What is The Northwoods River News (rivernewsonline.com)?

Updated

The Northwoods River News is a local news website serving Wisconsin’s Northwoods, with Rhinelander as its clear coverage center. It publishes daily community news, obituaries, opinion, education, high school sports, and outdoors content, and it offers an e-edition and a subscription path. It is a source for local reporting, not a national news outlet or a general information portal.

What the site covers

The homepage navigation and story list show a fairly broad local-news mix:

  • News: city, county/state, and court news
  • Community: entertainment, area events, business watch, and reader submissions such as community photos and “bouquet of roses” thank-yous
  • Obituaries
  • Opinions
  • Education: Nicolet College, the School District of Rhinelander, and other area schools
  • Sports: high school sports, sports news, and outdoors, including an outdoors photo submission channel

Recent headlines on the page illustrate the range: a feature on a school event (“On like Donkey Kong”), the death of former Rhinelander Mayor Dick Johns at 93, a School District of Rhinelander Culture Tap program hosting Mexican folk artists, an NTSB report on a Tiffany plane crash landing, and a Rhinelander FBLA/DECA food drive. In other words, the site mixes municipal news, schools, public safety, and community fundraising rather than sticking to one beat.

Who it is for

The site is aimed at residents of Rhinelander and the surrounding Northwoods communities who want local reporting in one place. It is also useful for people outside the area who follow local institutions—school district decisions, city government, court cases, or high school sports—or who need to find local obituaries.

If you are looking for statewide or national coverage, this is not the right starting point. Its value is proximity: it reports on the school board, the mayor, local crashes, and community drives that larger outlets typically skip.

Access, e-edition, and subscriptions

The page shows an E-Editions entry and a River News $1 item alongside Super Shopper – FREE, plus a Sign in link. That indicates the site has both a digital edition and some form of paid or account-based access. The page does not spell out what the $1 refers to, whether it is a single copy, a trial, or something else, so treat pricing and login requirements as things to confirm on the site rather than assume.

The page also carries a notice that the site is “under construction” after a hardware malfunction affected RiverNewsOnline.com and LakelandTimes.com, with service interruptions beginning Tuesday evening. If pages fail to load or the e-edition is unavailable, that notice is the likely explanation.

How to use it

  1. Start with the section menu rather than scrolling the homepage. News, Obituaries, Education, and Sports are separated, which makes it faster to find a specific item.
  2. Use the community submission links if you want to contribute a photo or a thank-you note; the site lists dedicated channels for these.
  3. Check the e-edition if you need the print layout or content that may not appear as a web story.
  4. Expect occasional outages while the site reports ongoing restoration work; retry later rather than assuming a story has been removed.

A practical example: if you want to know what the School District of Rhinelander has been doing, the Education section and stories like the Culture Tap feature give you district-level coverage that a general search engine may not surface.

What to keep in mind

The site is a community newspaper operation, so coverage reflects local priorities and staffing. Some items, such as the NTSB report on the plane crash landing, summarize official documents; others, like the FBLA/DECA food drive, are community announcements. The distinction matters if you need to cite something: check whether a story is original reporting or a submitted notice. And because the site is recovering from a service interruption, confirm that any page you rely on is actually loading before treating a missing story as unpublished.