About The Standard

The Standard

Overview

The Standard is an independent weekly community newspaper published in Port Perry, Ontario, on the western shore of Lake Scugog. Based at 94 Water Street in Port Perry, it serves readers across the northern part of Durham Region and the southern Kawartha Lakes area — principally the townships of Scugog and Brock and the rural communities of the City of Kawartha Lakes — with coverage of municipal councils, schools, courts, minor and junior sports, agriculture, business and community life. It should not be confused with the St. Catharines Standard, the daily newspaper of Ontario's Niagara Region; the Port Perry paper is a separate, locally owned weekly. It bills its companion audio program, carried on podcast platforms, as "the news podcast for North Durham."

The Standard is the modern bearer of a name with deep roots in Port Perry. The town's first newspaper was the Port Perry Standard, established in 1866, and the present paper was launched in 2004 — originally as the Scugog Standard — by journalists displaced in a chain takeover, explicitly to restore a second, locally accountable newspaper voice in the community. It has remained independent of the large chains throughout its life, passing through three local ownerships and broadening its coverage from Scugog into Brock Township and the Kawarthas, which prompted its shortening of name from the Scugog Standard to simply The Standard.

History

Port Perry's first newspaper, the Port Perry Standard and North Ontario Advertiser, began publishing on August 16, 1866, from the second floor of the Paxton and Bigelow building above the post office on Queen Street. Its founder, Edward J. Mundy, had previously published the North Ontario Advocate in Uxbridge for about five years. Mundy ran the Standard through two fires that devastated the town's business section in 1883 and 1884, relocating the office each time, and sold the paper around 1889 to brothers Sam and George Newton after buying the Oshawa Ontario Reformer. The historic Standard's run belongs to Port Perry's nineteenth-century press history, which also included the Ontario Observer, the Port Perry Star (founded 1907) and, much later, the Scugog Citizen of the 1990s; digitized issues of the early papers are preserved in the Lake Scugog Historical Society's Scugog Digital Newspaper Collection at the Scugog Public Library.

The modern Standard arose from the consolidation of Ontario's community press. The Port Perry Star, the town's surviving weekly, passed into the hands of Metroland, Torstar's community newspaper arm, and a number of its employees were let go in the takeover. The Scugog Heritage account of the town's newspaper history records that the birth of The Standard "came about primarily because of the arrogant and thoughtless way in which so many former employees were let go," and that, with more compassion in the takeover, the Star might have remained the only newspaper in town for many years. Instead, dismissed Star staff resolved to start a competitor, and a group of prominent local business people — among them Jim Grieve of the IGA, Jeff Reid of Reid's Independent and Jeff Hodgkinson of Canadian Tire, as named in the heritage account — helped financially launch the paper.

The first issue of the Scugog Standard rolled off the press in 2004, from original offices at 94 Water Street in Port Perry. The new weekly revived the historic Standard name and gave the community two newspapers again. Its first editor was Rik Davie. Ownership changed for the first time when the paper was sold to David Nguyen, owner of Webnews Printing in North York, the company at which The Standard was being printed. Davie left the newspaper in about 2010. A few years later Nguyen sold the paper to Colleen Green, an employee of the Scugog Standard; she and her family have published it since that time. Under the Green family the name was shortened to The Standard to better reflect coverage that had expanded beyond Scugog to focus primarily on the Kawarthas, with additional coverage of Brock and Scugog townships.

The newspaper's office has moved with its growth. After beginning at 94 Water Street, it relocated around 2016 to a unit at an industrial site on North Port Road, then in 2021 returned to downtown Port Perry, opening an office at 94 Water Street a few doors south of its original 2004 location.

Programming and Content

The Standard publishes weekly in print and maintains a news website, covering the municipalities within its footprint: the Township of Scugog (Port Perry, Blackstock, Nestleton, Caesarea and the Lake Scugog shoreline communities), Brock Township (Beaverton, Cannington, Sunderland) and the rural west of the City of Kawartha Lakes. Its news pages follow council decisions, budgets, development proposals, road and arena projects, school news, police and court briefs, and the agricultural sector that surrounds its towns. Sports coverage centres on local hockey — including the Port Perry Lumberjacks and the Provincial Junior Hockey League — high school athletics and community leagues, with the Scugog Sports Hall of Fame among its recurring subjects.

The paper carries a stable of local columnists whose bylines recur across years of issues and in its podcast headline summaries: Jonathan van Bilsen's humour column "You've Got to be Kidding?", Geoff Carpentier's nature column "Walk Softly," and Tina Y. Gerber-McCurley's column on money and well-being, alongside editorials on local affairs. Obituaries, community calendars, church and service-club news, real estate and classified advertising complete the typical issue.

Since at least 2023 The Standard has extended its journalism into audio with The Standard Newspaper podcast — presented in recent seasons as "Your Standard Podcast" — a weekly digest of the paper's headlines read and discussed for listeners across North Durham. Episodes through late 2025 and into January 2026 covered, among other stories, the reopening of the Blackstock Arena after a fire closure, homelessness and the Kawartha Lakes budget, downtown improvement grants in Brock, the Scugog Sports Hall of Fame's 2026 inductees, the Port Perry lakefront skate and the PJHL all-star game — a cross-section that mirrors the print paper's council, community and sports agenda.

Audience and Reach

The Standard's audience is the population of northern Durham Region and the adjoining Kawartha Lakes countryside: farmers, small-town merchants, commuters to Oshawa, Whitby and the Greater Toronto Area, and the cottagers and recreational users drawn to Lake Scugog. The Ontario Community Newspapers Association lists the paper in its member directory under Durham/Kawartha with a circulation figure of 18,100. The paper's expansion from a Scugog-only title into a Kawarthas-focused weekly reflects the regional shopping, school and municipal patterns of its readership, and its podcast is distributed on major podcast platforms, extending its reach to listeners beyond the print delivery area.

Digital Presence

The Standard's website at thestandardnewspaper.ca carries its current news, sports and community content, and the paper maintains an audio presence through The Standard Newspaper podcast, distributed via podcast directories and listening platforms. New episodes were still appearing weekly in January 2026 — editions dated January 8 and January 16, 2026, followed the December 25, 2025 and November 27, 2025 episodes — confirming that the Port Perry newsroom remains active in both print and digital formats. The historic record of its predecessor titles is separately available online through the Lake Scugog Historical Society's digital newspaper collection, which includes surviving issues of the nineteenth-century Port Perry Standard.

Ownership and Organisation

The Standard is independently owned. Its current publishers are Colleen Green and her family, who bought the newspaper from David Nguyen, the North York printing company owner who had acquired it from its founding group. Green had been an employee of the paper before becoming its owner, and under the family's ownership the paper shortened its name, widened its territory and moved its office back into downtown Port Perry in 2021. The newsroom operates from 94 Water Street in Port Perry, a few doors from the premises where the Scugog Standard began in 2004.

Contact and Availability

The Standard is published weekly from 94 Water Street, Port Perry, Ontario. The current edition and recent stories are available on its website at www.thestandardnewspaper.ca, and its weekly headline podcast, The Standard Newspaper, can be heard on major podcast platforms. Back issues of Port Perry's historic newspapers, including the original Port Perry Standard of 1866, are available through the Scugog Public Library's digital newspaper collection.