UPDATE: Burlington Gazette to continue operations, says publisher

The Burlington Gazette website has new life.

Within a day of posting on Jan. 31 that the online news site was at "the end”, its publisher updated that status. “I have suspended the ceasing decision,” Pepper Parr confirmed in an email to BurlingtonToday on Wednesday (Feb.1).

In a note posted to the site Wednesday, Parr explained that the decision to cease publishing was not a retirement, but came after concluding that “continuing with the financial resources available was no longer possible even though readership was setting new records every month.”

However, he said, a number of people reached out after the Jan. 31 announcement asking how they could help. 

“So there will be conversations in the days ahead,” Parr wrote. “ I am required to keep the newspaper ‘in print’ for a number of days; so whatever I was doing in the past I will be doing for a little longer.”

Original story (Jan. 31):

The Burlington Gazette has announced it is ceasing operations effective Jan. 31, 2023.

“Everything has a beginning and everything has an end. The end for the Burlington Gazette is today,” said publisher Pepper Parr in a post to readers this morning.

The online news outlet, spearheaded by Parr and the late John Boich,  launched in 2010 as Our Burlington. The name was changed in 2013 to the Burlington Gazette.

The site’s “About” section describes its mandate: “We see the electronic media as significantly different than print. We both report, comment and analyze and link stories together so that readers can see both a bigger picture and put what they read today in a frame that includes what happened and was said in the past.

“We believe fervently that an informed population can make informed decisions.”

The Burlington Gazette is a member of the Canadian Newsmedia Council (formerly the Ontario Press Council) and received a grant to hire a reporter through the federal government’s Local Journalism Initiative program in 2021-2022.

Although mainly focused on city hall coverage and development issues, the Burlington Gazette featured several posts a day, and also covered local arts and culture events, non-profit organizations and other community-oriented news. Readers were also able to subscribe to a daily newsletter.

“Reporting, analyzing, salting news with a little humour are how we see what we do,” Parr noted in a June 8, 2013 post responding to readers’ queries about the name change. “We didn’t set out to make friends; we did set out to tell the stories that make up this city in a way no one else has in the recent past.”

Loyal Gazette readers posted notes of thanks for Parr’s dedication to the publication over the past 13 years.

“Please add my name to those who appreciate the service you’ve provided to the Burlington community,” posted one reader. “You helped enlighten folks who may not have known otherwise about an important local issue.”