About Barrie Today

Barrie Today

Overview

Barrie Today is an online-only news and information website for Barrie, Ontario, a city of 147,829 residents (2021 census) on Kempenfelt Bay at the western end of Lake Simcoe. Published at barrietoday.com by Village Media, the Sault Ste. Marie company behind a network of hyperlocal Ontario news sites, Barrie Today combines staff-written local reporting with community services such as obituaries, events listings, weather and reader polls, plus Ontario, national and world coverage supplied through the Village Media network and The Canadian Press. It is one of the network's flagship southern Ontario outlets and, since the closure of Barrie's daily newspaper in 2017, it has been the city's principal locally staffed newsroom.

History

Village Media launched BarrieToday.com in October 2015, part of the company's first wave of expansion beyond its northern Ontario base in Sault Ste. Marie, North Bay and Timmins. The site began publishing while Barrie still had a daily newspaper, the Barrie Examiner, a paper that dated to the nineteenth century and had published daily since 1958. That changed abruptly in late 2017: the Postmedia–Torstar newspaper swap that concluded on 27 November 2017 transferred the Examiner to Torstar, whose Metroland Media Group subsidiary announced the paper's closure effective immediately. Barrie Today, then two years old, was left as the city's main source of daily local journalism; the remaining Metroland weekly, the Barrie Advance, was folded into the regional Simcoe.com website and lost its print edition when Metroland ended printing of its community newspapers in September 2023.

Over the following decade Barrie Today grew into one of the larger local newsrooms in the Village Media network. Its reporting has received national recognition: at the 2025 Canadian Community Newsmedia Awards, reporter-photographer Kevin Lamb won first place for Best Feature Series for a series of articles putting a face on homelessness in Barrie, including his stories about a 75-year-old shed-dweller known locally as "Rick the Mayor"; Lamb was also nominated at the Digital Publishing Awards for best news coverage by a community publication for the same body of work.

Content and Coverage

The site's local file spans Barrie city council — including its coverage of the 2026 municipal election, the first run under a redrawn ward map with expanded boundaries following the city's annexation of land from Springwater and Oro-Medonte townships at the start of 2026 — along with Barrie Police Service news, courts, development and housing, education at Georgian College and area school boards, health care at Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre, and the city's waterfront and Kempenfelt Bay recreation scene. Sports coverage follows Barrie's junior hockey and school teams and the broader Simcoe County scene, and the site carries a substantial obituaries section, a community events calendar, and features such as its "Rooted" community storytelling strand.

Staff bylines in recent years include editor Raymond Bowe, reporter-photographer Kevin Lamb, reporters Ian McInroy and Jessica Owen, and court reporter Peter Robinson, whose coverage of the Norval Morrisseau art-fraud trial in a Barrie courtroom was featured on Village Media's Closer Look podcast. The podcast has returned to Barrie stories repeatedly: an April 2025 episode examined how the network's reporters chronicled the aftermath of the severe ice storm that damaged large parts of central Ontario days earlier, and an August 2025 episode walked through Barrie police charges arising from an investigation inside a controversial homeless encampment in the city — the same homelessness file on which Lamb's award-winning feature series reported. BarrieToday stories also feed the network's shared products: the Village Report stream of provincial and national stories, the Village Life lifestyle service, and the Closer Look podcast, in which Village Media journalists discuss major stories. A Community Leaders Program partners the site with local businesses and organizations to fund expanded community coverage, and the site's daily email newsletter mixes local headlines with obituaries, Village Report stories and upcoming events.

Audience and Reach

Barrie Today's potential audience begins with Barrie's 147,829 residents and a census metropolitan area of 212,856 people (2021), extending into surrounding Simcoe County communities such as Innisfil, Springwater and Oro-Medonte that look to Barrie as their regional centre. Village Media does not release audited audience figures for individual outlets, so no verified readership number exists for Barrie Today on its own. The figures the company cites are network-wide and self-reported: in a 2026 industry profile Village Media said its network reaches more than five million monthly readers and sends more than 450,000 daily newsletters across its publications, and chief executive Jeff Elgie estimated in 2023 that the company's own network generated about 40 million page views a month with more than 300,000 newsletter subscribers. Those totals describe the whole Village Media operation, not Barrie Today's share of it.

Digital Presence

Barrie Today has never had a print edition; it publishes only at barrietoday.com, on Village Media's proprietary Villager platform — software developed in Sault Ste. Marie that also runs dozens of other publishers' websites under licence in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Stories are posted throughout the day and distributed through the site's free daily newsletter, its social media accounts, and Spaces, the community social platform Village Media launched in late 2024. Reflecting Barrie's role as a regional centre — the terminus of GO Transit's Barrie rail line and a Highway 400 hub for Simcoe County — the site's homepage also surfaces news from neighbouring Village Media communities including Orillia, Collingwood and Innisfil, so Barrie readers can follow the wider region from one front page. The site runs contests and giveaways for registered readers under its BarrieToday+ banner, conducts reader polls through the network's Village IQ tool, and maintains active community sponsorships; Village Media's bulletins list BarrieToday backing events including the Chamber Barrie Business Awards in October 2025 and Barrie Housing, the Barrie Parkinson Walk and an ALS Canada event in September 2026.

Ownership and Organisation

Barrie Today's owner is Village Media Inc., a privately held company headquartered at 298 Queen Street East, Sault Ste. Marie. The business descends from SooToday, founded in 2000 by broadcaster Dick Peplow and acquired in stages by Jeff Elgie, an IT consultant who had been a minority investor; Elgie became chief executive after Peplow's death in 2007 and took majority control in 2012, and he and his family remain majority owners, with a small minority interest held by Glacier Media according to the Harvard Future of Media Project's Canadian Media Ownership Index. Elgie's approach — often described as keeping reporting local while centralizing technology, ad operations and product development — took the company from two northern sites to a network of more than 30 owned publications, including The Trillium, its Queen's Park politics outlet launched in 2023. Barrie Today's newsroom works to editor Raymond Bowe, with reporters and a photographer based in Barrie, regional and network support from Sault Ste. Marie, and sales staff selling to local advertisers; the site is free to readers and funded by advertising, sponsorships and programs such as the Community Leaders Program. In July 2026, Village Media announced a partnership with the Knight Foundation to launch 15 local newsrooms in the United States, its largest expansion beyond its Ontario base.

Contact and Availability

Barrie Today publishes free of charge at barrietoday.com and is updated daily. Readers can send news tips, submit events and obituaries, enter contests, and subscribe to the free daily newsletter through tools on the website, and can follow the outlet on its social media channels and in the Spaces community app. Barrie Today's publisher, Village Media, can be reached at its head office, 298 Queen Street East, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and through villagemedia.ca, which lists Barrie Today alongside the company's other Ontario publications.