North Penn Now: The Little News Site That Grew Into Something Bigger Than Anyone Expected
There’s something quietly remarkable about a guy sitting at a kitchen table in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, deciding one day to start a local news website — and then watching it grow into one of the most-read outlets in the entire region. That’s more or less the story of North Penn Now. It didn’t launch with a big budget, a fancy newsroom, or corporate backing. It launched because someone noticed that the people living in a particular stretch of southeastern Pennsylvania weren’t getting the stories that mattered to them. And that someone did something about it.
Whether you’re a Lansdale local who checks it every morning before coffee gets cold, or you’re someone curious about how small, independent news organizations are fighting back against the slow disappearance of community journalism — this article is for you. Pull up a chair. This is a good story.
Key Facts:
| Topic | Detail |
| Full Name | North Penn Now |
| Website | northpennnow.com |
| Founded | August 2018 |
| Founder | Keith Heffintrayer |
| Type | Hyperlocal digital news outlet |
| Primary Coverage Area | North Penn School District region, Montgomery County, PA |
| Towns Served | Lansdale, Montgomeryville, North Wales, Harleysville, and surrounding areas |
| Parent Company | Fideri News Network (formerly Access Network) |
| First Acquisition | January 2024, by Access Global Media |
| Second Acquisition | September 2025, merged into Fideri News Network |
| Monthly Readership (at acquisition) | Approximately 250,000 readers |
| Fideri Network Size | 19+ websites, one radio station (WBCB), projected $6M+ revenue |
| Key Staff | Tony Di Domizio (Managing Editor), Jimmy “Jimmy James” Short (Multimedia) |
| Content Areas | Breaking news, public safety, education, government, courts, business, sports, community |
| Newsletter | Free weekly email, covering news, events, restaurants, weather, and more |
| Cost to Read | Free — no paywall |
| Veteran-Owned Origin | Yes — Keith Heffintrayer is a U.S. Army veteran |
Where It All Began: One Person, One Idea, One Gap to Fill
Keith Heffintrayer had already spent years working in local journalism when he made his leap. He’d gotten his start in 2010 as a columnist for the Lansdale Patch — a hyperlocal news network that was popular for a while before it scaled back dramatically. Under the mentorship of veteran journalist Tony Di Domizio, Heffintrayer moved from column writer to regional editor, eventually overseeing multiple Patch sites across Montgomery County.
But when Patch pulled back its resources and some of those communities were left without consistent coverage, Heffintrayer saw what happens when a neighborhood loses its local voice. Things go unnoticed. Decisions get made without scrutiny. People stop knowing what’s happening a few streets over.
So in August 2018, he launched North Penn Now. He was honest about his goal: fill a coverage gap. He wasn’t predicting a media empire. He just knew these communities deserved better.
What happened next surprised even him.
The Region It Covers: More Than Just a Place Name
The “North Penn” in North Penn Now refers to the North Penn School District area — a cluster of communities sitting about 20 miles north of Philadelphia in Montgomery County. Lansdale is the central hub. North Wales, Montgomeryville, Hatfield, and Harleysville round out the area. Souderton edges in from the north. The region also pulls content from Franconia Township, Hilltown Township, and surrounding boroughs.
This is classic American suburban geography. Quiet residential streets, a lively small-town commercial district, active school sports, local government that genuinely affects people’s daily lives. The North Penn School District alone serves roughly 13,000 students across multiple elementary schools, two middle schools, and a high school known for its marching band — the North Penn Marching Knights, who have performed at Philadelphia Eagles games.
This is the kind of place where a zoning board vote matters. Where a local business opening is news worth sharing. Where a fire on Tuesday morning means people need to know about it before they try to drive down that road.
What North Penn Now Actually Covers
Walk through the website and you’ll find a wide spread of local stories. Public safety is a consistent thread — fire calls, police reports, court outcomes, and crime updates. The editorial team takes care to note that anyone mentioned in a police report is legally innocent until proven guilty, which is more thoughtful than many outlets manage.
Education coverage is strong, too. The North Penn School District is a major anchor of the region, and the site keeps tabs on school board meetings, funding debates, student achievements, and district policy changes. When a scholarship program threatened to cut tuition aid for 173 students at Lansdale Catholic, North Penn Now was there covering it.
Government and politics flow through the coverage regularly — from borough council decisions to state legislative updates. When Governor Josh Shapiro called out the Pennsylvania Senate over budget delays, North Penn Now carried that story. When a local union organized to try to save 1,500 jobs at a Franconia Township facility facing closure, that was front-page material too.
Business news is woven in. Real estate updates, new openings, economic development ideas — like a proposed STEM and AI training center in a former Wells Fargo building in Lansdale. These are the small, practical stories that affect where people work, shop, and invest.
Sports coverage runs alongside all of it. Local high school sports, Philadelphia Eagles and Phillies updates, and features on community athletes round out the mix. The site even partners with WBCB Sports for additional coverage.
And then there are the community stories — the warm human features, the animal rescues (a “Rescue of the Week” section has won readers’ hearts), the seasonal events like Halloween parades and house-decorating contests.
The People Behind It
Good local journalism is mostly about the people doing it. North Penn Now has been lucky in this department.
Keith Heffintrayer brought military discipline and community roots to the operation. He’s a U.S. Army veteran who served as a forward observer in the 3rd Infantry Division — a background that probably shaped his instinct for staying alert, staying accurate, and knowing when something matters. He’s lived in the Lansdale area for most of his adult life. That’s not a small thing. Local news works best when the reporters actually belong to the place they’re covering.
Tony Di Domizio, the Managing Editor, is one of the most experienced journalists in the region. He spent six years at The Reporter — the long-established Lansdale-area print newspaper — and also ran the Lansdale Patch during its peak years, growing it into one of the most-read hyperlocal sites in the entire northeastern United States. He has won multiple journalism awards for features and breaking news, and he holds a seat on the Lansdale Economic Development Committee. He knows this community the way a neighbor does.
Jimmy “Jimmy James” Short handles photography and multimedia. He’s a North Penn High School graduate who taught himself photography, worked events for major celebrities, covered the Bill Cosby trial, and contributed to 6ABC and NBC10 before joining North Penn Now full-time. His work has given the site a visual quality that goes well beyond what most small local outlets can manage.
The team also includes freelancers and veteran contributors, including award-winning columnist Mike Morsch and longtime reporter Melissa Finley.
The Business of Being a Small News Site
Running a local news outlet without a print revenue stream or a big corporation behind you is genuinely hard. North Penn Now has managed it, but the path wasn’t always obvious.
The site grew primarily through word of mouth, social media sharing, and reader loyalty. By the time Keith Heffintrayer marked five years in business in 2023, the site had already blown past its original growth targets. Monthly readership had climbed to around 250,000 unique readers — a remarkable number for a hyperlocal outlet serving a suburban Pennsylvania corridor.
In January 2024, the company was acquired by Access Global Media, and Heffintrayer stepped into an executive role at the parent organization. By that point, he had helped launch several sister sites — Wissahickon Now, Perk Valley Now, Central Bucks Now, Horsham Now, Willow Grove Now, and Delco Now — all following the same hyperlocal model.
Then, in September 2025, things got bigger still. Access Network merged with Broad + Liberty, a Philadelphia-area media organization, to form the Fideri News Network. The name comes from a Latin root meaning “to trust” or “to be faithful.” The combined operation now covers communities from Harrisburg to the Jersey Shore, with 19-plus websites, a radio station, and projected revenues of around $6 million — with ambitions to grow further.
Importantly, Fideri chose not to go the paywall route. Everything is free to read. Revenue comes through advertising, sponsorships, affiliate partnerships, e-commerce, and event ticketing. That choice matters. Putting local news behind a subscription wall prices out some of the very people who need it most.
Why Local News Matters More Than You Might Think
Here’s something worth sitting with for a moment. Across the United States, more than 2,500 local newspapers have closed since 2005. As of 2025, roughly 213 counties have no local news outlet at all — a record high. Another 1,500-plus counties are down to a single, barely functioning source. About 50 million Americans now have very limited access to local journalism.
That’s not just sad in an abstract way. Research has shown that when local news disappears, something measurable happens. Voter turnout drops. Municipal bond interest rates go up because less transparency means less investor trust. Local elections get less competitive. Political polarization increases. And misinformation — the kind that spreads on Facebook when no trained reporter is around to fact-check it — fills the gap.
One Pennsylvania county actually documented this: when no local journalists were present to report accurately, alarming but false rumors about crime spread rapidly through social media and caused community-wide panic.
North Penn Now is, in a quiet but real way, a response to all of that. A small outlet that decided this community deserved real reporters, real stories, and real accountability — even when no one else was watching.
How It Works Day to Day
The basic rhythm of North Penn Now is breaking news first, features second, community third.
When something happens — a fire, a crash on Route 309, a police incident, a school board vote — stories go up fast. The editorial team monitors police scanners, follows public meetings, and keeps tabs on township government. Breaking news alerts reach readers through the website, social media channels, and email.
The weekly newsletter serves a different purpose. It lands in subscribers’ inboxes with a curated look at what’s happening locally — news, upcoming events, restaurant openings, weather, real estate, things to do. It’s the kind of email a lot of people actually read, not just skim.
Readers are also invited to participate. The site has an open policy for story tips and community submissions. If you spot something worth covering — a duckling crossing the road that’s slowing traffic, a ribbon-cutting at a new shop, something that feels off about a local decision — you can send it in. That reader-to-reporter pipeline is part of what makes hyperlocal journalism feel different from the big news machines.
The site has a content-sharing agreement with The Reporter, the long-established print newspaper in Lansdale. Some Reporter content appears on North Penn Now; some North Penn Now content runs in The Reporter’s print edition. It’s a sensible arrangement that keeps local journalism collaborative rather than purely competitive.
The Challenges That Come With the Territory
None of this is easy or guaranteed. Local digital news outlets face real pressures.
Advertising revenue in local markets is thin compared to what national digital platforms can offer. Competing with Facebook, Google, and algorithm-driven news feeds for readers’ attention is a daily reality. Maintaining editorial quality and speed at the same time — without the staffing a larger newsroom would have — requires constant prioritization.
There’s also the trust problem. Not just North Penn Now’s trust, but the wider erosion of trust in news media that has made every outlet’s job harder. In a climate where many people are skeptical of journalism in general, a local outlet has to earn its credibility story by story, correction by correction, presence by presence.
Then there are the questions around community standards. North Penn Now has a clear takedown policy — requests are evaluated case by case, and in most situations the original article stays in the archive even if removed from public view. That’s a thoughtful balance between accountability and the real-world consequences articles can have for ordinary people.
The Bigger Picture: North Penn Now Inside Fideri
Being part of the Fideri News Network means North Penn Now is no longer just one site trying to survive on its own. It’s part of something larger — a regional media company with enough scale to share costs, coordinate reporting, and maintain sustainability in a way that individual hyperlocal sites often can’t.
Fideri’s stated goal is to be the leading local digital news platform in a region where legacy newsrooms have been retreating. It’s not subscriber-based. It’s multimedia — combining news, radio (through WBCB), podcasts, sports coverage through OnPattison.com, and even e-commerce and event ticketing. The idea is that a diversified revenue base can fund the kind of journalism a single advertising stream can’t support anymore.
Whether that model succeeds long-term remains to be seen. But it’s a more serious attempt at sustainability than most local news organizations have managed.
The Communities It Serves: A Quick Sketch
For context, the North Penn area sits in one of Pennsylvania’s more economically mixed suburban zones. Montgomery County as a whole is prosperous, but that prosperity doesn’t reach everyone equally. Housing affordability has emerged as a genuine local challenge — new development hasn’t kept pace with demand, and zoning rules have historically favored low-density housing. Transportation infrastructure is important here too, especially for workers commuting via SEPTA rail or along the Route 309 corridor.
The North Penn School District is one of the community’s biggest institutions, serving students across multiple municipalities with a student population that reflects the region’s diversity. School board decisions, funding formulas, special education policies — these are the kinds of stories that directly change families’ lives. Having a news outlet paying close attention to those decisions is not nothing. It’s quite a lot, actually.
Final Thoughts:
There’s a version of this story that’s just about one website. And there’s a larger version — about what happens when someone from a community decides that their neighbors deserve to know what’s going on, and then actually does the work.
Keith Heffintrayer rolled the dice in August 2018. He had no blueprint. He had no guarantee. What he had was a genuine understanding of where he lived, what his neighbors cared about, and what was missing. He built something from that. By the time it was big enough to be acquired — twice — it had already become something the community relied on.
That’s not a small achievement. In an era when local news is disappearing at a speed that alarms researchers and civic leaders alike, North Penn Now has done the opposite of disappearing. It has grown. It has adapted. It has stayed free to read and firmly rooted in the daily life of the people it serves.
The next time you see a story about a school board vote, a local business opening, or a fire down the street on North Penn Now, you’re looking at the output of something that could so easily not have existed. Someone decided it should. That’s worth remembering
FAQs
1. What exactly is North Penn Now?
North Penn Now is a free, digital-only local news outlet serving communities in and around the North Penn School District area of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. It covers breaking news, public safety, education, government, courts, business, and community events. It’s part of the larger Fideri News Network.
2. Who founded North Penn Now, and when?
Keith Heffintrayer, a U.S. Army veteran and longtime local journalist, founded North Penn Now in August 2018. His goal was to fill a coverage gap in the North Penn region after the decline of other local news options.
3. Who owns North Penn Now today?
As of 2025, North Penn Now is part of Fideri News Network, which formed when Broad + Liberty acquired Access Network (the company that had purchased North Penn Now in January 2024). Fideri operates 19-plus websites across Pennsylvania and the Jersey Shore.
4. Is North Penn Now free to read?
Yes. There is no paywall or subscription fee. The site is funded through advertising, sponsorships, affiliate partnerships, and e-commerce. The weekly newsletter is also free to subscribe to.
5. What towns and communities does North Penn Now cover?
- Lansdale
- Montgomeryville
- North Wales
- Harleysville
- Hatfield
- Souderton
- Franconia Township
- Hilltown Township
- Towamencin Township
- Surrounding boroughs and townships in Montgomery and Bucks counties
6. How is North Penn Now different from The Reporter, the traditional Lansdale newspaper?
The Reporter is a long-established print-and-digital paper with roots going back to 1870. North Penn Now is a digital-first operation launched in 2018, with a faster breaking news focus and free access. The two outlets actually have a content-sharing agreement — some stories appear in both.
7. How can I submit a news tip or story idea?
You can send tips to the North Penn Now editorial team via email at their contact addresses, or reach them through their Facebook page. The site actively encourages readers to flag stories — whether it’s something urgent or a feel-good community moment.
8. Does North Penn Now cover Philadelphia Eagles and Phillies games?
Yes. Sports coverage includes local high school sports as well as Philadelphia professional teams — Eagles, Phillies, Flyers, Sixers, and the Union. The site also runs WBCB Sports content.
9. What is the Fideri News Network?
Fideri News Network is a regional media company formed in September 2025, combining Broad + Liberty and Access Network. It now operates multiple local news sites across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, plus a radio station and sports/entertainment platform. The name comes from a Latin word meaning “to trust.”
10. What kinds of stories get the most attention on North Penn Now?
Breaking news — fires, road accidents, police incidents — tends to travel fastest. But school board decisions, local election results, and community features about local people also consistently draw strong readership.
11. How do I subscribe to the North Penn Now newsletter?
Go to mail.northpennnow.com and sign up for free. The weekly newsletter covers news, events, restaurants, real estate, weather, and local recreation.
12. Is North Penn Now politically neutral?
The site aims for balanced coverage. It publishes news stories, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor from across the political spectrum. Its parent company Fideri has described its editorial mission as centered rather than politically aligned to one side, though it emerged partly from Broad + Liberty, which previously identified as right-of-center. Readers should always bring their own critical thinking to any news source.
13. Can I submit an opinion or letter to the editor?
Yes. North Penn Now welcomes submissions from community leaders, elected officials, candidates, and residents. Submissions should focus on policy or issues — not personal attacks. They may be edited for grammar and style, and the publication has the right to accept or decline them.
14. How large has North Penn Now’s readership grown?
By early 2024, when it was first acquired, the site had reached approximately 250,000 monthly readers — well beyond the targets set when it launched in 2018. The Fideri network as a whole now draws 2.5 to 3 million monthly visits across all its sites.
15. Why does hyperlocal journalism matter so much right now?
Across the U.S., over 2,500 local newspapers have shut down since 2005. Research links the loss of local journalism to lower voter turnout, more misinformation, and weaker civic engagement. Outlets like North Penn Now fill a gap that used to be served by print papers — keeping people informed about the decisions and events that shape daily life closest to home.
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