About Amherstburg River Town Times

Amherstburg River Town Times

Overview

The Amherstburg River Town Times is an independent community weekly newspaper serving Amherstburg, a town of about 23,500 people (2021 census) on the Detroit River in Essex County, in Ontario's far southwest. Published on Wednesdays in print and continuously online at rivertowntimes.com, it is the town's established community newspaper, covering town council and municipal business, local schools, minor and high-school sports, heritage, faith and community life, obituaries and the small-business life of a historic border town. The paper is a member of the Ontario Community Newspapers Association (OCNA), which lists it without a publishing group — the directory marker of an independent — and credits its edition with a circulation of 9,478.

Amherstburg is a border community across the Detroit River from Michigan, shaped by Fort Malden National Historic Site and its role as a terminus of the Underground Railroad, commemorated by the Amherstburg Freedom Museum — a heritage identity that runs through the paper's coverage. The byline and editorial voice most closely identified with the paper is Ron Giofu, whose reporting anchors its council, election and community coverage and whose editorials speak in the paper's first person. In 2022 the Amherstburg Chamber of Commerce gave Giofu its Community Service/Involvement honour at its 17th annual Business Excellence Awards, a recognition of the paper's civic role in the town it covers.

History

Amherstburg has one of the longest newspaper traditions in Ontario. The town's first paper, the Amherstburg Courier, was founded on March 10, 1849 by James Augustus Reeves, with the poet Charles Sangster briefly among its early editors, according to the University of Windsor's INK newspaper-history project; Reeves died only seven months after the launch. The title most associated with the town for more than a century was the Amherstburg Echo, established in 1874. The Echo was run by the Marsh family until 1981, then sold to John and Linda James, and sold again in the early 1990s to Bowes Publishers Limited, later part of Sun Media, which closed it on October 25, 2012, ending a 138-year run.

No founding date for the River Town Times itself was located in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is asserted here. What the record shows is a paper well established in the town's civic life by the 2010s: the Marsh Historical Collection, the local archives, listed the Echo and the River Town Times among the Amherstburg newspapers in its holdings in the Ontario Historical Society's September 2017 bulletin, and full Wednesday print editions from 2021 survive in community partners' archives, showing a mature weekly with staff-written local reporting throughout. Following the Echo's 2012 closure, the River Town Times stood as the community weekly of record for Amherstburg, a position it continues to hold.

Programming and Content

The paper's core beats are municipal government, education, sports and community life. Its town-hall coverage follows council decisions, budgets, accessibility disputes and development debates, and it reports the area's school news in detail, including the October 2026 race for the Greater Essex County District School Board trustee seat representing Amherstburg and LaSalle, in which three candidates filed after the incumbent, Chandrika Abhang, chose not to run again — a story the paper covered candidate by candidate.

Election coverage is a signature effort. For the October 26, 2026 municipal election, the River Town Times posed six identical questions to all 20 candidates running in Amherstburg — for mayor, deputy mayor and councillor — publishing three answers per candidate in its October 14 print edition and all six online, and it reported the Amherstburg Chamber of Commerce's all-candidates nights of October 7 and 8, 2026, including the mayoral and deputy-mayoral debates at the McGregor Columbian Club. An editorial the same month urged residents of every age to vote, noting that turnout in the 2022 municipal election had been roughly 39 per cent.

Sports coverage centres on local teams such as the North Star Wolves senior football team, whose October 2026 games at the Libro Centre the paper reported in detail, and on the town's high schools, including St. Thomas of Villanova. Its reporting also reaches into the surrounding county: a July 2026 story quoted a former Amherstburg restaurateur announcing a run for town council, and in October 2026 it reported a Harrow family's account of a fatal dog attack. Heritage and community features are a further strand: the paper has covered the Marsh Historical Collection's downtown heritage walks through the Ramsay, Murray, Dalhousie and Richmond Street blocks, the town's Open Air Weekends street closures — a recurring subject of local debate that other town commentators cite the paper's reporting on — the competing Halloween displays on McLellan Avenue, church and service-club news, and the everyday record of births, milestones and obituaries expected of a community weekly.

Audience and Reach

The OCNA member directory credits the River Town Times edition with a circulation of 9,478 — a figure presented here as the association's directory listing, not an audited count. Its market is the Town of Amherstburg, whose population was 23,524 in the 2021 census, together with readers in the surrounding Essex County communities its coverage touches, including neighbouring LaSalle, which shares school-board representation with Amherstburg. The paper's agenda-setting role in the town is visible in how often others build on its work: The Burg Watch, a long-running local civic blog, has cited the River Town Times' reporting for years — from a 2015 town debate over Miracle League billboards to its coverage of the Open Air Weekends survey — treating the weekly's articles as the starting point for public discussion. The Marsh Historical Collection, Amherstburg's community archives, likewise preserves the paper among the local newspapers in its holdings, the archival mark of a paper of record.

Digital Presence

The paper publishes at rivertowntimes.com, where stories appear online alongside the Wednesday print edition; during the 2026 election the website carried the complete candidate question-and-answer material that space limited in print. Journalist-tracking services such as Muck Rack index its reporters' output, and regional news aggregators pick up its stories, extending its reporting beyond the town. Its print operation has also included a commercial printing sideline: a July 2021 edition carried the paper's own advertising for design and print work offered as a division of the River Town Times.

Ownership and Organisation

The River Town Times is independently owned and operated in Amherstburg. The OCNA directory lists no publishing group for the title, and the paper operates from its own office in the town's downtown with a small staff of journalists, editors and production personnel. Ron Giofu is its leading journalist and editorial voice, writing news, features, sports and the paper's editorials; his 2022 Chamber of Commerce community-service award was given for his work with the paper. The business also offers commercial printing through its in-house division, a traditional sideline for small-town newspaper offices.

Contact and Availability

The River Town Times office is at Unit 9, 80 Richmond Street, Amherstburg, Ontario N9V 1E9, listed in the Town of Amherstburg's business directory with hours of Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and telephone 519-736-4175 — the same number the paper prints for its office and printing division. A published sales email address, sales@rivertowntimes.com, appeared in the paper's own print editions. The weekly print edition appears on Wednesdays, and current stories are available at rivertowntimes.com.