the municipality of North Grenville — Kemptville, Oxford Mills, Burritts Rapids and the surrounding rural area in the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville — where it is the community's own newspaper in a media environment otherwise dominated by outlets from Ottawa and Brockville.

Digital Presence

The paper's website, ngtimes.ca, serves both the North Grenville Times and its sister North Dundas Times. Full editions of the papers have been posted to the site as downloadable PDF issues, allowing readers to page through the complete print newspaper online, and editions have also been published as digital flipbooks on the Issuu platform, where the Times maintained an archive of its 2023 issues and earlier. Its articles are additionally tracked by media monitoring services such as Muck Rack, which indexes the bylines of its reporting staff.

Ownership and Organisation

The North Grenville Times is locally owned and is published by North Grenville Times Inc. of Kemptville. The company's masthead has given its mailing address as P.O. Box 1854, Kemptville, Ontario, K0G 1J0, with its office reachable at 613-215-0735. The same company publishes the sister North Dundas Times, and the two papers share a Kemptville-based team across editorial, production, marketing and sales, and accounting functions; mastheads for the operation have named Pat Jessop in accounting and Peter Peers in sales management, with reporter Brandon Mayer — by 2023 identified as editor of the Times — among the editorial staff. David Shanahan has been the paper's editor and public face since its early years as a weekly, while co-founder Maggie Boyer remained closely associated with the paper's community role. The paper is a member of the Ontario Community Newspapers Association and competes in the Canadian Community Newspaper Awards, where its 2025 editorial wins confirmed its standing among Canada's community weeklies.

Contact and Availability

The North Grenville Times is published weekly and delivered free across the Municipality of North Grenville each Wednesday. Its publisher is North Grenville Times Inc., P.O. Box 1854, Kemptville, Ontario, K0G 1J0, and its office telephone number, as printed in its masthead, is 613-215-0735. The paper's website is ngtimes.ca. No public business email address is published for the paper.