T here’s nothing like rumours of a serial killer in town to highlight the need for trusted local news. A case in point is the recent experience of Smiths Falls, Ontario, a community of roughly 9,500 people located along Eastern Ontario’s historic Rideau Canal.
The town’s serial-killer rumour mill kicked into high gear when three local men went missing over a fourteen-month period. Lawrence Bertrim, forty-two at the time, disappeared in late September 2022. About a year later, on October 19, 2023, Robbie Thomson, then thirty-four, was reported missing. Steven Tate, also thirty-four, vanished not long afterward. His body was found along a highway outside town on November 8, 2023. Police have posted a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the Tate case, which is being investigated as a hit-and-run collision. Bertrim and Thomson seem to have disappeared without a trace.
As the mysteries stacked up, so did the rumours, says Kelley Denham, who administers the Smiths Falls Together Facebook group with 14,000-odd members. Some residents “absolutely convinced themselves that there was a serial killer on the loose,” she says.
Reliable information, meanwhile, was becoming much harder to come by. In August 2023, in response to the federal government’s Online News Act, Meta blocked access to news on Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada. Denham posted screenshots of headlines and encouraged people to go to news websites to read the latest stories about the missing men. But it was a hard sell. “Everyone’s used to the stuff that’s replaced actual news in their feeds,” she says.
Not long after Meta’s retaliatory move made Canadian news more difficult to find online, the financially strapped Metroland Media Group killed another access point to local stories when it ended the print edition of the Smiths Falls Record News. The company announced on September 15, 2023, that its seventy-odd community newspapers would publish news online only. What it didn’t say was that there would also be less of it. An eleven-member team of editors and reporters used to produce content for InsideOttawaValley.com, a website shared by six Metroland weeklies in Eastern Ontario, including the Record News. That team was cut to just two local reporters.
Smiths Falls mayor Shawn Pankow, who worked as a community newspaper reporter years ago, didn’t think the serial-killer rumours were that widespread. No frightened residents, for instance, reached out to him with concerns. His take on what was happening in town, however, is consistent with the findings of a recent study of Canadian media consumption that concluded belief in misinformation is highest among people who rely upon social media platforms for news instead of more traditional sources. Moreover, he says, trust in the media—which increases the more present reporters are in the communities they cover—has deteriorated to the point where more than a few residents have turned their backs on mainstream news sources. “They’ll get the news from the guy next door, who said he heard this from the guy down the street, that these two [cases] are connected and there’s a serial killer around.”
Bill Dickson, spokesperson for the Ontario Provincial Police, Eastern Ontario, says too little is known to speculate about the fates of Bertrim and Thomson. Both are suspected of involvement with the drug subculture in Smiths Falls, he says, but it is not clear if they knew each other or even if they are dead. “Right now,” he says, “these continue to be missing-person cases.”
Not long after Tate’s body was found, however, police felt it necessary to issue a public appeal for “tips, not rumours” about the missing men. Every lead in a criminal investigation is checked out, Dickson says, adding that the appeal for first-hand information was meant “to discourage people from tying up our resources for pure rumour and speculation.”
The disquiet in Smiths Falls illustrates how social media–fuelled junk can quickly fill the void that emerges when reliable local news is difficult to come by. The town, however, is not alone in suffering the repercussions of what I call local news poverty—when people don’t have access to the information they need to navigate daily life and participate in decision making that affects them. Proving causation—drawing a direct line between the weak performance of local media and specific outcomes—is difficult because so many other political, social, and economic factors can influence what happens. But a growing body of research links the scarcity of timely, verified local news produced by journalists who aren’t beholden to special interests to a multitude of consequences that are playing out in communities across Canada.
While some politicians no doubt celebrated the disappearance of pesky journalists, others are lamenting their absence, because municipalities must now work harder and spend more to keep people informed. Local governance more frequently morphs into crisis management as residents angrily protest decisions by local councils that take them by surprise. Activists who counted on watchdog journalism to keep an eye on elected officials are discovering they must do the job themselves. Social cohesion is taking a hit in the absence of local coverage that introduces people to different perspectives and explores solutions to thorny community problems. And it’s more difficult to get essential information to the public during the floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters that now occur with unnerving frequency.
T he misfortunes that have ravaged local journalism—some self-inflicted, some not—have been unfolding for more than a decade. Spending cuts by owners have hollowed out local newsrooms, tech platforms have hoovered up advertising revenue, and cellphones and the internet have eliminated the control traditional media once had over when and where people get news. More recently, Meta’s move to banish journalism from Facebook and Instagram has made it much more difficult for news organizations, especially small local outlets, to get their stories to readers.
Since 2008, 529 such outlets have closed in 351 communities across Canada, according to data from the Local News Map (part of the Local News Research Project), an online site I run that tracks changes to local media. Only about half as many have launched and survived. Community newspapers account for about three quarters of all the closings to date, but the blight is spreading to the broadcast sector. As per my research, ten of the forty-three radio stations that have shut down since 2008 closed in the past twenty months.
There’s every reason to believe that the number of communities suffering from local news poverty is growing. Recently, for instance, CTV cancelled almost all local noon and weekend newscasts in its markets. Job cuts by Corus Entertainment eviscerated local coverage at Global News stations. The Quebec-based publisher Métro Média closed abruptly, killing seventeen local newspapers. Ontario-based Metroland Media, Black Press in British Columbia (which has since emerged from creditor protection), and the SaltWire Network Inc. in Atlantic Canada (acquired by Postmedia) all recently teetered on the brink of a financial abyss.
My analysis of data from the Local News Map points to communities at risk. A deep dive into the numbers shows that between 2008 and April 1, 2024, 239 places lost more media outlets than they gained, while only seventy-six places came out ahead. Among larger cities, thirty-four local news outlets had closed in Montreal while just thirteen opened. Ottawa had suffered a net loss of fourteen news outlets, Toronto was down by twelve, and fourteen sources had closed in Vancouver while just five had opened.
The effects of local news poverty are particularly striking in Vancouver’s troubled Downtown East Side. The closing of free newspapers and limited internet access among the neighbourhood’s low-income and unhoused population mean local news isn’t easy to come by. Now when a news organization does write about landlord–tenant disputes and other issues relevant to the community, residents are printing copies of the stories and posting them on hydro poles, according to a post on X by Globe and Mail journalist Andrea Woo. In other cases, as The Tyee journalist Jen St. Denis pointed out in an X post, pop-up posters in parks direct people to stories of interest.
A closer look at reporting about the missing-men cases in Smiths Falls illustrates what news poverty looks like in a smaller community. A content analysis by the Local News Research Project shows that local, regional, and international media published a total of ninety stories about Bertrim, Thomson, and Tate between October 2, 2022, and October 18, 2024. When duplicates and rewrites (or verbatim copies) of police press releases were removed from the mix, however, there were only eleven stories left that quoted sources other than the police.
Chris Must, who was a journalist at the Smiths Falls Record News from 1987 to 1992 and still lives in the town, says the publication’s remaining local coverage is a “far cry” from what it was in his day, when the paper had a team of full-time editors and reporters. Crime reporting, he says, suffers as newsrooms shrink, because the journalists who are left don’t have time to monitor police activities and cultivate police sources. The less diligent just regurgitate press release information. There’s also no time for stories that dig deeper to answer residents’ top-of-mind questions. In mid-October last year, for instance, Must heard about the rumoured existence of a gruesome video showing one of the missing men being dismembered. “Functioning local media would be able to trace that kind of story to its source and find out where it came from,” he says.
Canadians are waking up to the local news crisis. Survey results released in a new report by the Public Policy Forum, for instance, show that 61 percent of respondents believed having less local news in their communities means residents are less informed about the workings of local government, schools, and hospitals. Fifty-eight percent indicated people have fewer ties to the community, and 57 percent agreed there is less participation in community events.
In a study published last August, 41 percent of respondents said Meta’s strangulation of news has negatively affected their ability to stay up to date. And McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy found that only about half of Canadians are satisfied with local news coverage, a number that declines more the further you get away from cities and towns. In rural areas, satisfaction levels drop to 40 percent. Data from the Local News Map suggests one explanation for this: nearly half (249) of all the local news producers that have closed since 2008 were in places with fewer than 20,000 people. By comparison, only seventy-five media start-ups launched in smaller communities.
D onna Forster and her husband, Joe Fardella, experienced the retrenchment of local journalism first hand on Thursday, July 18, 2024, when they settled in to watch the 6 p.m. local news in Kingston, Ontario. They expected to see Bill Hutchins, the affable news anchor on CKWS Global News Kingston, deliver the better part of an hour of local news and interviews from the station’s downtown broadcast centre, just as he’d done for twenty-seven years. Instead, their TV screen was blank.
“We just had no idea what had happened,” Forster says. The next day, they learned that the Kingston station had fallen victim to spending cuts by its troubled parent company, Corus Entertainment. When the revamped supper hour newscast appeared four days later, it was unrecognizable. About two dozen on-air personalities, reporters, and support staff at CKWS and the two local Corus-owned radio stations lost their jobs. Hutchins, then president of the broadcast centre’s Unifor local, says that as recently as 2023, the station had seven full- and part-time videographers covering Kingston and its environs. Following the July purge, there were three. What was a locally produced sixty-minute show that included local weather, sports, entertainment, and news about everything from city politics to community food drives now starts at 5:30 p.m. and lasts a half hour. The truncated newscast, anchored out of Peterborough, is recorded and shown again at 6:30 p.m. Producers in Toronto determine the story lineup.
“There’s far, far less information about Kingston now—they usually have one Kingston story, one Brockville story, and one Belleville story,” says Forster, a sixty-two-year-old social worker. By her reckoning, news about Kingston and the surrounding area now lasts about four minutes. As someone who eschews social media, Forster increasingly thinks of that blank television screen she saw back in July as a metaphor for feeling less connected and aware of what’s going on in her community.
She is not alone. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t run into someone who wants to know what happened, why it happened,” Hutchins says. “When you take a seventy-year-old station with deep community roots, and I mean deep, and you just rip them out of the ground one day, people feel hurt, they feel abandoned, they feel lost.” CKWS, he says, specialized in “a little bit of everything that reflected the community,” and people tell him they are struggling to make sense of the remaining local news offerings.
Christine Sypnowich, a Queen’s University philosophy professor and chair of the Coalition of Kingston Communities, says the loss of a strong local television newscast creates “a really bad situation.” The coalition, which brings together nineteen neighbourhood groups, counted on CKWS to cover local issues that it then pursued further in its report cards on openness and transparency at city hall. The station also helped the coalition share its concerns with the public: a CKWS reporter typically sought an interview within hours of receiving a coalition press release. Nowadays, Sypnowich says, attracting media attention is more “hit and miss.”
The CKWS cuts are the latest symptom of decline in Kingston’s once-rich local media environment. The storied Kingston Whig Standard newspaper, winner of two prestigious Michener Awards for public service journalism and a host of other honours, is “less and less relevant,” Sypnowich says. The Postmedia Network–owned newspaper publishes daily only four times a week and is so diminished it sometimes runs Sypnowich’s press releases verbatim. There are just five unionized staff left in its newsroom, down from sixty-nine in 1992.
Kingstonist.com, a digital news outlet, is working hard to fill the gaps, Sypnowich says. But it is a relatively small operation, with just three full-time journalists, a manager who occasionally helps out with news coverage, and a budget for freelancers. Forster and Fardella recently stepped up to support the publication, but their willingness to pay for digital news makes them a rarity. While almost three quarters of Canadians (72 percent) access news online, a majority still believe journalism is best served up free, with 57 percent indicating they won’t pay anything at all for it. Nationwide, only 15 percent of us opened our wallets to support digital news, according to data published in 2024. Just over half of those subscriptions (54 percent) were discounted.
A seething mess of consequences unfolds as news outlets close or are reduced to zombie status, plodding along but producing little to no journalism. Regional and national media, for instance, can no longer count on local reporters to flag important stories. In British Columbia’s recent election, for instance, it was a journalism student doing an assignment who reached out to major news outlets after the Conservative candidate in the Vancouver Island riding of Juan de Fuca-Malahat spewed racist, anti-Indigenous views during an election-night interview. The party subsequently announced that the candidate—who lost by just 141 votes—would not be running for the Conservatives in the future.
The knock-on effects when a local newspaper closes are also worth noting. Many local publications are guilty-as-charged of offences that include being overly invested in defending the status quo and failing abjectly to represent diverse communities in their reporting and newsroom staffing. But newspapers, at least until recently, generated the most comprehensive coverage of public affairs. When one shuts down, thinly staffed local radio and television stations can no longer simply “rip and read” its front-page stories or look to it for cues as to what to include in their newscasts.
It is also the case that when a newspaper closes, its loss is felt most by older people, many of whom still rely on traditional print publications (and television newscasts) for news. In Newmarket, Ontario, for instance, local councillor Bob Kwapis says NewmarketToday.ca, an online news site operated by Village Media, is now providing superior coverage of local news in a city that does not have a local radio or television station and where the weekly newspaper, owned by Metroland Media Group, stopped publishing a print edition in 2023. “The problem is [NewmarketToday.ca] is just online,” Kwapis says. That makes it inaccessible to older residents, who aren’t comfortable using a computer, in the city of around 88,000 people. Even if they are computer savvy, the Meta ban means the news site’s stories aren’t showing up on Facebook, the most popular social media platform among people over sixty.
Finally, research suggests that when newspapers close, ties within communities and civic engagement begin to fray. Residents of one American town that lost its local weekly told researchers they felt more isolated, missed community events because they didn’t know about them, and struggled to find information. A Canadian study that examined voter turnout during municipal elections in 233 municipalities concluded that the more newspapers there are in a community, and the more frequently the largest newspaper publishes, the more people showed up to cast a ballot.
News poverty, however, has consequences beyond those associated with the demise of a local newspaper. As local journalism declines, so, too, does its capacity to act as an early warning system for public health officials and researchers who count on local coverage to sound the alarm about infectious disease outbreaks before they spread.
Officials responsible for public safety during emergencies point to other clear and present dangers as local news outlets scale back or disappear. Having multiple channels of communication with the public is essential, because one or more may be destroyed as a disaster unfolds. In District of Clearwater, a roughly eighty-minute drive north of Kamloops, BC, mayor Merlin Blackwell is therefore brooding over Stingray Radio’s recent decision to lay off half the newsroom staff at Radio NL and shift it from talk to music format. Blackwell says the Kamloops-based AM station provided essential information for his community of around 2,600 during the summer of 2023, when the wildfire threat was such that he was “a day away from calling an emergency if weather conditions were unfavourable.” The situation is made worse, the mayor says, by Stingray’s decision to shut down its AM transmitter, a move that reduces Radio NL’s signal in Clearwater to little more than static, particularly on hot summer days when the fire risk is highest.
Blackwell says cell service dies about ten kilometres out of town, the internet is slow at the best of times and clogs up when demand increases (as it does during emergencies), and not everyone has signed up for the landline- and cellphone-based emergency alert service the municipality has set up. “What we don’t have now, especially outside the coverage of cellphone networks, is any way to get word to people,” he says. “Now it’s up to actual physical human beings to go out into the bush and find people and tell them what’s going on. And that’s putting human lives at risk in a way that I didn’t think we’d ever go back to.”
Jason Brolund, the fire chief in BC’s City of West Kelowna, says his concern is that Corus Entertainment’s decision to shift production of Global Okanagan’s television newscast from Kelowna to Vancouver, about four hours away, may make it more difficult to get urgent information on the air. National and international media drop in to cover the drama when fire threatens a community, says Brolund, who oversaw the evacuation of thousands of people ahead of the McDougall Creek fire during the calamitous 2023 wildfire season. Local media, by comparison, “are trying to get word out to people about what they should do in the face of a disaster.” Reporters who live in a community have the granular knowledge needed to convey accurate evacuation instructions. And when emergencies end, they are still around writing stories that connect people to resources, explore ways to prevent future disasters, and track recovery efforts.
When they aren’t scrambling to reach people in an emergency, officials in places underserved by local news increasingly have other communications-related headaches. In Toronto, councillor Stephen Holyday has suggested lack of neighbourhood-level local reporting contributed to a backlash against new bike lanes installed along Bloor Street West in his Etobicoke Centre ward: “I think this is a major reason why citizens have become detached from their local government, and why so much comes as an unpleasant surprise to many,” Holyday told the Toronto Star.
Municipal governments in smaller communities face similar challenges when local news providers aren’t reliable information conduits. In the northwestern Ontario community of Dryden, for instance, the fallout from the 2019 closing of the Dryden Observer newspaper was still being felt in 2022 when town council introduced a water charge on vacant lots. The charge, expected to cost the owners of vacant lots about $800 a year according to a report by CKDR News, was adopted to encourage development of the properties and generate revenue for maintaining and replacing water and sewer-related infrastructure in the city of about 7,300. Dryden mayor Jack Harrison, newly elected at the time, says information about the charge was shared with the local radio station, mailed out to residents, and available via recordings of council meetings provided online. Still, some vacant lot owners were surprised to get the first bill, and the issue ended up back before council, where a delegation of property owners asked—to no avail—for cancellation of the charge. Looking back, Harrison says that if the 122-year-old newspaper hadn’t shut down, it would have been easier to make people aware that the charge was being considered.
Brian Lambie, the president of Redbrick Communications, says the disappearance of robust local media and the proliferation of online misinformation mean it is no longer enough for municipalities to issue press releases and hope somebody sees them. Local governments must take on “work that would have been done previously by a print reporter or radio reporter or a television reporter,” he says, noting that packaging information in multiple formats, such as podcasts and videos, and sharing it via social media, adds to costs. Lambie, whose company has provided communications advice, support, and training to more than 100 clients in the municipal sector, now encourages municipalities to share municipal news with local Facebook group moderators in the same way they share it with journalists.
Not all municipalities are rushing to open the equivalent of professional newsrooms. City of Kawartha Lakes, a sprawling collection of two dozen communities in cottage country northeast of Toronto, uses roadside billboards to promote its municipal newsletter. In Newmarket, the municipality delivers local news headlines and story links to residents who subscribe to the service. Last month, council members in the northern Alberta town of High Level voted to continue purchasing a subscription to the local weekly newspaper for every household in town. In return, the municipality gets space in every issue for its announcements and a surefire way to reach the town’s roughly 3,500 residents. When I first wrote about the arrangement in the Toronto Star back in 2021, officials said their goal was to combat gossip, conspiracy theories, and residents’ suspicions that local politicians lie to them all the time.
L ocal news poverty also means more work for people who want to stay informed. “The onus now is on the audience to figure out what they want, what they need, and where they’re going to go and get it, and then what they trust and what they think is credible,” says Robert Washburn, a journalism professor at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario.
Washburn says residents of Cobourg, the Eastern Ontario town he has called home for more than three decades, relied upon the Cobourg Daily Star newspaper, before it closed in 2017, to get a sense of what was happening in the community. Figuring that out now in what he describes as the town’s “completely shattered” local news ecosystem requires gathering tidbits of information from multiple sources that offer limited coverage. The search for news in Cobourg, he says, is like “panning for gold . . . washing and washing and trying to find those little nuggets that you could put together to create an ingot.”
The situation is complicated by deep divisions that Washburn says began during the pandemic, when anti-vaxxer sentiment and the trucker convoy’s hate-Trudeau rhetoric took root locally. Those divisions have morphed into nasty conflicts, particularly on social media, he says, over the town’s handling of a major opioid abuse problem and the location of an encampment and emergency shelter for the unhoused. “There were always issues that would flare up and groups would get upset,” Washburn says, but in his view, the community was never as polarized as it is today.
Given the complicated political, social, and cultural differences fuelling the divisions, he stops short of claiming that a healthier local news environment will bring Cobourg’s more than 20,000 residents together. “It wouldn’t happen overnight,” he says. “[But] if I didn’t believe [it] was possible, I wouldn’t be working as hard as I do to do what I do”—which is to spend up to twelve hours a week running a news website where he posts interviews he conducts with local officials, along with stories and columns he writes about local issues. “It’s an incredible amount of work. But the thing is, I feel so passionately about trying to respond to what [we have been] talking about, which is people are hungry for news.”
Washburn isn’t the only unsung hero assuming the task of holding local governments accountable in places where local news media aren’t doing—or can’t do—the job. In Kingston, residents with urban planning backgrounds, retired local councillors, and other members of the Coalition of Kingston Communities have also stepped into the breach. Recently, for instance, they pushed back against restrictions council placed on public delegations and its growing tendency to bypass standing committees and move issues straight to city council for a decision. “We were interested in how many [committee] meetings are being cancelled, how long are these meetings lasting, who’s going to them,” Sypnowich says. “We are basically [doing the] investigative journalism that you can’t find anywhere else anymore. We’re doing it as best we can, but it’s obviously going to be rather patchy and incomplete.”
In Stratford, Ontario, the Get Concerned Stratford citizens’ group used the province’s Municipal Act to request special investigations, which concluded that more than 135 improper votes occurred in closed city council meetings between 2018 and 2024. The investigations included the period when city council was in secret talks—ultimately unsuccessful—with a China-based company to bring a controversial $400 million auto glass–manufacturing plant to town. “The media certainly did not uncover the malfeasance,” says Mike Sullivan, a former New Democratic Party member of Parliament who retired in the city and helped organize Get Concerned Stratford. “The media didn’t file freedom of information requests. The media did not file the [requests for] closed-meeting investigations—that all had to be done by members of the public.”
The unsung heroes in Brighton, Ontario, a town of over 12,000 on the shores of Lake Ontario, are Amy McQuaid, a former municipal councillor turned mortgage agent, and Joyce Cassin, a retired journalist turned real estate agent. In early 2024, they launched the Brighton Community Gazette and began reporting on town council and other local issues. About twice a month, they distributed an email newsletter and printed 200 copies of the Gazette on 8.5×14 sheets of paper that they dropped off at local businesses. Almost immediately, they caused a stir with a story revealing that city staff had authorized costly design changes to the town’s wastewater treatment system without council approval. Then their story about the Brighton council’s decision to spend $10,000 a month on a lobbying firm with connections to Ontario’s premier was picked up by media at the provincial legislature and became Question Period fodder. The firm, hired to help the town secure a major infrastructure grant, backed out of the contract.
McQuaid, whose background includes a journalism diploma and stints as a communications consultant and city councillor in Oshawa and Durham region (2010 to 2018), noticed Brighton’s need for more news soon after moving there in 2020. First, she was struck by how difficult it was to convince town bureaucrats to install a “Hidden Driveway” sign along a stretch of road where she’d been forced into a ditch with her two young children in the car. Then she noticed that inadequate media coverage was making it difficult for a non-profit group she supports to attract volunteers and raise money.
McQuaid says she champions local news because it provides busy people with the information they need to effect change. It also inspires candidates to run for office: “Part of the reason why people choose to get involved is they get angry about an issue,” she says. “[A news story] is usually the first point at which people are, like, maybe I can do something.”
The problem is that not every community has a Washburn, Sypnowich, Sullivan, McQuaid, or Cassin. And politicians in Cobourg, Kingston, Stratford, and Brighton will be held accountable only as long as activist residents are willing—and able—to donate their time and expertise. There are costs to doing this work: McQuaid says getting involved in politics may deter clients if you are running a business. And holding power accountable, she warns, can become all consuming. “You need to have some boundaries.”
The Brighton Gazette, for instance, recently suspended operations for three months because one of McQuaid’s children had a health problem. When it got back to business in November, its publishers announced they were scaling back operations due to their full-time jobs, family responsibilities, and volunteer commitments. Going forward, the Gazette’s newsletter will focus mostly on council highlights, while more in-depth stories will be published online and in print.
O ne of the great unknowns is whether local journalism can be repaired in places where it is in tatters. That may get even more difficult if Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre forms the next government and makes good on his pledge to slash funding for the CBC’s English-language service. Outside Quebec, the public broadcaster currently operates forty-eight local bureaus and stations for radio and television and just announced it will hire thirty journalists to expand or create new bureaus in twenty-two underserved communities, mostly in western Canada. Poilievre is also unenthusiastic about measures the Liberal government, beginning in 2019, introduced to shore up journalism. He has heaped scorn on the Local Journalism Initiative in particular. LJI funding for local news organizations—which will total $128.8 million over the eight years from 2019 to 2027—has supported the hiring of more than 2,000 mostly full-time reporters for up to a year to cover underserved communities and issues. Other measures that face an uncertain future include a tax break for people who pay for digital news subscriptions and a 35 percent Canadian journalism labour tax credit, worth an estimated $320 million to news organizations over the five years ending in 2028.
On the darkest of days, however, it’s worth remembering that Canadians value local journalism, or at least they say they do. When regular consumers of news were asked in a recent survey to identify the coverage that matters most to them, local and political news tied for first place as the choice of 67 percent of respondents. The Ontario government has stepped up with support: as of September, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, the Ontario Cannabis Store, Metrolinx, and the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation must direct to Ontario-based publishers a minimum of 25 percent of the more than $100 million they together spend on advertising each year. Meanwhile, in return for an exemption from the Online News Act, Google has sent the $100 million it agreed to pay Canadian news outlets in 2025 to the journalism organization set up to disperse the funds. The money, the first of five annual payments, is now being distributed to eligible Canadian news publishers whose work has been repurposed or shared online by the tech giant. The CBC says its $7 million share is covering the cost of those thirty additional journalists it is hiring.
On the darkest of days, it’s also worth remembering that innovative local news outlets are rewriting many aspects of the journalism playbook—and making a go of it. Some, convinced that the internet is not their best friend, have embraced old-fashioned print as a way to distribute their journalism. Some are rejecting the traditional advertising-reliant business model and are developing new revenue sources. Others are involving the people they report on in the production of stories those people think are important. In 2023, Lion Publishers, a professional association that supports news entrepreneurs, identified 191 independent digital news businesses in Canada that focus on local news. When Press Forward, an umbrella organization for independent, community-focused news outlets, recently conducted a member survey, it received only ten responses. But eight of the ten respondents said their revenue grew in the past two years, along with their audiences and their news coverage. Nine of the ten had hired more people.
And finally, on the darkest of days, it’s worth remembering that local journalism at its best is demonstrably as essential to well-functioning communities as potable drinking water, safe streets, and reliable emergency services. The Toronto Star and The Narwhal, a non-profit digital news outlet that covers environmental issues, won the 2023 Michener Award for public service journalism for reporting that led Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government to abandon its plan to allow housing development on protected Greenbelt lands in the Toronto area. The Montreal Gazette’s exposé of deaths, likely preventable, at a local hospital emergency room, and officials’ attempts to cover up the circumstances, sparked a Quebec government investigation that largely confirmed the newspaper’s findings and led to funding for an ER expansion. Cabin Radio, an online station in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, was recognized for its evacuation coverage during the 2023 wildfires that threatened the city’s more than 20,000 residents. In Toronto, award-winning reporting by The Local, an online magazine, on the city’s mayoral by-election included profiles of the major contenders, stories about the issues, and reported, fact-checked biographies for all 102 candidates.
In too many places, alas, stories like these are the exception rather than the rule.
