About Paris Independent

Paris Independent

Overview

The Paris Independent is a free weekly community newspaper serving Paris, Ontario, the largest community in the County of Brant, at the confluence of the Grand and Nith rivers. It is published by Grant Haven Media, the independent Western Ontario newspaper group owned by Stewart Grant, and it is one of a cluster of Grant Haven titles that share the publisher's granthaven.com domain. The Ontario Community Newspapers Association (OCNA) member directory lists the Paris Independent under Grant Haven Media as a distinct title with a circulation of 3,900 copies per edition — a separate listing from its sibling Grant Haven papers such as the Goderich Sun, the Stratford Times and the Wilmot-Tavistock Gazette, each of which the directory likewise lists individually. The Independent gives Paris a locally owned print weekly again after the town's historic newspaper, the Paris Star, disappeared from print amid the contraction of Ontario's chain-owned community press.

History

Paris has had a newspaper since the middle of the nineteenth century: the Paris Star was established in June 1850 by B. C. Hearle, according to the County of Brant gazetteer of 1869–70, and the Star served the town under a succession of owners into the modern era. In the chain era the Star ended up in the hands of Metroland Media, and its print life ended as that company's Ontario community weeklies contracted — Metroland ended print publication of its community newspapers across Ontario on 15 September 2023, when it filed for bankruptcy protection in a restructuring that eliminated some seventy print titles. The Paris Independent belongs to the response to that contraction. Its publisher, Grant Haven Media, began in June 2014, when Stewart Grant bought a small independent newspaper in his hometown of St. Marys — the St. Marys Independent — and built from it a group of free community papers across Western Ontario. Grant described that starting point himself in a November 17, 2023 editorial in another of his papers, the Woodstock Ingersoll Echo. Grant Haven does not publish a launch date for the Paris Independent in the sources available for this profile, and none is asserted here; what the record shows is that the Independent is an established part of the group's lineup, listed in the OCNA directory and entered in the association's 2025 awards competition, and that Grant's stated approach is to launch or sustain locally staffed papers in towns the chains have left behind.

Programming and Content

The Independent covers the community life of Paris and the County of Brant: county council and the committees of the single-tier County of Brant municipality, schools, local business, heritage and history, arts and entertainment, and the minor sports of a fast-growing town. Its emphasis on locally written material is visible in the work of its contributors. Muck Rack, the journalism database, profiles George Le Gresley as a Paris Independent contributor and sports correspondent for Grant Haven Media; his published pieces include a local-history column on how Brant's communities got their names, a visit to the Concerts on the Promenade series in Paris, coverage of a Paris U13 girls' softball game against Copetown played on June 30, and a feature on lawn bowling played on the banks of the Grand River in Paris. The paper's editorial and photographic work has been recognised by its peers: in the OCNA's 2025 Better Newspapers Competition the Paris Independent was a finalist in three categories — Arts and Entertainment writing, for Edward Lander; Best Editorial Cartoon, for Chris Whelan; and Photographer of the Year, for Michelle Malvaso. Finalist placings in a general competition of Ontario community newspapers, across writing, cartooning and photography, are evidence of a paper producing a full range of original local journalism rather than a thin advertising vehicle.

Audience and Reach

The OCNA directory figure of 3,900 copies per edition is the Paris Independent's listed scale of distribution in and around Paris. Those are the publisher-group figures carried by the industry association's member directory rather than independently audited numbers, and they are best read as the size of the paper's print run for its community. Paris itself is a community of roughly fifteen thousand people and the population centre of the County of Brant, and the Independent operates under the Grant Haven group's free-distribution model: as the group set out in its 2026 announcement of a new paper for Cobourg and Port Hope, its newspapers are placed free at pickup locations such as grocery stores, coffee shops, retail stores and community hubs, with paid subscriptions available for readers who prefer mail delivery. Stewart Grant, in that same 2026 announcement as reported by the Cobourg News Blog, described himself as successfully publishing twelve other newspapers in Western Ontario — his own figure for the group's reach. The Independent also appears among the Ontario community newspapers in the provincial government's published advertising placements for an October 2025 Cabinet Office campaign, a further indication that the paper is an active, recognised publication in its market.

Digital Presence

The Paris Independent's digital home is its publisher's shared website, granthaven.com, which serves the whole Grant Haven Media group rather than the Independent alone — the reason several sibling Grant Haven papers in the WorldNM inventory share this domain. In line with the group's stated model, issues are published on the site in PDF and flipbook formats, and readers can subscribe to an email version of a paper. The group invested in that platform in 2024, when Moore Creative Consulting designed Grant Haven Media's new website; the agency's client feature describes the goal of making the site's digital presence match the group's print publications and quotes the philosophies behind the operation — "local people telling local stories" and the belief that "news should be free and accessible for all." Because the Independent's online presence is one storefront within the group platform, readers read its current edition there in replica form. The domain could not be rendered by the research fetcher used to prepare this profile, so the Independent's current digital edition should be sighted directly at publish time to confirm the latest issue and masthead details.

Ownership and Organisation

The Paris Independent is owned and published by Grant Haven Media, the independent newspaper company of Stewart Grant. Grant founded the business with his June 2014 purchase of the St. Marys Independent and expanded it title by title across Western Ontario. The papers the OCNA directory lists under Grant Haven Media, with their directory circulation figures, are the St. Marys Independent (6,587), the Tillsonburg Post (5,180), the Simcoe Advocate (4,200), the Wilmot-Tavistock Gazette (4,065), the Goderich Sun (4,000), the Paris Independent (3,900) and the Stratford Times (3,500); Grant's own November 2023 editorial adds the Woodstock Ingersoll Echo, established in 2023. In 2026 the group announced its first title outside Western Ontario, the West Northumberland Independent for Cobourg and Port Hope, and named Peter Dounoukos as general manager and sales representative for the new paper, according to the Cobourg News Blog's report of the announcement. Grant has publicly framed the company's mission as restoring small-town journalism — launching new publications and investing in existing ones that lack a succession plan, in the words of the agency that built the group's website — and the Paris Independent is one of the papers through which that mission is carried out.

Contact and Availability

The Paris Independent is published weekly by Grant Haven Media and is available free at pickup locations in the Paris area under the group's free-distribution model, with paid mail subscriptions offered for readers who want home delivery. Its current edition is published in PDF and flipbook form through the publisher's website, granthaven.com, where the group's papers and contact routes for advertising and subscriptions are listed. The paper is a member of the Ontario Community Newspapers Association, whose member directory lists the Paris Independent under Grant Haven Media with a circulation of 3,900. A direct visual check of granthaven.com at publish time is recommended to confirm the Independent's current issue, its Paris pickup distribution and the publisher's current contact details.