About Toronto Today

Toronto Today

Overview

Toronto Today is Village Media's local news website for Toronto, Ontario — by far the largest market the Sault Ste. Marie-based network has attempted. Publishing at torontotoday.ca since October 2024, the site takes the hyperlocal formula Village Media built in mid-sized Ontario cities and applies it to downtown Toronto: staff-reported coverage of city hall and municipal politics, housing and rent disputes, transit and construction, crime and courts, arts and events, and the neighbour-versus-neighbour stories of a dense core city, in a municipality of 2,794,356 people at the 2021 census. Where Village's other sites typically serve a whole city, TorontoToday deliberately narrows its focus to downtown and its neighbourhoods, competing for attention in Canada's most crowded media market while leaving the suburban boroughs largely to others.

History

TorontoToday was the boldest step in Village Media's expansion beyond its northern and mid-sized Ontario base. The company grew from SooToday, founded by Dick Peplow in 2000, through a network of city sites run from Sault Ste. Marie, and reached the Toronto area's political core in February 2023 with The Trillium, its subscription publication covering Queen's Park. In September 2024, Village Media announced that TorontoToday would officially launch the following month, describing it publicly as the founding editor's biggest news venture for the company yet; the same announcement named Allison Smith — who had been leading the company's national team, assembling network-wide newsletters and podcasts — as founding editor, and confirmed that reporter Alex Flood was transferring from SooToday to join the launch team. The site went live in October 2024 with what Smith described in her own account of the launch as a "skeleton crew of two" putting out a high volume of content, and its first birthday was marked on 23 October 2025 with a reader celebration at Dark Horse Espresso Bar, one of the downtown coffee shops where the young newsroom had held "meet the TorontoToday team" gatherings about eight months after launch. The launch also coincided with Village Media's acquisition of the Queen's Park Today and Parliament Today newsletters, rebranded under The Trillium — a signal that Toronto was becoming the network's second centre of gravity alongside Sault Ste. Marie. The outlet remains active in the autumn of 2026, filing city hall and public-policy stories and representing the network at events such as CBC Toronto's This is Toronto programme.

Content and Coverage

TorontoToday's journalism is municipal to its core. Village Media's own anniversary summary credited the Toronto team with leading coverage of the City of Toronto's controversial "bubble zone" bylaw restricting protests near places of worship, schools and daycares, with being first to report a west-end café's fight with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency over its sale of Vegemite — a small-business story that escalated until Australia's prime minister weighed in — and with sustained attention to rent strikes and neighbour disputes across the downtown core. Founding editor Allison Smith's own reporting has included the city's homelessness count, which she reported had doubled in three and a half years, and rapid-turn explainers on transit decisions such as the RapidTO bus-priority plan. Staff writers cover the everyday mechanics of the megacity — public-health policy fights such as the 2026 dispute over a College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario complaint against a physician who had prescribed safer-supply opioids, the campaign for the October 2026 mayoral election, arts and festival life, real estate and construction, and good-news and human-interest stories gathered under the network's "Good News" label. City hall reporter Aidan Chamandy appeared as a Toronto Today panellist on CBC Toronto's This is Toronto in September 2026, discussing the mayoral campaign — evidence of the two-year-old outlet being treated as part of the city's established political-media conversation.

Audience and Reach

Toronto is Canada's largest city — 2,794,356 people at the 2021 census, within a census metropolitan area of more than 6.2 million — and its downtown — the site's chosen territory — packs in several hundred thousand residents plus a daily inflow of office workers, students, tourists and sports and concert crowds that no other Village Media market approaches. The audience is younger, more renter-heavy and more transit-dependent than the network's typical readership, and the site competes for it against the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, CBC Toronto, blogTO, NOW's successors, the National Post and dozens of neighbourhood newsletters and podcasts. Village Media publishes no independently verified readership figure for TorontoToday itself. The company's network claims — more than five million monthly readers, more than 450,000 daily newsletter subscribers and 33 publications in its own 2026 industry profile — describe Village Media in aggregate, are the company's own numbers, and should not be read as a Toronto audience measurement; no Toronto-specific circulation or traffic figure is asserted in this profile.

Digital Presence

TorontoToday is digital-only, built on Village Media's Villager platform and published at torontotoday.ca. It distributes stories through a free daily email newsletter, the Village Media app, social media accounts and Spaces, the company's community platform, and its headlines are carried by Canadian news aggregators — an October 2026 headlines digest, for example, listed multiple TorontoToday items among the day's Toronto stories. The newsroom also works in person: its reader meet-and-greets at Dark Horse Espresso Bar locations in 2025, and its first-birthday party there in October 2025, were part of a deliberate effort to give a digital outlet a physical presence in the neighbourhoods it covers. Like other Village sites, it supplements its own reporting with network content, including Village Report provincial and national stories and the company's podcasts.

Ownership and Organisation

TorontoToday is owned by Village Media Inc., headquartered at 298 Queen Street East, Sault Ste. Marie. The company's lineage runs from SooToday, started by Dick Peplow in 2000 as a local shopping and business directory that grew into a hyperlocal news site; chief executive Jeff Elgie, initially a minority investor, took over after Peplow's death in 2007 and majority ownership in 2012, and Village Media was established under that name in 2013. TorontoToday's founding editor was Allison Smith, recruited from the company's national newsletter and podcast operation; reporter Alex Flood transferred from SooToday for the launch, and Aidan Chamandy was reporting from city hall by 2026. The Toronto launch came as the company was scaling up on several fronts at once: in 2026 Village Media announced a Knight Foundation partnership, supported by a US$5 million commitment, to carry its model into the United States with 15 newsrooms in three states, beginning in Wisconsin. The outlet is free to readers and funded by advertising, partnerships and community sponsorships, which in September 2026 included ALS Canada, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the Cabbagetown Festival, Childhood Cancer Canada, Live Loud, Music For Every Child, Tapestry Opera, the Word on the Street festival and the World of Jazz festival, and in February 2026 the Open-Ice Initiative — a sponsor list that maps closely onto the downtown arts and charitable scene the site covers.

Contact and Availability

Toronto Today can be read free of charge at any hour at torontotoday.ca, with stories published daily, a free email newsletter, and access through the Village Media app, the site's social accounts and its Spaces community. News tips and reader submissions can be sent through the website's contact channels, and advertising inquiries are handled through the site or Village Media's head office at 298 Queen Street East, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.