About Tilbury Times Reporter

Tilbury Times Reporter

Overview

The Tilbury Times Reporter is a digital community news outlet serving Tilbury and the Municipality of Chatham-Kent in southwestern Ontario. It is published by Diversity Reporter Media, the small publishing company led by Mohsin Abbas, a Pakistani-born journalist who rebuilt the title after its death as a print newspaper. The Tilbury Times was a 136-year-old print weekly when Postmedia closed it in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic; Abbas relaunched it in 2022 as an online news site rather than a print paper. The Ontario Community Newspapers Association (OCNA) currently lists the Tilbury Times Reporter as a Diversity Reporter Media member with a circulation figure of 1,000 — an association listing that reflects the relaunched paper's place in Ontario's community-newspaper directory even though the modern title publishes online.

The revival made the Tilbury Times a small but nationally noticed story about the value of local news. Reporting on the relaunch in March 2022, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) described how Abbas — a reporter who had fled persecution in Pakistan two decades earlier — took on the shuttered paper because he believed a community without its own newspaper is worse off. "If newspapers disappear, the well-being of the community decreases," he told CPJ. The paper is demonstrably active today: its Local Journalism Initiative reporters were filing Tilbury and Chatham-Kent stories through September and October 2026.

History

The Tilbury Times served Tilbury for well over a century as the community's print weekly. When CPJ profiled its relaunch in 2022, it described the newspaper as 136 years old, placing its origins in the mid-1880s. For generations the Times recorded the life of the town and its surrounding farm country in what is now Chatham-Kent: council business, schools, churches, sports, business openings and closings, and the personal milestones of local families.

That era ended in 2020. As advertising revenue collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Postmedia — by then the paper's parent company — shed several publications, and the Tilbury Times was among those closed. Tilbury residents fell back on informal substitutes such as community Facebook groups, which, as later accounts of the closure noted, were not the same as having a newspaper.

The paper's second life began with Mohsin Abbas. In 2002 Abbas was a reporter at the Daily Pakistan when, as CPJ recounted, he was arrested and abused during then-president Pervez Musharraf's campaign of surveillance and harassment of the press. He fled Pakistan for Canada and rebuilt his career in his adopted country, contributing to the BBC in Urdu and Punjabi and founding his own publications, including the Diversity Reporter, which a 2014 news report described as a weekly newspaper distributed in Ontario and British Columbia, and the Milton Reporter. Around 2022 he turned to the closed southwestern Ontario weeklies: he relaunched the Tilbury Times as a news site, and also brought back two neighbouring Postmedia casualties, the LaSalle Post — relaunched as the LaSalle Post Reporter — and the Lakeshore News, relaunched as the Lakeshore News Reporter. The Canadian Press coverage carried by CBC's Trust Talks has described Diversity Reporter Media as the publisher of four community newspapers in southwestern Ontario.

Programming and Content

Abbas transformed the Tilbury Times from a print weekly into a digital-first news operation. As CPJ described the relaunched site in 2022, it publishes local crime and business news alongside international news with a local angle — an early example was an interview with a Canadian family with ties to Ukraine after Russia's invasion. That mix remains visible in the paper's current output, which is produced largely by reporters funded through the Local Journalism Initiative, the federal program that supports local reporting positions in underserved communities.

The Tilbury Times Reporter's recent bylines show the breadth of its coverage. Its Local Journalism Initiative reporters — among them Matt Weingarden, Kenneth Pastushyn, Saeed Akhtar, Shazia Nazir and John Humphrey — have covered municipal funding announcements such as Ontario's $1.27 million Gas Tax investment in Chatham-Kent–Leamington transit in 2026, public-safety news including the municipality's confirmation that the drinking-water supply was unaffected by the Greenfield Global fire, and community stories ranging from Chatham-Kent Welcome Week and the Doors Open Chatham-Kent heritage program to a new municipal renovation-licence bylaw and the Tilbury and District Horticultural Society. Its sports coverage follows local teams such as the Tilbury Bluebirds of the Northern Professional Hockey League through their 2025–26 season, and its reporters covered the 2026 Chatham-Kent Community Recognition Awards, at which Tilbury residents were among the honourees.

Audience and Reach

The paper serves Tilbury, a community of a few thousand people within the Municipality of Chatham-Kent, together with readers across the municipality whose news it carries. Coverage of the 2022 relaunch described Abbas's project as saving a newspaper for a town of about 4,800 people. The OCNA member directory lists the Tilbury Times Reporter with a circulation figure of 1,000 under Diversity Reporter Media; as with other directory figures in this profile, that is an association listing rather than an audited count, and it does not capture the paper's online readership. The relaunched title's stories are published on Diversity Reporter Media's shared online platform, The Reporter, which carries dedicated sections for each of the group's communities — a Tilbury section sits alongside sections for its sister titles — giving the small paper a digital reach well beyond its original print footprint.

Digital Presence

True to its publisher's reinvention of the title, the Tilbury Times Reporter is an online publication: Abbas converted the paper from a print weekly to a news site when he relaunched it, and CPJ reported the transformation in 2022. Its reporting is published on The Reporter, the shared digital platform of the Diversity Reporter Media titles, where Tilbury stories are filed under the paper's own name and its reporters carry the Tilbury Times Reporter masthead in their bylines. The title's own web address is tilburytimes.ca, the address under which it is recorded in the OCNA directory. The paper's journalists are active on the platform throughout the year — its Tilbury section carried multiple new stories dated September 30, 2026 alone, covering municipal, public-safety and community news.

Ownership and Organisation

The Tilbury Times Reporter is published by Diversity Reporter Media Inc., led by publisher Mohsin Abbas, and is a member of the Ontario Community Newspapers Association. It belongs to a small family of relaunched southwestern Ontario community titles under the same ownership: the Lakeshore News Reporter, the LaSalle Post Reporter and their sister publications share the group's platform and publishing infrastructure, and Essex Free Press reporting produced under the Local Journalism Initiative also appears within the network. The group's newsroom model leans on Local Journalism Initiative reporters assigned to individual communities, each filing under their home paper's masthead. Abbas's own story — a refugee journalist who arrived in Canada in the early 2000s and went on to revive newspapers that a national chain had closed — has made the little Tilbury title a recurring example in national discussions about the future of local news, including CPJ's 2022 feature and CBC's Trust Talks.

Contact and Availability

The Tilbury Times Reporter publishes online and can be read through Diversity Reporter Media's Reporter platform and at tilburytimes.ca, where readers can follow its Tilbury and Chatham-Kent coverage and find contact options for the newsroom. No public business email address is listed for the paper.