About Niagara This Week

Niagara This Week

Overview

Niagara This Week is the digital community newspaper for Ontario's Niagara Region, published at niagarathisweek.com by Metroland Media Group. It is the successor to the free weekly print newspaper of the same name, launched in April 2004 with what its publisher billed as the largest press run of any community newspaper in Canada. The site serves the whole of Niagara Region — St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, Welland, Fort Erie, Grimsby, Lincoln and West Lincoln, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Pelham, Port Colborne, Thorold and the region's smaller communities — and carries on the work of several older local papers that were folded into the title over the years, among them the Fort Erie Post, the Grimsby Lincoln News, the Niagara-on-the-Lake Advance and the Port Colborne Leader. Since September 15, 2023, when Metroland ended print production for all of its community weeklies, Niagara This Week has been a digital-only publication, updated daily.

History

Niagara This Week was a deliberate, large-scale launch. The Ontario Community Newspapers Association's April 2004 newsletter reported that Metroland was launching three new weekly community papers in Niagara, all called Niagara This Week and serving St. Catharines, Welland and Niagara Falls, with the first of the Friday products launched on March 26, 2004. Citing company figures and Canadian Community Newspapers Association statistics, the newsletter said Niagara This Week would become the largest press-run community newspaper in Canada when it launched on April 16 with a weekly circulation of 185,000. It was a full-colour, free weekly tabloid, managed by Metroland's Halton Division and headed by Ian Oliver, who would later become president of Metroland. Torstar's 2004 annual report likewise described "the successful April launch of Niagara This Week, Canada's largest community newspaper."

The launch reshaped Niagara's community-press map. Three independent Niagara newspapers — the Grimsby Lincoln News and its sister publication Niagara West This Week, and the Thorold News — were sold and folded into the new title; Grimsby founder and editor Mike Williscraft took on duties for Niagara This Week's west-end section, and Thorold News editor Doug Youmans became a news editor at the company's new Thorold office, where four zoned versions of the paper were produced weekly for different parts of the region. The new paper made an early mark: in 2004, reporters Paul Forsyth and Doug Draper and editor Doug Youmans earned Niagara This Week a national newspaper award for a series on a controversial plan to build an amusement ride at the Horseshoe Falls — an achievement Draper later recalled was remarkable "for a paper that, at the time, was less than a year old." Draper's own weekly column ran from the paper's launch until July 2012, when, as he wrote at the time, the Torstar/Metroland publication dropped it in a round of cost-cutting.

Through the 2000s and 2010s the title anchored Metroland's Niagara community operation alongside older sister papers such as the Fort Erie Post and the Port Colborne Leader, delivered free to households across the region, latterly on Thursdays. In November 2017 Metroland's position in Niagara deepened when it acquired the region's three daily newspapers — the St. Catharines Standard, the Niagara Falls Review and the Welland Tribune — from Postmedia in the Torstar–Postmedia transaction, giving the group both daily and community coverage in the region. The community papers' print era ended on September 15, 2023, when Metroland filed under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and moved its weeklies online only. When Metroland returned a handful of titles to print as monthly newspapers in the spring of 2026, the program covered only Halton and Durham titles — the Burlington Post, Oakville Beaver, Whitby This Week and Oshawa This Week — and Niagara This Week was not among them; it remains digital-only.

Programming and Content

Niagara This Week publishes the full range of community journalism: municipal council and Niagara Region council coverage across the region's twelve municipalities; school board news; police, fire and court reporting; development, housing and infrastructure stories; community and high-school sports; arts, events and human-interest features; and obituaries and local announcements. Monitoring of niagarathisweek.com in October 2026 shows the daily mix its readers now receive — regional service journalism such as scheduled Niagara highway closures for roadwork on October 17, 2026, an analysis of Ontario's deadly 2026 motorcycle season drawing on the province's road-safety data, lottery results, food-recall notices and provincial service stories, alongside Niagara-specific reporting. Muck Rack, which monitors the outlet, summarizes its remit as publishing "daily news and information that aim to inform, engage and empower readers" across Fort Erie, Grimsby, Lincoln and West Lincoln, Niagara Falls, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Pelham, Port Colborne, St. Catharines, Thorold and Welland.

Audience and Reach

The print Niagara This Week was a free-distribution paper, and its launch circulation of 185,000 copies a week — a figure published by the Ontario Community Newspapers Association in April 2004 from company and industry-association data — was exceptional for a community title, reflecting delivery across an entire regional municipality. The audience today is the population of Niagara Region, counted at 477,941 in the 2021 census, with St. Catharines, the inventory city for this profile, the region's largest municipality at 136,803 residents in the same census. The digital site is free to read and publishes daily. No current audited circulation or traffic figure for niagarathisweek.com is published in the sources used for this profile, and none is asserted here; Muck Rack lists the outlet as a verified local digital publication.

Digital Presence

NiagaraThisWeek.com is the paper's sole publishing platform. It presents the former print titles — the Fort Erie Post, Grimsby Lincoln News, Niagara This Week's own Niagara Falls, St. Catharines-Thorold and Welland & Pelham editions, the Niagara-on-the-Lake Advance and the Port Colborne Leader — as one regional digital publication, in Metroland's words on the site, the website "for former weekly newspaper serving Niagara Region." The site is updated daily, offers a Today's Headlines newsletter, and is monitored as a current outlet by Muck Rack, whose October 2026 listings show fresh Niagara and Ontario content posted throughout the month. The newspaper maintains the standard Metroland digital presence shared across the group's community sites, without a paywall.

Ownership and Organisation

Niagara This Week is published by Metroland Media Group Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Torstar Corporation. Metroland was formed in February 1981 by the merger of Metrospan Community Newspapers, a Torstar unit, and Inland Publishing Company, and was combined with CityMedia Group in 2006 to form Metroland Media Group. Torstar was acquired by NordStar Capital LP in 2020. On September 15, 2023, Metroland filed for protection under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and ceased production of all of its weekly community newspapers, including Niagara This Week's print editions, moving them to an online-only model that publishes daily; the restructuring cost roughly 60 per cent of the company's jobs, including 68 of its 200 journalists. Metroland also publishes Niagara's daily newspapers — the St. Catharines Standard, Niagara Falls Review and Welland Tribune — which continue in print and online and are separate publications from Niagara This Week. Metroland's head office is in Mississauga, Ontario.

Contact and Availability

Niagara This Week is available free online at niagarathisweek.com, publishing daily, with a Today's Headlines newsletter offered through the site. Reader contact, news tips and advertising inquiries are handled through the website's contact channels. The print edition that served Niagara households from 2004 to 2023 is no longer produced, and back issues from the print era are held in local library and archive collections in the region. No public business email address is listed for this profile.