About Newmarket Today

Newmarket Today

Overview

Newmarket Today is an online-only local news website serving Newmarket, Ontario, a fast-growing York Region town of 87,942 residents (2021 census) centred on historic Main Street and the Holland River. Published at newmarkettoday.ca by Village Media, the Sault Ste. Marie company that operates a network of hyperlocal news sites across Ontario, Newmarket Today provides daily coverage of town council and York Region government, development and housing, police and fire services, schools, health care, business, sports and community life. It mixes original reporting by its own Newmarket newsroom with community services — obituaries, events listings, weather and classified-style community posts — and with provincial, national and world news supplied through the Village Media network and The Canadian Press. The site is free to read and is supported by local advertising and sponsorships.

History

Village Media launched NewmarketToday in September 2018, extending the company's model of digital-only local newsrooms from northern and central Ontario into York Region. The timing mattered: Newmarket still had a legacy weekly newspaper, the Newmarket Era, a Metroland Media title whose roots reached back to the nineteenth century, but print journalism in the town was already thinning, and Village built its newsroom around a veteran of that older world. Editor Debora Kelly, a longtime York Region journalist who had previously served as a newspaper editor-in-chief in the community and was known for advocacy reporting on poverty and homelessness — work connected to the creation of Belinda's Place, York Region's first emergency and transitional housing facility for women, which opened in 2015 — was in place as the site's editor by the early 2020s and was still being described by Village Media as the editor at the helm in 2023.

By its fifth anniversary in September 2023, Village Media reported that more than 22,000 people subscribed to NewmarketToday's daily newsletter alone, a figure the company presented as evidence of how thoroughly the site had become part of the town's daily information habits. Weeks after that anniversary, Metroland ended the print edition of the Newmarket Era in its September 2023 restructuring, folding its remaining York Region coverage into the regional YorkRegion.com website; NewmarketToday was left as the town's principal dedicated local newsroom. In May 2024 the network grew around it again when Village launched AuroraToday in the neighbouring town of Aurora, describing NewmarketToday as its York Region sister site, and NewmarketToday's coverage of the October 2026 municipal election continued its run as the community's news source of first resort.

Content and Coverage

NewmarketToday's local file is anchored by town hall: council decisions, planning and development, and York Region government, the upper-tier municipality responsible for services from transit to public health. Reporter Joseph Quigley's What's Going Up series has tracked the town's growth file project by project — new subdivisions, mid-rise proposals and the fate of some of the area's last working farms — while the newsroom's When Ends Don't Meet series examined the challenges facing residents squeezed by housing and living costs, and possible solutions. Breaking news coverage spans Central York Fire Services, York Regional Police and the courts, and the site follows Southlake Regional Health Centre, the Newmarket Public Library, area schools in the York Region and York Catholic district boards, and the town's business community along Yonge Street, Davis Drive and the Upper Canada Mall area.

The site's personality comes through in its regular features. History Hound columnist Richard MacLeod has written a weekly local history column since the site launched, connecting present-day Newmarket to its past as a Quaker settlement, a railway town and a manufacturing centre. Photographer Greg King has documented the community in pictures, from breaking news scenes to lighter civic moments — his coverage ranged from a black bear that wandered into town to Newmarket's "celebrity duck," a local story that travelled around the world. Editor Debora Kelly's own byline appears on news stories and on the site's weekend roundups of events in and around Newmarket. The newsroom's stories also feed wider Village Media products, including the Village Report stream of provincial and national news, the Village Life lifestyle service and the Closer Look podcast, and the site maintains a substantial obituaries section and community events calendar.

Audience and Reach

Newmarket Today's home audience is the town's population of roughly 88,000, set within a York Region of more than 1.2 million people, and its coverage regularly reaches into neighbouring Aurora, East Gwillimbury and King Township, whose residents share Newmarket's hospital, fire service, courts and commuting patterns along Highway 404 and the GO Transit Barrie line. Village Media does not publish audited audience figures for individual outlets, so no verified readership total exists for Newmarket Today on its own. The one site-specific figure on record is the company's own: in an August 2023 bulletin marking the site's fifth anniversary, Village Media said more than 22,000 people subscribed to NewmarketToday's daily newsletter alone. Network-wide, Village Media said in a 2026 industry profile that its publications reach more than five million monthly readers and send more than 450,000 daily newsletters; those totals describe the whole network, not Newmarket's share of it.

Digital Presence

Newmarket Today has never had a print edition. It publishes only at newmarkettoday.ca, on Village Media's proprietary Villager platform, which the company developed in Sault Ste. Marie and also licenses to other publishers. Stories are posted throughout the day and pushed out through the site's free daily email newsletter — the product Village Media has cited as the clearest measure of the site's local penetration — as well as through social media and Spaces, the community social platform Village Media launched in late 2024. The site carries reader polls, contests for registered readers, obituaries, an events calendar and community announcements, and its homepage links readers onward to sister sites including AuroraToday, so York Region readers can move between the two towns' coverage. Village Media's September 2026 network bulletin listed NewmarketToday among the sponsors of community initiatives that month, including CMHA York and South Simcoe's Mental Health in Motion event and YouthSpeak (YSSN), and editor Debora Kelly's bylines continued to appear on the site through 2026 — evidence of an outlet still publishing daily in its eighth year.

Ownership and Organisation

Newmarket Today is owned by Village Media Inc., a privately held company headquartered at 298 Queen Street East in Sault Ste. Marie. The company descends from SooToday, the local news site founded in 2000 by broadcaster Dick Peplow, which began as a shopping directory before turning to news. Jeff Elgie, an IT consultant who had been a minority investor, became chief executive after Peplow's death in 2007 and took majority control in 2012, formalizing Village Media the following year; the Elgie family remains the majority owner, with a small minority interest held by Glacier Media, according to the Harvard Future of Media Project's Canadian Media Ownership Index. Elgie's model — local reporters and sales staff in each community, with technology, advertising operations and product development centralized — has carried the company from two northern Ontario sites to more than 30 owned publications, including The Trillium, its Queen's Park politics outlet. NewmarketToday's newsroom works under editor Debora Kelly with reporters, a photographer and columnists based in Newmarket, supported by regional and network desks; in July 2026 Village Media announced a partnership with the Knight Foundation to launch 15 local newsrooms in the United States, the largest expansion in its history.

Contact and Availability

Newmarket Today publishes free of charge at newmarkettoday.ca and is updated throughout the day. Readers can submit news tips, events and obituaries, enter contests and subscribe to the free daily newsletter through tools on the website, and follow the outlet through its social media channels and the Spaces community platform. Newmarket Today's publisher, Village Media, is based at 298 Queen Street East, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and lists Newmarket Today among its Ontario publications at villagemedia.ca.