About Pelham Today

Pelham Today

Overview

Pelham Today (styled PelhamToday) is a digital-only local news outlet for the Town of Pelham in Ontario's Niagara Region, published at pelhamtoday.ca. Statistics Canada counted 18,192 residents in Pelham in the 2021 census, spread across a largely rural and small-town landscape of distinct communities — Fonthill, Fenwick, Ridgeville, Effingham and North Pelham — famous for its orchards, vineyards and the Fonthill Kame. Pelham Today covers that whole town: its council and committees, Niagara Regional Police and fire services, schools, libraries, service clubs, minor sport and farm country life.

The outlet is part of Village Media, the Sault Ste. Marie-based network of free, advertising-supported community news websites. Pelham Today is unusual within that network because it was not a cold start. When it launched in January 2023, it directly succeeded the Voice of Pelham, an independent weekly community newspaper that had served the town for more than 25 years, and Village Media said at the time that the Voice's writers, editors and columnists would continue with the new digital publication.

History

The Voice of Pelham published its first edition in March 1997. For the next quarter century it was the town's hometown paper, produced from an office at 1428 Pelham Street in Fonthill under editor and publisher Dave Burket, whose Publisher's Corner column was a fixture of its pages. The masthead of its final years lists administration by Lori Gretsinger and Don Rickers as a contributing news editor. The paper used the tagline "The paper that Pelham reads," carried the town's municipal notices, and was so woven into civic life that in 2007 Pelham town council passed a bylaw authorising an agreement with the paper's company, 1211858 Ontario Ltd., to produce the town's Municipal & Community Services Brochure.

The Voice was a watchdog as well as a booster, and its relationship with town hall could be adversarial: municipal advertising records involving the paper later became the subject of an order by Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner. The paper's journalism was recognised in the Ontario Community Newspapers Association's Better Newspapers Competition, where it placed in 2020 and again in 2022. But the economics of the independent weekly were deteriorating. In its pages the Voice appealed directly to readers to take out paid supporting subscriptions of less than a dollar a week, warning plainly that advertising alone could no longer guarantee the newspaper's survival.

The end came quietly at the close of 2022. The Voice's final issues appeared in December 2022, including a farewell letter from its first editor looking back to the March 1997 launch. Weeks later, Village Media announced the succession. In its January 2023 bulletin the company reported: "Latest launch transitions the Voice of Pelham to PelhamToday.ca." Village had acquired the assets of the Voice of Pelham, and PelhamToday became the company's 20th owned-and-operated local news website in Ontario and its third in Niagara Region, alongside ThoroldToday and Niagara-on-the-Lake Local. The people moved with the masthead: Gretsinger joined Village Media as PelhamToday's outreach sales specialist, and Rickers continued filing to the new site as a reporter.

Programming and Content

The Voice's successor publishes daily digital journalism rather than a weekly print edition, but the subject matter will be familiar to any former Voice reader. Town of Pelham council business — budgets, planning applications, road and recreation decisions — is a staple, as is coverage of Niagara Regional Council, in whose jurisdiction Pelham sits. Police news comes from the Niagara Regional Police Service, and fire coverage follows Pelham Fire Services; one recent story explored a dispute after the town's fire chief said many noise complaints did not fall under the fire department's mandate.

Education and community institutions feature prominently. Reporting catalogued in journalist databases includes Kris Dubé's story on a $500,000 donation to the Fonthill branch of the Pelham Public Library, coverage of school-zone speed enforcement as classes resumed in Thorold and Pelham, and the posthumous induction of Fonthill native Jim Weller into the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame. Service clubs and charities — the Rotary Club of Fonthill, the Kinsmen, Pelham Cares — receive sustained attention, as do local sport, agriculture and the town's busy calendar of festivals and fundraisers.

The site follows the standard Village Media architecture. A local news file sits alongside obituaries, a community events calendar, local-business Spotlight features and flyers. Its email newsletter, visible in public campaign archives, packages Pelham headlines with the Village Report — stories drawn from sister sites across Ontario — and Community Stories produced through the network's Community Leaders Program, under which local businesses and organisations partner with the outlet on community content.

Audience and Reach

Pelham Today publishes no audited or outlet-specific readership figure, and none is asserted here. Its addressable audience is the Town of Pelham itself — 18,192 people at the 2021 census, up from 17,110 in 2016 — a compact, affluent and fast-growing municipality where a single dedicated news source can plausibly become habitual reading. Because the town's communities are small and its institutions few, the outlet's coverage of council, the library and the service clubs reaches readers with a direct personal stake in the stories.

The outlet benefits from the scale of its parent network. In a 2026 directory profile, Village Media reported more than five million monthly readers across its publications, upwards of 450,000 daily newsletter subscribers, 33 publications and roughly 190 staff, with its Villager platform powering 80 websites including licensed partners. The company has separately reported that its SPACES local social-networking product grew to 19 communities and more than 500,000 active users by 2026. These are company-reported network totals, not Pelham figures; Pelham Today's contribution is that of one small-market newsroom among many.

Digital Presence

Pelham Today lives entirely online at pelhamtoday.ca, on Village Media's Villager publishing platform. The site is updated daily and organised around local news, community, lifestyle and obituary sections, with an events calendar and business features; its archive begins with the January 2023 transition from the Voice of Pelham, whose own web archive remains part of the town's recorded history.

A free email newsletter is a central part of the product, delivering Pelham headlines, obituaries, event listings and local offers to subscribers' inboxes, with past editions preserved in a public campaign archive. The outlet maintains social media accounts under the PelhamToday name, and its reporters' work is indexed by Muck Rack, where byline pages for its journalists show continuing output through 2026. Like all Village Media sites, Pelham Today adapted to Meta's 2023 blocking of Canadian news links by emphasising direct channels — the website itself, newsletters and the network's SPACES communities — over social distribution.

Ownership and Organisation

Pelham Today is owned by Village Media Inc., whose head office is at 298 Queen Street East in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. The company grew out of SooToday, founded in 2000 by veteran broadcaster Dick Peplow, and expanded under chief executive Jeff Elgie, who took majority control in 2012. Its strategy of acquiring or succeeding legacy community outlets in smaller Ontario markets brought it to Pelham when the Voice of Pelham's independent run ended in 2022.

No single site editor for Pelham Today is named in publicly available sources. Its reporting is shared with ThoroldToday, the network's neighbouring Niagara site: Village Media's May 2024 bulletin introduced Richard Hutton as a reporter covering both PelhamToday and ThoroldToday, and journalist databases list Kris Dubé reporting for the two sites, with Colleen Patterson also filing PelhamToday stories. Sales and community outreach have been handled locally — Lori Gretsinger, who ran the Voice's office for years, moved to PelhamToday as its outreach sales specialist — while technology, ad operations and editorial support come from the network's central teams. The outlet remains active in community sponsorship; Village Media's bulletins list Pelham Today among the sponsors of the Rotary Club of Fonthill, the Pelham Concert Series and Pelham Cares events through 2025 and into January 2026.

Contact and Availability

Pelham Today is free to read at pelhamtoday.ca, with no paywall; its daily newsletter is available by subscription through the website. The outlet's corporate parent, Village Media, is headquartered at 298 Queen Street East, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario P6A 1Y7, and publishes its network information at villagemedia.ca. Readers wishing to reach the Pelham newsroom — with news tips, event listings or obituary information — are directed to the contact facilities on the Pelham Today website, which carries on the community-newspaper role the Voice of Pelham performed in print from the same town for 25 years.