About SooToday

SooToday

SooToday is a hyperlocal online news website serving Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Launched in 2000 by former broadcaster Dick Peplow, it began as a regional tabloid shopping and business directory before pivoting to locally focused news — becoming one of the first prominent Canadian ventures in hyperlocal web-only media. Today it is the flagship property of Village Media, the Sault Ste. Marie-based digital media company that operates a network of community news sites across Ontario, and it remains the model on which the company's expansion was built.

Overview

SooToday publishes local news written by local journalists for the Sault Ste. Marie community, supplemented by weather, events listings, obituaries, and a wide range of community information. As a web-only outlet, it has no print edition and no broadcast arm; its entire business is digital. The site's formula — intensive local coverage, community service features, and deep integration into civic life — proved that a standalone local news website could sustain itself in a mid-sized Canadian market, and Village Media has spent two decades replicating that formula in other Ontario cities.

History

SooToday.com was launched in 2000 by Dick Peplow, a former broadcaster, initially as a regional tabloid shopping and business directory rather than a news outlet. The pivot to news came in response to a crisis in local television: MCTV, the regional television system, imposed significant news cutbacks that merged all of the region's local television newscasts into a single regional program produced in Sudbury. Sault Ste. Marie — a city of more than 70,000 people on the St. Marys River at the Ontario–Michigan border — suddenly faced the prospect of losing dedicated local television news.

Peplow saw the opening. SooToday began producing locally focused news content for the Sault, stepping into the gap left by television's retreat. The MCTV decision was part of a broader pattern in Canadian regional broadcasting, where local newscasts in smaller markets were consolidated into regional hubs to cut costs — leaving communities with headlines about a distant city rather than their own streets. SooToday's response — hiring local journalists to cover local stories for a website with no printing press and no transmitter — was genuinely novel in Canada at the time. In doing so, it became one of the first prominent Canadian ventures in hyperlocal web-only media, demonstrating years before the industry's digital transition that local news could live entirely online. The bet worked: the site grew into the city's primary digital news source, and its success became the proof of concept for an entire company's strategy.

Peplow died in 2007. Jeff Elgie, a local IT consultant who had been a minority investor in the site, increased his ownership stake and eventually became CEO, leading the company through its expansion era. Under Elgie, SooToday became the template and the headquarters for Village Media's growth across Ontario.

The company's expansion followed the playbook SooToday had written. Inspired by the SooToday model, a different company launched TimminsToday.com, which Village Media acquired in 2014. Peplow himself had launched the sister site BayToday.ca in 2003, extending the model to North Bay. Later launches concentrated on mid-sized cities in Southern Ontario, typically arriving soon after the closure or retrenchment of the community's legacy daily newspaper: BarrieToday.com in October 2015, GuelphToday.com in February 2016, and OrilliaMatters.com in 2018. In 2020, Village Media acquired the assets of Laurentian Media Group, including the Sudbury.com news website and Northern Ontario Business magazine, while ceasing publication of Laurentian's twice-weekly print newspaper Northern Life.

Village Media also experimented beyond its core model. It operated HalifaxToday.ca, OttawaMatters.com, and KitchenerToday.com in partnership with Rogers Radio-owned news stations, though all three were later converted to the Rogers-owned CityNews brand. The company ran a video news portal, local2.ca, in Sault Ste. Marie — later fully integrated into SooToday — and a VM Radio network of internet radio streams, which was shut down. In early 2021, the company expanded into the United States for the first time by acquiring The Longmont Leader in Longmont, Colorado, though that site was shuttered in 2024. In February 2023, Village Media launched The Trillium, an outlet devoted to Ontario politics, and in 2024 announced plans for Spaces, a localized social networking platform for community discussion. In August 2026, the company announced a second attempt at American expansion, backed by funding from the Knight Foundation.

Content

SooToday's content centres on Sault Ste. Marie and the surrounding Algoma region: city council and district decisions, policing and courts, education, health care, local business, sports, and the everyday life of the community. In addition to reported news, the site offers weather, events calendars, obituaries, and extensive community information — the service journalism that makes a local site a daily habit for residents. Village Media's sites are known for supporting local events and charitable causes, and SooToday functions as a civic bulletin board as much as a news outlet. The company has also built content and marketing partnerships with community newspapers in other Ontario cities, including TBNewswatch.com in Thunder Bay and Manitoulin.ca on Manitoulin Island, extending the Village Media platform's reach beyond its owned sites.

The site's video heritage survives in its multimedia approach: the former local2.ca video news portal was folded into SooToday, and video remains part of the site's storytelling toolkit.

Coverage and Audience

SooToday covers Sault Ste. Marie — a steel town and border community on the St. Marys River, home to more than 70,000 people — and the Algoma district around it. The Sault's economy, anchored by steel production and cross-border trade with Michigan, gives its local news a distinctive industrial and border-town character, from plant announcements to bridge traffic. Its audience is the community itself: residents who rely on the site for everything from breaking news to obituaries to what's happening on the weekend. As the outlet that pioneered the model, SooToday enjoys deep brand recognition in its market; for many residents, it is simply where local news lives. The site's history as the first mover gave it a lasting advantage: by the time competitors considered digital local news in the Sault, SooToday was already entrenched.

Ownership

SooToday was founded by Dick Peplow and, following his death in 2007, came under the leadership of Jeff Elgie, who serves as CEO of Village Media. Elgie, a local IT consultant who had been a minority investor in the site, recognized that the SooToday model could travel — that what worked in Sault Ste. Marie could work in Barrie, Guelph, Timmins, and beyond. The company is headquartered in Sault Ste. Marie — the city where its flagship site was born — and remains an independent Canadian media company, operating its network of Ontario news sites without affiliation to the country's large media conglomerates. That independence, rooted in a northern Ontario city far from Toronto's media corridors, has been central to Village Media's identity: a local-news company built by local-news people.

Digital Presence

SooToday publishes at sootoday.com, a digital-only news site with no print counterpart. The website hosts the full range of the outlet's content — news articles, video, weather, events, and obituaries — and is designed for the daily-use patterns of local news consumption. The company's 2024 announcement of Spaces, a localized social networking platform for discussing community topics such as local sports and history, signals Village Media's ambition to deepen the digital relationship between its sites and their communities beyond conventional news publishing.