About Napanee Guide

Napanee Guide

Overview

The Napanee Guide is a digital news outlet serving Greater Napanee and Lennox and Addington County in eastern Ontario, published by Postmedia Network. It descends from the weekly Napanee Guide newspaper founded in 1988, a free tabloid that for three decades was delivered to homes across the Napanee area every Thursday. The Guide's print edition ended in May 2020, when Postmedia closed or wound down 15 community newspapers during the COVID-19 advertising collapse — but the Guide was one of only two titles, along with the Paris Star, whose websites Postmedia deliberately kept alive. It has published online only ever since, at napaneeguide.com.

The inventory record behind this profile describes the Guide as an "independent community weekly," and both halves of that description are now wrong. The paper did begin as an independent publication in 1988, but it has belonged to national chains for roughly two decades — first Osprey Media, then Quebecor's Sun Media from 2007, then Postmedia from 2015. Nor is it any longer a weekly in print: its present form is a continuously updated website within Postmedia's community network. Napanee is unusual among small Ontario towns in supporting two newspaper brands — the Guide and The Napanee Beaver, the independent weekly founded in 1870 — and the Guide profiled here is the chain-owned, digital one of the pair.

History

The Napanee Guide was founded in 1988. Reference histories of the paper describe its trajectory as a passage "from an independent to a corporately owned publication and from a shopper to an award-winning newspaper": it began as a free-distribution advertising shopper and developed, over the 1990s and 2000s, into a tabloid weekly carrying a full local news file for Napanee and the surrounding Lennox and Addington communities. Its listed headquarters in its print years was Unit 11 at 2 Dairy Avenue in Napanee.

By the mid-2000s the Guide appeared in the published lists of Osprey Media's weekly newspapers, alongside eastern Ontario stablemates such as the Gananoque Reporter, the County Weekly News in Picton and Kingston This Week. Osprey was taken over by Quebecor in a deal accepted in July 2007, folding the Guide into Sun Media, and when Quebecor sold Sun Media's English-language papers to Postmedia — announced in October 2014 and closed on 13 April 2015 — the Guide became part of the Postmedia chain, where it remains.

The decisive break came in the spring of 2020. On 28 April 2020 Postmedia announced the permanent closure of 15 community newspapers in Manitoba and Ontario, citing the collapse of advertising revenue in the COVID-19 pandemic; about 30 employees were laid off. The Napanee Guide was on the Ontario list — but with a distinction reported at the time by CBC News and Media in Canada: while the other Ontario titles ceased operations entirely once their final print editions ran in the week of 4 May 2020, the Napanee Guide and the Paris Star "ceased their print editions, and are now online-only," in the words of the contemporary summary, with Postmedia confirming the two websites would remain. In December 2020 Postmedia underlined that decision by including The Napanee Guide in its launch of more than 80 redesigned community newspaper websites. Journalism credited to the Guide has continued to appear in the years since — Postmedia content monitoring in 2026 still lists The Napanee Guide among the outlets carrying the chain's reporting — making it a digital survivor of a print closure rather than a closed paper.

Programming and Content

In its print years the Guide covered the standard community-weekly territory of Greater Napanee: town council and Lennox and Addington County council, the Napanee District Secondary School and the area's elementary schools, minor hockey and other local sports, business openings, agricultural news from the surrounding county, obituaries, and the entertainment and events listings its "Guide" name promised. As a Postmedia community website, napaneeguide.com now presents the chain's standard mix: locally relevant municipal, court and police coverage for the Napanee area; regional reporting drawn from Postmedia's nearby newsrooms, principally the Kingston Whig-Standard and The Belleville Intelligencer; and provincial and national news, columns and service journalism produced centrally by Postmedia and published across its community sites.

Readers comparing Napanee's two papers should note the division between them. The Napanee Beaver — founded in 1870, owned for decades by the Morrison family and still independently owned — remains the town's print newspaper of record, published from Napanee. The Guide, by contrast, is the chain title: historically the free Thursday companion delivered alongside the Beaver, and today a digital brand whose local material is produced within Postmedia's regional structure rather than by a stand-alone Napanee newsroom.

Audience and Reach

Greater Napanee is the largest community and the administrative centre of Lennox and Addington County, set on Highway 401 between Kingston and Belleville, and the Guide's patch is the town together with the county's surrounding communities, including Deseronto, Odessa, Bath, Selby and the rural townships that shop, study and play in Napanee. In print the Guide was a free paper, distributed weekly on Thursdays — town references note it was distributed together with the Napanee Beaver — which gave it household reach across the community rather than a paid-subscription base. No audited circulation or web-traffic figure for the Guide is published in the sources used for this profile, and none is claimed; its audience today is the online readership of a small-city community site inside a national network, discovered largely through search, social sharing and the Postmedia platform.

Digital Presence

The Guide's home is napaneeguide.com, a Postmedia community website redesigned in the chain's December 2020 network relaunch and operated on the same platform as Postmedia's other Ontario community titles, with shared navigation, newsletters and social channels under the Napanee Guide name. The site is free to read. Because the Guide has no print edition, the website is the complete publication: there is no e-edition replica of a paper, and the brand exists only in this digital form and in the social feeds attached to it.

Ownership and Organisation

The Napanee Guide is owned by Postmedia Network Canada Corp. of Toronto, publisher of the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, the Kingston Whig-Standard, The Belleville Intelligencer and more than 130 print and digital titles; Postmedia is majority-owned by the American investment firm Chatham Asset Management. The Guide's chain of title runs from independent founding (1988), through Osprey Media in the 2000s, to Sun Media in Quebecor's 2007 Osprey takeover, and to Postmedia on the closing of the Sun Media sale on 13 April 2015. Reference listings name Aimee Pianosi as the Guide's editor and give its office as 2 Dairy Avenue, Unit 11, Napanee; those listings date from the paper's print era and should be re-verified against the live site before being relied on, since Postmedia now produces its community titles from regional hubs. Postmedia's head office is Postmedia Place, 365 Bloor Street East, Toronto.

Contact and Availability

The Napanee Guide is available free online at napaneeguide.com; there has been no print edition since May 2020 and no subscription is required. Readers, advertisers and news sources should use the contact channels published on the website itself for current newsroom and advertising information. The public business email field for this profile is intentionally left empty, in line with the directory's practice for chain community titles whose contact points are maintained centrally by the publisher.