About ExploreClarion

ExploreClarion

ExploreClarion, published at exploreclarion.com, is a hyperlocal online news site covering Clarion County in western Pennsylvania. It is the flagship of EYT Media Group, the Clarion-based digital publisher founded in 2010 by Jake and Joanne Bauer, and it describes itself as Clarion County's number one source for news and information. ExploreClarion publishes free, all-local coverage — breaking news, police and fire calls, courts, county and borough government, schools, high school sports, obituaries, weather and community events — for a rural county that traditional media increasingly overlook. It is a member outlet of the Pennsylvania Independent News Association.

Location and Coverage Area

ExploreClarion is based in Clarion, the borough that serves as the county seat of Clarion County, about 77 miles north-northeast of Pittsburgh along the Clarion River. Clarion was settled in 1839 and incorporated in 1841, had a population of 3,931 at the 2020 census, and is home to PennWest Clarion and the annual Autumn Leaf Festival. EYT's contact address for the network is on Main Street in Clarion. The site's coverage follows the county's communities and institutions: the borough and township governments, the county courthouse, area school districts, PennWest Clarion, Clarion's Main Street businesses, and the outdoor life of the Clarion River and nearby Cook Forest that drives much of the county's tourism.

The Founding of EYT Media in 2010

ExploreClarion's parent, EYT Media Group — originally Explore Your Town, Inc. — was founded in Clarion in 2010 by Jake and Joanne Bauer. Jake Bauer serves as the company's president. Joanne Bauer, its vice president and co-founder, brought a background spanning insurance marketing, education and digital media: an alumna of North Clarion Junior/Senior High School, she worked in marketing at a local fire insurance company, earned a degree in English education at Clarion University, taught English and journalism at Youngsville High School, and accumulated more than two decades of editing experience before turning to digital publishing. The Bauers' stated mission was to bring news to areas often overlooked by traditional media — a mission ExploreClarion, as the network's original home-county site, embodies most directly.

Growth into the County's Most-Read News Site

By 2014, when EYT announced its expansion into Jefferson County, it reported that exploreClarion.com and its sister site exploreVenango.com had become the most visited local news websites in their respective counties, together accumulating more than 1.2 million pageviews a month. That position — the default news homepage for its county — is the site's defining achievement. In a market anchored by a borough of under four thousand people, ExploreClarion built a daily audience by publishing the full record of county life at internet speed: scanner-level police and fire news, meeting coverage, school news and sports, submitted community items and job listings, all free to read and heavily shared on social media.

What ExploreClarion Covers

The site's editorial formula is comprehensive localism. Its daily mix includes breaking public-safety news from across Clarion County, court and police reports, county commissioners and borough council actions, school district news, obituaries, weather, classifieds and an active local jobs board. Sports are a pillar: EYT built a dedicated sports department whose coverage of District 9 high school athletics — football, basketball and more — includes live video broadcasts, and its sports operation grew from the D9Sports tradition that EYT later folded into its exploreSports brand. Community coverage extends to signature county events such as Clarion's Autumn Leaf Festival, with its week of parades, crafters' days and fiddlers' contests each October, and to outdoor life along the Clarion River and in Cook Forest State Park, which sits partly in the county.

The EYT Network Around It

ExploreClarion is the home site of a network that EYT's own about page lists as exploreClarion, exploreVenango, exploreJefferson, explore814, exploreSports (formerly D9 Sports) and CookForest.com, drawing, by the company's current account, more than three million visits a month across the network, with more than 100,000 followers across its Facebook pages. Earlier company descriptions put the network at more than a million users a month and described an EYT Radio Network broadcasting local shows and sports online. For ExploreClarion readers, the network matters practically: stories from neighboring counties appear alongside Clarion news, Clarion stories travel to diaspora readers in Pittsburgh, Erie, Philadelphia and beyond, and shared reporting, photography and sales staffs let a small-county site operate with a larger newsroom's resources.

How the Site Reaches Readers

EYT describes social media, Facebook in particular, as its lifeline to the community and its principal conduit for sharing stories and breaking news. Its reporters aim to be first on the scene — structure fires, crashes, games — delivering coverage in near-real time through photos, video and live broadcasts. That model suits Clarion County's geography: a dispersed rural readership that may not see a printed paper daily but follows its county continuously by phone. The company has also treated its audience as a conversation, soliciting tips, photos and community submissions, and its sites carry reader content such as the county photo features that recur across the network.

Business Model and Staffing

ExploreClarion is advertising-supported and free to readers. EYT sells local businesses integrated campaigns across its sites, its online radio and email newsletters, with advertised entry rates far below traditional print and radio. The company has repeatedly recruited full-time reporters, editors and sports staff for its Clarion County operations — postings over the years have sought reporters based in Shippenville and editors to manage daily content flow, court coverage and social media — evidence that the flagship site supports a standing professional newsroom rather than a hobby blog. Sales staff cover a multi-county western Pennsylvania territory from the Clarion base. The network's commercial team includes client success managers with long regional business backgrounds — one joined after a decade in business development and marketing at a federal credit union, another brought nearly three decades of sales experience when he arrived in 2017 — a structure that treats advertiser relationships as a standing department rather than an afterthought, and that helps explain how a free news site in a small county sustains paid reporting staff.

Professional Standing

ExploreClarion is listed among the member outlets of the Pennsylvania Independent News Association, the statewide association of independent news organizations — a notable affiliation for a commercial hyperlocal site, and one it shares in this batch with fellow Pennsylvania independents such as Saucon Source, LebTown and NorthcentralPA.com. Its parent presents the network as western Pennsylvania's premier publisher of hyperlocal news for underserved communities, and within Clarion County that claim is grounded in the audience figures the company has reported since 2014.

ExploreClarion Today

Fifteen years after EYT's founding, ExploreClarion remains the network's home-county anchor: a free, advertising-supported daily covering a county seat with a university, a courthouse, a famous fall festival and a river, for readers who mostly encounter it through Facebook and search. Its significance in the Pennsylvania news landscape is structural as much as editorial. As legacy newspapers retracted across rural western Pennsylvania, EYT's about page argues, outlets like ExploreClarion stepped in to fill the void with an all-local approach — no national filler, just the county's own news. For Clarion County, that site is the one that bears its name — and the one its residents check first.