About Simcoe.com

Simcoe.com

Overview

Simcoe.com is the digital home of Metroland Media Group's community newspapers in Simcoe County, Ontario, publishing local news online every day for Barrie and the towns and townships around Lake Simcoe and southern Georgian Bay. The site carries the journalism of a family of long-established community titles — among them the Barrie Advance, the Alliston Herald, the Bradford West Gwillimbury Topic, the Collingwood Connection, the Innisfil Journal, the Midland Penetanguishene Mirror, Orillia Today and the Stayner Sun — whose print editions ended in September 2023, when Metroland moved all of its Ontario community newspapers to an online-only model. Readers who once received a free weekly paper on their driveway now follow the same newsrooms through community sections on Simcoe.com, including a dedicated Barrie section at simcoe.com/barrie-on/.

History

The site's flagship title, the Barrie Advance, has roots in the first newspaper published in Barrie. The Barrie Magnet, launched by Thomas Fox Davies on August 6, 1847, and later known as the Northern Advance, was described as the first newspaper north of Toronto. Davies, a printer who had worked at the Toronto Globe, hauled his equipment two days north from Toronto, and the paper's earliest issues were printed on recycled Toronto newsprint. The paper campaigned vigorously for a railway to Barrie to help farmers market their grain, and Davies renamed it the Advance in honour of the progressive spirit of the times; the Huron and Simcoe Railway reached the area in 1851, an event bound up with the creation of Collingwood, one of the communities Simcoe.com covers today. The Advance also sustained a long-running rivalry with the Orillia Packet, whose editors it mocked for soliciting subscriptions in Barrie. That original Advance line ran for more than nine decades under a succession of proprietors before the paper was bought by its crosstown rival, the Barrie Examiner, and published its final issue in March 1940.

The modern Barrie Advance is a Metroland creation. Metroland Media Group itself was formed in February 1981 through the merger of Torstar's Metrospan Community Newspapers and the Inland Publishing Company, and in October 1987 it launched a new Barrie Advance from an office on Patterson Road. Shortly after its first issue, the new paper bought the former Barrie Banner, a community newspaper with more than twenty years of history in the area, and briefly published under the combined name Banner Advance before settling back to Barrie Advance. The Advance office went on to serve as the head office of Metroland's Simcoe County division, overseeing sister weeklies that included the Alliston Herald, the Collingwood Connection, the Midland Mirror and Orillia Today.

In November 2017, a major swap between Torstar and Postmedia reshaped Simcoe County's newspaper map. Metroland acquired daily newspapers from Postmedia — including Barrie's own Barrie Examiner and the Orillia Packet & Times — and closed them, while making clear in its announcement that it remained committed to serving the affected communities through its existing publications, naming the Barrie Advance and Orillia Today. Simcoe.com's search continues to surface Examiner articles published from about 2012 until that paper's closure in November 2017, a small digital inheritance noted by the Barrie Public Library in its guide to the site.

The decisive change came on September 15, 2023, when Metroland filed for protection under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and ended print publication of its Ontario community weeklies. According to the Local News Map, seventy-one NordStar-owned community newspapers in Ontario became digital-only publications in that restructuring, which eliminated about 605 jobs, roughly sixty per cent of Metroland's workforce. The Simcoe County titles were among them: the Barrie Advance and its sister papers ceased printing, and their journalism continued exclusively on Simcoe.com.

Programming and Content

Simcoe.com publishes the full range of community journalism its print predecessors carried, updated daily rather than weekly. News coverage concentrates on municipal councils and the County of Simcoe, the Barrie Police Service and the Ontario Provincial Police detachments serving the county, courts, schools, hospitals and development. A long-running feature format, "What's Going On Here?", explains construction and development proposals street by street. Election coverage is a staple: during the October 2026 municipal campaign the site carried candidate questionnaires and meet-and-greet reporting for Barrie, Innisfil and New Tecumseth, voting guides for the October 16 to 26 voting period, and ward-level reporting across the region.

Community coverage sits alongside the hard news. In the summer of 2026 the site ran a weekly series profiling vendors at the Barrie Farmers' Market as the market marked 180 years in operation. Its journalists have also led community campaigns: in 2017, after reporting on the disappearance of a Barrie senior with dementia, the Advance newsroom — working through Simcoe.com — partnered with the Barrie Chamber of Commerce to raise $25,000 in seed money and form Project Lifesaver Simcoe, bringing tracking technology for vulnerable residents to the county alongside the city, the police, the Alzheimer Society of Simcoe County and other partners, a campaign the paper documented in its submission to the Ontario Community Newspapers Association's community service awards. Reporters also cover the region's courts and parole hearings, road closures and construction, weather warnings, and the everyday business of school boards and health units. October 2026 coverage, for example, ranged from a Barrie Police Service Board request to pre-order front-line vehicles, to an Oro-Medonte volunteer firefighter's 100-mile fundraising run, to a county town hall on water security, to the death of former Barrie mayor Janice Laking at ninety-six. Sports coverage follows local junior hockey and community athletics, while obituaries are published in association with remembering.ca, the national obituary service used by Metroland's readers to search notices by city and date. Stories produced by the Simcoe newsroom also appear across Metroland's sister sites in neighbouring regions, and Simcoe readers see relevant reporting from elsewhere in the company's network.

Audience and Reach

The site's coverage area is one of the faster-growing parts of Ontario. The 2021 census counted 147,829 people in the City of Barrie alone and 533,169 across Simcoe County, a county of sixteen municipalities that includes the site's core communities of Innisfil, New Tecumseth, Bradford West Gwillimbury, Collingwood, Wasaga Beach, Clearview, Midland, Penetanguishene and the separated city of Orillia, along with the townships around them. Simcoe.com does not publish audited circulation or traffic figures for the site, and its audience is best understood as the readership of the former print weeklies — publications that were distributed free to households across the county — carried over to a free-to-read digital platform.

Digital Presence

Simcoe.com is a free website organized into community sections for each of the towns its newspapers served, together with subject sections for news, sports, community happenings, real estate and obituaries. Its article archive reaches back well over a decade and, as the Barrie Public Library notes, its search function also retrieves Barrie Examiner articles from roughly 2012 to the Examiner's closure in November 2017, making the site a working archive of recent Simcoe County history as well as a news source. Readers can follow the site's journalism through its social media channels and email newsletters, and its stories are distributed across the wider Metroland and Torstar network of local sites.

Ownership and Organisation

Simcoe.com is published by Metroland Media Group Ltd., the community newspaper division of Torstar Corporation and a wholly owned Torstar subsidiary. Metroland was created in February 1981 by the merger of Metrospan Community Newspapers and Inland Publishing, and the present Metroland Media Group was formed on September 11, 2006, when Metroland Publishing was combined with the CityMedia Group. Torstar, which also publishes the Toronto Star, was acquired by NordStar Capital LP in 2020, and it is under NordStar ownership that Metroland undertook the September 2023 restructuring that took Simcoe.com's newspapers online-only. Within Metroland, the Simcoe County publications were historically directed from the Barrie Advance office, which served as the division's head office for the county's titles.

Contact and Availability

Simcoe.com is available free of charge at simcoe.com, with no subscription required to read its news coverage. Media directories list the publication at 8 Spadina Avenue in Toronto, the head office address of its parent companies, and the site provides online channels for submitting news tips, contacting reporters and advertising with Metroland's Simcoe County publications. Readers looking for obituary notices can search them through the site's obituaries section and the associated remembering.ca service.