About ExploreVenango

ExploreVenango

ExploreVenango, published at explorevenango.com, is a hyperlocal online news site covering Venango County in northwestern Pennsylvania. Operated by EYT Media Group, the Clarion-based digital publisher founded in 2010 by Jake and Joanne Bauer, it was one of the network's two original county sites, alongside exploreClarion, and had become the most visited local news website in Venango County by 2014. Based for directory purposes in Oil City, the county's largest city, it publishes free local news, police and fire calls, courts, government, schools, sports, obituaries, weather and community features for the historic oil-region county anchored by Franklin and Oil City. Its sister sites include exploreClarion and exploreJeffersonPA.

Location and Coverage Area

Venango County sits in northwestern Pennsylvania, created on March 12, 1800 from parts of Allegheny and Lycoming counties; its name derives from the Indigenous name for French Creek. Its county seat is Franklin, laid out in 1795 at the site of Fort Franklin and named for Benjamin Franklin, incorporated as a borough in 1828 and as a city in 1868. Its other principal city is Oil City, at the junction of Oil Creek and the Allegheny River, settled in 1825 and transformed after 1860 when its oil wells were developed — the petroleum boom that made this corner of Pennsylvania the birthplace of the American oil industry. ExploreVenango's coverage follows both cities and the county between them: Franklin's courthouse and county government, Oil City's schools, council and riverfront, and smaller communities including Cranberry, Seneca, Sugarcreek, Emlenton, Cooperstown and Pleasantville.

Origins within EYT Media

ExploreVenango belongs to the first generation of EYT Media. The company — Explore Your Town, Inc., now EYT Media Group — was founded in Clarion in 2010 by Jake and Joanne Bauer to bring news to areas overlooked by traditional media. The explorevenango.com domain itself was registered on November 12, 2010, in the company's founding season, initially under the Bauers' Dagny Design Group in Clarion. By the time EYT announced its Jefferson County expansion in May 2014, it presented exploreVenango as one of its two proven sites: exploreClarion.com and exploreVenango.com, the company said, had become the most visited local news websites in their respective counties, together accumulating more than 1.2 million pageviews a month. That track record in Venango County was the evidence EYT used to justify launching a third county site.

The County It Covers: Oil Country

Venango County's identity gives ExploreVenango a distinctive news diet. This is the Oil Region: Franklin and Oil City grew rich in the nineteenth-century petroleum boom, and the county's historic districts, Victorian architecture and oil heritage remain central to its economy and self-image, alongside French Creek and the Allegheny River, which anchor its outdoor tourism. The county's older newspaper tradition — The Derrick of Oil City, a daily with roots in the oil era, and Franklin's News-Herald — long defined local coverage, and ExploreVenango grew up as the free, digital-first alternative beside them, publishing at scanner speed for readers who increasingly got their news from phones and Facebook rather than a delivered paper.

What ExploreVenango Covers

The site's formula matches its network: all local, all free, updated through the day. Its sections and recurring content include police and fire calls from across the county, court news, Venango County commissioners and city government in Franklin and Oil City, school district news and high school sports, obituaries, a seven-day county weather forecast, business and jobs coverage, and community features such as its Venango County Photo of the Day, which showcases reader and staff photography of the county's rivers, wildlife and small towns. Network reporting regularly appears on its pages under the EYT byline — ceremonies at the Franklin VFW honoring Vietnam veterans, dairy-farm and agriculture stories, school and civic events from one end of the county to the other — reflecting the shared newsroom behind the county brand.

The EYT Network Around It

ExploreVenango is one of six properties EYT lists in its current network — exploreClarion, exploreVenango, exploreJefferson, explore814, exploreSports (previously D9 Sports) and CookForest.com — which the company says draws more than three million visits a month with more than 100,000 followers across its Facebook pages. Earlier company descriptions put the network above a million users monthly and included the EYT Radio Network, broadcasting local shows and sports. The company's hiring has at times been based partly in Seneca, in Venango County, for reporters and editors serving the network. For ExploreVenango, the network cuts both ways beneficially: Clarion-based resources support Venango coverage, while Venango stories reach the wider regional audience, including former residents in Pittsburgh, Erie and beyond whom EYT specifically counts among its readers.

How It Reaches Readers

EYT describes social media as its lifeline and its principal conduit for sharing stories and breaking news, and ExploreVenango follows that playbook: Facebook drives much of its traffic, and its reporters aim to be first on scene — fires, crashes, games — with photos, video and live broadcasts in near-real time. The company frames that immediacy as a service rare in communities underserved by traditional outlets, and positions the site as the primary news outlet in its county for many residents. EYT also stresses that engagement runs both ways: readers supply tips, photographs and conversation, so the site functions partly as a community forum as well as a newsroom, a relationship the company credits with making its outlets part of daily life in their counties. Its tagline across search listings states the ambition plainly: Venango County's number one source for news and information.

Sports and the District 9 Connection

Sports coverage is a network pillar that shapes ExploreVenango's offering. EYT absorbed D9Sports, the long-running site covering athletics in Pennsylvania's District 9 — in its sixteenth year of operation when EYT promoted it in 2016 — and rebranded the operation as exploreSports, staffing a sports department of veteran broadcasters and reporters to cover high school football, basketball and other sports across the region, including live video. Venango County's schools — Franklin, Oil City, Cranberry and their rivals — sit inside that District 9 footprint, so ExploreVenango readers get their local teams covered both as county news and within one of rural Pennsylvania's deepest high school sports operations.

Business Model

ExploreVenango is advertising-supported and free to read. EYT sells integrated advertising across its websites, online radio and newsletters to businesses throughout western Pennsylvania, promoting rates significantly below traditional print and radio, with packages advertised from a few hundred dollars a month. Its sales operation has recruited representatives to cover a territory including Venango, Clarion, Crawford, Forest, Elk, Jefferson and Mercer counties. The commercial logic mirrors the editorial one: a county too small to sustain multiple traditional outlets can sustain a digital one whose costs — reporting, photography, sales — are shared across a multi-county network.

ExploreVenango Today

More than a decade after EYT's founding, ExploreVenango continues as Venango County's county-branded EYT site: Franklin's courthouse, Oil City's streets, the county's schools, churches, fire halls and river valleys, covered daily by a network newsroom based in neighboring Clarion County. Its history is the proof-of-concept chapter of the EYT story — one of the two original sites whose reported traffic leadership in its county justified everything the Bauers built afterward. In a county whose name the world associates with the first oil boom, ExploreVenango's role is a modern echo: extracting, refining and delivering the county's most renewable local resource, its own news.