About Bay Today

Bay Today

Overview

Bay Today is a digital-only local news website serving North Bay, Ontario, a city of 52,662 people (2021 census) on the shore of Lake Nipissing in northeastern Ontario. Published at baytoday.ca by Village Media, it is one of the oldest outlets in that company's network of hyperlocal Ontario news sites — in fact, one of the earliest web-only local news operations in Canada. Bay Today reports on North Bay and the surrounding Nipissing district with locally based journalists, and rounds out its service with obituaries, events, weather, contests and reader engagement programs, together with provincial, national and world news from the wider Village Media network and The Canadian Press.

History

Bay Today's origins are intertwined with those of Village Media itself. In 2000, former broadcaster Dick Peplow launched SooToday in Sault Ste. Marie, initially as a regional shopping and business directory, which turned to local news after regional television cutbacks consolidated northeastern Ontario newscasts in Sudbury. In 2003 Peplow extended the experiment north-east and launched BayToday.ca as SooToday's sister site in North Bay, at a time when daily, web-native local news was still a novelty in Canada. After Peplow's death in 2007, Jeff Elgie — an IT consultant who had been a minority investor in the business — increased his ownership, became chief executive and, by 2012, majority owner, building the two northern sites into the Village Media network.

For much of its history Bay Today was led editorially by Jeff Turl, whom a Village Media media kit of the mid-2010s credited with running a site that competed vigorously with local media and was often first to break North Bay news; Turl's byline continued to appear on Bay Today community stories into 2026. The site's sports coverage has long centred on the North Bay Battalion of the Ontario Hockey League and Nipissing University's Lakers teams, a beat the same media kit assigned to broadcast journalist Chris Dawson. As North Bay's legacy media contracted — CTV closed its North Bay location in 2020, a development Bay Today itself covered as the "end of an era," while the long-established North Bay Nugget continued under Postmedia — Bay Today settled into its role as the city's dedicated online newsroom alongside the Nugget.

Content and Coverage

Bay Today's everyday file covers North Bay city council and the councils of surrounding municipalities such as Callander, East Ferris and West Nipissing; police, fire and court news across the Nipissing district; Ontario Northland and the region's transportation links; mining, forestry and the northern economy; education at Nipissing University and Canadore College; health care; and an active outdoors and sports scene built around the Battalion, the Lakers, fishing on Lake Nipissing and winter recreation. The site also runs BayToday Cares, a community program fronted by a local Cares Team working with Village Media's marketing leadership, which spotlights non-profits, organizes Random Acts of Kindness and supports local fundraisers.

Its civic coverage is at its most intensive during elections. For North Bay's October 2026 municipal election, Bay Today published a reader poll on the five-candidate mayor's race on 16 October 2026 and promised live election-night coverage with a live blog, photographs and candidate interviews. Weeks earlier it had invited residents to apply for a BayToday Community Conversation, a virtual discussion panel whose findings the site said would guide its coverage priorities and its GoodWorks community programs. The everyday texture of the site is community news of the kind Turl's recent bylines illustrate — a Pregnancy Help and Resource Centre gala that raised more than $16,000 in May 2026, a local martial arts instructor's selection to Team Canada, and a long-running pike fishing tournament in nearby Sturgeon Falls — alongside breaking coverage such as its reporting on Chippewa Creek flooding that closed a major city roadway and filled homeowners' basements. Standard Village Media elements — a daily newsletter, obituaries, an events calendar, Village IQ reader polls, contests such as its 2026 summer camp giveaway, and the network's Village Report and Village Life streams — complete the mix.

Audience and Reach

Bay Today's home market is the City of North Bay's 52,662 residents within a census agglomeration of 71,736 (2021), and the City of North Bay's own community profile puts the wider regional trading area at roughly 112,000 people — the audience across the Nipissing district that shops, studies and seeks services in the city. Village Media publishes no audited readership figure for Bay Today individually. An older media kit from the mid-2010s promoted the site with marketing claims typical of that period, but those numbers are dated and were never independently audited. Current figures offered by the company are network-wide and self-reported: Village Media said in a 2026 industry profile that its network reaches more than five million monthly readers, sends more than 450,000 daily newsletters and owns 33 publications, and chief executive Jeff Elgie told Parliament's heritage committee in 2023 that the company then ran 25 publications with about 150 employees, 90 of them journalists. None of those totals is a measure of Bay Today's own audience.

Digital Presence

Bay Today publishes only online, at baytoday.ca, and has never had a print edition in its own right. It runs on Villager, the publishing platform Village Media built in Sault Ste. Marie and now licenses to other news publishers in Canada and abroad, and it is designed for reading on phones, tablets and desktops with updates throughout the day. Distribution extends through the site's email newsletters, its social media accounts (including its longstanding Facebook page and its NorthBayToday presence on X), and Spaces, the moderated local social networking platform Village Media began launching across its markets in late 2024, where North Bay residents join community groups moderated with the involvement of local journalists. The site's community presence is also physical: Village Media's bulletins record BayToday sponsoring North Bay initiatives including Hike for Hospice and a RAW youth mental health summit in October 2025, and the Bay Beats Fest and Near North Palliative Care in September 2026.

Ownership and Organisation

Bay Today is owned and operated by Village Media Inc., a privately held company headquartered at 298 Queen Street East, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Jeff Elgie, the chief executive who assembled the network after founder Dick Peplow's death, and his family are the majority owners; the Harvard Future of Media Project's Canadian Media Ownership Index records a small minority interest held by Glacier Media, with all shareholders Canadian. Village Media's structure concentrates technology, advertising operations, product and finance in Sault Ste. Marie while keeping editorial and sales staff in each market — in Bay Today's case, a North Bay newsroom whose reporting is supplemented by network resources, including Village Media's Queen's Park outlet The Trillium for provincial politics, and by The Canadian Press. The company describes itself as a community impact organization with journalism at its core, is a certified Ontario living-wage employer, and funds its free sites through local and network advertising and sponsorships. In July 2026 it announced, with the Knight Foundation, a plan to replicate the model in 15 American cities — a network that began, in part, with the 2003 launch of this North Bay site.

Contact and Availability

Bay Today is available free at baytoday.ca, updated daily. Readers can contact the newsroom, submit news tips, events and obituaries, apply to community programs such as the BayToday Community Conversation, and sign up for email newsletters through the website, and can follow the outlet through its social media accounts and the Spaces app. Its publisher, Village Media, is headquartered at 298 Queen Street East, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and lists Bay Today among its publications at villagemedia.ca.