About North Bay Nipissing News

North Bay Nipissing News

Overview

North Bay Nipissing News is a local news outlet serving the city of North Bay and the surrounding Nipissing District and Almaguin communities in northeastern Ontario. It is published by Metroland Media Group, the community-news division of Torstar, and today it operates as a digital-only publication at northbaynipissing.com. The outlet began life as a free weekly print newspaper, distributed on Thursdays across the North Bay area, but its print edition ended in September 2023 when Metroland ceased print publication of its Ontario community newspapers and moved them online. Since then its journalists have continued to publish North Bay and area news on the web, covering city council, police and courts, education, health and community life in a market it shares with the North Bay Nugget daily and the Village Media site BayToday.

History

North Bay Nipissing News is a comparatively young title by Canadian community-newspaper standards. It was created by Metroland Media as one of a wave of new community publications launched around the start of the 2010s: Torstar's 2013 annual information form lists North Bay Nipissing News among the publications Metroland had launched in the preceding three years, alongside titles such as London Community News and the Kitchener Post. Unlike the legacy weeklies Metroland inherited through acquisition, the North Bay paper was purpose-built for a market where the dominant print voice was the daily North Bay Nugget, and it was distributed free as a Thursday tabloid; a Metroland advertising rate card from its print era lists the paper as a Thursday tabloid with a press run of 34,222 copies.

Through the 2010s the paper published the full range of community coverage, from city hall and the Ontario Northland corridor to features such as its June 4, 2014 story on Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush receiving honorary doctorates from Nipissing University — a story that became a small piece of Canadian rock lore, since fog kept the band's plane from landing in North Bay and the two musicians delivered their convocation remarks by video from Toronto, dedicating their degrees to their parents, Holocaust survivors who had rebuilt their lives in Canada. The paper's history turned on September 15, 2023, when Metroland filed for creditor protection under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and announced it would cease print publication of its dozens of Ontario community newspapers, moving them to an online-only model; roughly 605 jobs were eliminated across the company, while Torstar's daily newspapers, including the Hamilton Spectator and the Waterloo Region Record, continued in print. The last print editions of the community weeklies, North Bay Nipissing News among them, appeared that month, and the title has been digital-only ever since.

Programming and Content

The outlet's content is the daily diet of a small-city newsroom. Municipal coverage is central: its local-news pages carried detailed 2026 reporting on North Bay's asset management plan and the city's infrastructure funding gap — the city's update estimated it needed to invest about $85.4 million a year to keep pace with rehabilitation, expected to spend about $48.4 million, and so faced a shortfall of about $37 million — following the debate through council. It covers the District of Nipissing Social Services Administration Board, including the Nipissing Counts homelessness enumeration, which found 452 people experiencing homelessness across the district during a 24-hour count on October 8, 2025 — about 130 of them in emergency or violence-against-women shelters and 153 unsheltered — down from 531 counted in the more comprehensive 2024 count. Police and public-safety news from the North Bay and West Nipissing detachments of the Ontario Provincial Police is a staple, as is coverage of Nipissing University and Canadore College, the North Bay Regional Health Centre, and the region's Franco-Ontarian community — its pages reported on Franco-Ontarian Day flag-raisings in five municipalities, the largest gathering bringing nearly 1,200 students to Place Léger in North Bay. Regional stories range across the readership area: a 2026 report on northern Ontario municipalities' difficulty recruiting qualified staff, drawn from a Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities survey of 61 municipalities in which 94 per cent reported trouble filling key positions, is typical of its district-wide brief. Like other Metroland sites, it also carries national and provincial material from the wider Torstar network.

Audience and Reach

Metroland's own listing of its newspaper sites describes North Bay Nipissing News as covering "North Bay and Almaguin" — the city of about 51,000 people on the shore of Lake Nipissing, plus the townships and villages of the Nipissing District and the Almaguin Highlands to the south and east, communities such as Powassan, Callander, Mattawa, Sturgeon Falls and Burk's Falls. In its print era the paper blanketed that market as a free Thursday tabloid with a press run of 34,222 copies, according to Metroland's rate card. Since September 2023 its audience has been entirely online, reached through northbaynipissing.com, search and the Torstar network of sites. Wikipedia's survey of media in North Bay still describes the outlet as the city's weekly newspaper, a description that predates the end of print; in its current form it publishes news online on a daily cycle rather than as a weekly edition. The same survey lists North Bay Nipissing News among the web-based outlets that grew in importance in the city as regional television news contracted.

Digital Presence

The outlet's home is northbaynipissing.com, built on the same platform as Metroland's other community sites, with local news, community, sports and obituary streams for the North Bay area. It sits within a network the company has listed as 39 community and daily newspaper sites across south, central and northern Ontario, and its stories can travel across that network and through syndication and aggregation services. The site has been the publication's sole platform since the print edition ended in September 2023, and it remained active through 2025 and 2026, carrying staff-reported local stories — municipal finance, homelessness counts, police news and regional reports — dated across those years, with its articles also surfacing through news aggregators credited to NorthBayNipissing.com. Its digital-only status makes it one of the surviving Metroland titles that made the transition from free print weekly to web publication without closing.

Ownership and Organisation

North Bay Nipissing News is owned by Metroland Media Group, the community media arm of Torstar Corporation; Torstar itself was acquired by NordStar Capital in 2020. The paper was a Metroland creation rather than an acquisition, launched as part of the company's expansion of its community newspaper network in the early 2010s. Its organisation today reflects the post-2023 Metroland model: a small local reporting team in North Bay working within Metroland's regionalised editing, production and advertising structure, publishing to the shared Metroland digital platform. The September 2023 restructuring that ended its print edition was a company-wide decision taken as Metroland sought creditor protection, citing the structural decline of print advertising; the North Bay title was one of the dozens of weeklies moved online rather than closed outright.

Contact and Availability

North Bay Nipissing News is available free online at northbaynipissing.com, updated on a rolling basis; there has been no print edition since September 2023. Readers in North Bay, Nipissing District and the Almaguin area can follow its council, police, education and community coverage through the website and through the Torstar network's digital channels.