When we chose the initial communities for this study, I was looking for a variety of communities. I wanted a rural community, the City of Kawartha Lakes. I was interested in Brandon because I think the local television station closed there a few years ago. I thought it might be interesting to look at the availability of news there for the purpose of comparing it with other small and medium-sized cities that do have a local television station.
What we can do with our data is look at how much news was produced by each local news outlet within the community and see to what extent TV stations are providing the news, versus radio or online sites.
I will add that one of the striking things that we're noticing is that we don't have very many new online sites registered on the map. That might be because people haven't added the information, but it also raises the question of why we aren't seeing a more vibrant response from online news organizations starting up in all sorts of different communities.
The closure of the NewsKamloops site just this week raises some really interesting questions about online news organizations' ability to survive. It was doing quite a good job of replacing and reporting on local news in the absence of the daily newspaper, which closed there in 2014. Now here we are, two years later, and it's gone.