While small-market newspapers across North America are struggling to serve their sprawling populations, it appears that local ownership may be the key to maintaining a vibrant local news ecosystem. Haliburton, Ont. is an idyllic county of only 18,00 people, but has a thriving media community with three newspapers, The Echo, The Highlander and The Minden Times, as well as two radio stations.

A summer cottaging destination for many big-city dwellers, year-round Haliburton residents rely on local news organizations to cover important stories, such as the fact that the county has one of the highest poverty rates in the province of Ontario, according to Statistics Canada. Though the newsrooms are small, their journalists are deeply connected with their communities and are held accountable because their work will be read and discussed by their neighbours “in the grocery store, in the post office, or in the street.”

Watch Ryerson journalism students’ Steph Wechsler and Spencer Turcotte’s short documentary on this local news success story in Ontario’s cottage country, on The Future of Local News.

‘A crazy, little oasis of local news’ in Ontario was originally published in The Future of Local News: Research and Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Across North America, the availability of news is inconsistent if not scarce. But how can we measure and compare accessibility to local news across regions in a meaningful way? Once quantified, that information can help us track trends over time and build a more comprehensive picture of the state of local news.

In their work toward this crucial goal, researchers Philip Napoli, Ian Dunham and Jessica Mahone approached their comparative analysis of all 50 U.S. states by first defining what they meant by the term they used to evaluate each state: news media infrastructure. It refers to the entirety of media outlets within a state that are focused, at least to some extent on providing local news and reporting. They looked at the total number of journalism-producing media outlets that they were able to identify as well as the total number of identifiable people employed within these outlets.

Their research, detailed in “Assessing news media: A state-level analysis,” revealed significant differences in local news availability in different regions of the country. The Mountain West, a cluster of states in the Northeast, and a cluster of states in the Southeast were found to be less robust than other areas of the country, they concluded. Their analysis suggests that different communities will require different kinds of support to maintain robust local news ecosystems.

To learn more about their findings, read their article in The Future of Local News: Research and Reflections.

Taking the pulse of local news in the United States was originally published in The Future of Local News: Research and Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week, Postmedia Network announced the shutdown of six local Canadian newspapers, including the Camrose Canadian and Strathmore Standard in Alberta and the Kapuskasing Northern Times, Ingersoll Times, Norwich Gazette and Petrolia Topic in Ontario. Three other community titles will no longer be printed, but will retain some sort of digital presence. This is part of the fallout from the company’s November deal with Torstar Corp., when the country’s two largest chains traded 41 titles in Ontario and closed almost all of them, creating dozens of local monopolies. The dealings by Postmedia and Torstar Corp. prompted the federal Competition Bureau to launch an investigation.

In his Future of Local News article “Death by natural causes or premeditated murder,” Marc Edge looks at the impact daily newspaper closures and mergers by two British Columbia media chains from 2010–2016 have had on the local news ecosystem in the province. What he finds is that while this would appear to be classic anti-competitive behaviour, these dealings have gone without challenge from the federal Competition Bureau. The earnings of both Black Press and Glacier Media in fact increased in 2016 after several years of decline, which suggests the companies’ strategic trade-and-close strategy improved their bottom lines. This case study emphasizes the laxity of Canada’s antitrust laws in dealing with newspaper mergers and takeovers.

Edge recommends that as part of its investigation into the Postmedia–Torstar trade and closures, the Competition Bureau to at least examine the B.C. deals to better understand the subsequent closure and merger of many local news sources in Canada. Read more of his research in The Future of Local News.

Canadian newspapers: Death by natural causes or premeditated murder? was originally published in The Future of Local News: Research and Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week, Postmedia Network announced the shutdown of six local Canadian newspapers, including the Camrose Canadian and Strathmore Standard in Alberta and the Kapuskasing Northern Times, Ingersoll Times, Norwich Gazette and Petrolia Topic in Ontario. Three other community titles will no longer be printed, but will retain some sort of digital presence. This is part of the fallout from the company’s November deal with Torstar Corp., when the country’s two largest chains traded 41 titles in Ontario and closed almost all of them, creating dozens of local monopolies. The dealings by Postmedia and Torstar Corp. prompted the federal Competition Bureau to launch an investigation.

In his Future of Local News article “Death by natural causes or premeditated murder,” Marc Edge looks at the impact daily newspaper closures and mergers by two British Columbia media chains from 2010–2016 have had on the local news ecosystem in the province. What he finds is that while this would appear to be classic anti-competitive behaviour, these dealings have gone without challenge from the federal Competition Bureau. The earnings of both Black Press and Glacier Media in fact increased in 2016 after several years of decline, which suggests the companies’ strategic trade-and-close strategy improved their bottom lines. This case study emphasizes the laxity of Canada’s antitrust laws in dealing with newspaper mergers and takeovers.

Edge recommends that as part of its investigation into the Postmedia–Torstar trade and closures, the Competition Bureau to at least examine the B.C. deals to better understand the subsequent closure and merger of many local news sources in Canada. Read more of his research in The Future of Local News.

Student-produced short doc chronicles media consolidation in Ontario

As part of The Future of Local News: Research and Reflections, we’ve commissioned a series of short documentaries by Ryerson School of Journalism students telling the story of local news in Canadian communities. Produced by Steph Wechsler (RSJ MJ ’17) and Spencer Turcotte (RSJ ’19) these stories complement the more traditional academic content in the publication by providing street-level examinations of why local news matters.

This story is set in Port Hope, Ont., a town that saw the availability of local news decline rapidly after a Canadian newspaper chain amalgamated the area’s three local papers in 2009. Eight years later, increased media concentration has seen that paper shut down. In this short doc, local media experts discuss what news production looked like in the years between the consolidation and the closure.

Small market struggles for survival was originally published in The Future of Local News: Research and Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One year after hosting our international conference, Is No Local News Bad News? at the Ryerson School of Journalism, we’re very excited to launch our new, interactive scholarly publication, The Future of Local News: Research and Reflections. Bringing together cutting-edge research from journalism scholars in Canada and around the world, this multimedia publication features interactive maps, videos, podcasts, as well as articles, and has been made open-access under a Creative Commons license.

The collection explores different facets of local news, and asks how we might begin to move forward in a way that preserves the most crucial parts of traditional news production and distribution models, while building on the best of what we are learning from technological disruption. It considers the role of local news in Canada and around the world, and asks what role policy, financing models, and new technologies might play in forging a new path forward. Above all, it invites the reader to draw their own conclusions. There may be many different ways to get vital civic and community information to the publics that require it, and no one model will work in every instance.

When the editorial team sat down to envision this publication, we wanted to ensure that the research presented here could be widely available, and reach far beyond the walls of the ivory tower. We therefore rejected the idea of paywalls and jargon-laden language accessible to only a limited audience. We also wanted to take advantage of digital tools that allow for storytelling in different formats. The result is an interactive, multimedia publication that is openly available online via multiple channels. In addition to the traditional academic articles, we encouraged multimedia submissions, so in this publication you will find short explanatory videos, an audio podcast, and work that includes links, interactive maps, and infographics. We’ve also included short documentaries produced by Ryerson School of Journalism students that tell the story of local news in Canadian communities. These stories complement the more traditional academic content by providing street-level examinations of why local news matters.

The contributions in this volume are varied and illuminate different aspects of local journalism and its future. Some invite the reader to reflect on the value of local news or on the changing role of local news outlets. Other contributions probe threats to local news, ranging from market forces to changing audiences. Some papers use technology to raise awareness of the challenges and opportunities in the local news ecosystem, others warn us about relying too much on some technologies, such as social media platforms, as a way to make up for the inadequacies of local news ecosystems.

This publication is the culmination of countless hours of research, presentations and collaborations, analysis, and generative discussions. We encourage you to continue this discussion. It was deliberately made open-access, and is available under a Creative Commons license to facilitate sharing with attribution. Local news availability impacts each of us in all of our communities. The future of local news is thus tightly bound with our own futures, as we continue to face the political and economic uncertainties of our times.

Asmaa Malik
Jaigris Hodson
Editors

Read more about the publication in our Letter from the Editors.

Imagining a way forward for local journalism was originally published in The Future of Local News: Research and Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.