Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here today to talk about my research.
I launched The Local News Research Project after I left daily news reporting and became a member of Ryerson's faculty back in 2007.
I should preface my remarks by saying that I'm going to talk specifically about local news, which is news produced by a local news organization that focuses on producing news about people, places, and events in a particular community. I'm not talking about national news or international news.
My interest in what I call local news poverty grew out of my observations about how some communities have a rich range of local news media to choose from and others do not. Toronto, for instance, has four dailies and many online television and broadcast outlets. By comparison, a nearby city like Brampton, which is Canada's ninth-largest city and has more than 500,000 people, relies pretty much exclusively on the Brampton Guardian, a community newspaper owned by Metroland Media. There's no local radio, no local television, and no local daily newspaper that focuses exclusively on news from that community.
The reality, as you well know, is that there has been a major disruption in the news industry. People who live in smaller cities, towns, suburban communities, and rural areas have fewer options to begin with, and in recent years their choice has become even more limited. The question then, of course, is whether this matters. The research suggests that the answer is yes.
In the United States, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy concluded, as it put it, that “Information is as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets, good schools, and public health.” It went on to explain that news and information help communities develop a sense of connectedness, provide access to information for holding public officials accountable, and give people the information they need to work collectively to solve problems.
While local journalism is the subject of increasingly intensive scrutiny in the United States, there's much we don't know about what's going on in Canada. I think the committee has heard from some witnesses who have pointed this out, including Carleton University professor Dwayne Winseck, who earlier this year said there are “a lot of opinions and little data to act upon” in terms of what's happening with local news.
I and colleagues Jon Corbett at the University of British Columbia and Jaigris Hodson at Royal Roads are trying to fill in some of these gaps. We launched our investigation into local news poverty last summer, and we've just now started to have our data ready for discussion with you.
The project's goals are to develop a tool that can allow us to track changes in local news sources, to measure the extent to which some communities are better served than others, to determine whether social media and digital-only news sites are filling the gap created by the loss of more traditional media, and to investigate why some communities are better served than others. We are also, in the longer term, interested in looking at the impact of the loss of these news organizations on civic and political engagement and in exploring the possible solutions.
Our project is basically divided into two main parts at this point. The first is the local news map. It's a crowdsource map that allows users to add information about changes to local news organizations: the launch of a new one, the closure of another news organization, services increases and service decreases. This is for local broadcast, online, and print media.
We launched the map in June. We wanted to do this to spark debate about what's happening to local journalism and to generate some data to inform that debate, as well as to help us identify trends and patterns if any emerge. The map, in general, can paint a big picture idea of what's happening to local journalism, but you can also zoom in on local communities and see what's changed at the local level. You can see what's happening to a specific type of news organization, such as what's been happening on the community newspaper scene or what's been happening in television or to local radio.
You can also monitor changes by media ownership. The map, of course, is a crowdsource map, so it's only as good as the information that people add to it, but we moderate the map and we think that the information is reliable and that the trends we're seeing reflect reality.
What are we seeing? Three months after its launch, the map tells a pretty powerful—and disturbing, I think, for many people—visual story of newsroom closures that far exceed the number of new ventures being launched.
When we examined the data at the end of September, there were 307 markers on the map highlighting changes going back to 2008, because we wanted to provide a historical perspective. Of those 307 markers, 164 documented the closure of a local news outlet in 132 different communities across the country. By comparison, there were only 63 markers highlighting the launch of a new local news source.
The second part of our project examines how local news outlets covered the contest for members of Parliament during the 2015 federal election. We were interested in election coverage because the race to represent a community in the House of Commons is a major news event that would warrant news media attention. As such, we think that in some ways it can be thought of as a proxy for the overall performance of local news media in general.
We looked at local news media and their coverage of the race for MPs in eight communities: Peterborough, the City of Kawartha Lakes, Oakville, Brampton, and Thunder Bay in Ontario; Brandon, Manitoba; and Nanaimo and Kamloops in British Columbia. We identified the local news outlets in those communities, and then we collected all of the stories that they did about the election race for their member of Parliament in the month prior to the vote.
I have some figures in the brief that I submitted, and they show significant differences in the number of local news sources in different communities. For instance, in Brampton there are three news outlets, which is 0.14 news outlets per 10,000 registered voters. At the other end of the spectrum, you have Kamloops, where there are 1.25 news outlets per 10,000 registered voters. There are nine altogether there.
This measure suggests that big suburban cities are relatively underserved in terms of the number of news outlets in them. Likewise, the data shows rural communities, such as the City of Kawartha Lakes, are also relatively underserved. At the same time, intriguingly, in medium-sized communities such as Nanaimo, Thunder Bay, Peterborough, and Kamloops, there's quite a variation. The question is, why? Why are some of them better served than others?
There is a second major observation that we can make at this stage, and I would emphasize that our data here is really preliminary and that we just got it in the last two weeks. The second observation is that there are significant differences in the number of stories about the local races to be an MP. Again, Brampton was relatively underserved with 43 stories in total, but more to the point, there were only about two stories for every 10,000 registered voters. If you lived in Thunder Bay or Kamloops, you were looking at 20 to 25 stories per 10,000 registered voters. Again, there is quite a disparity in the available stories.
I just wanted to draw your attention to Nanaimo, where there are about 15 stories for 10,000 voters. There were 103 stories that we found, but 57 of those stories were produced by the Nanaimo Daily News, which closed earlier this year, so those are 57 stories that a local news outlet is no longer producing.
Similarly, an online news site—quite a vibrant news site—in Kamloops called NewsKamloops, which was started after the closure of the daily newspaper in that community, also closed earlier this week. It produced, I believe, about 35 or 40 stories out of those 105 stories available to voters there.
We're seeing a significant lack of diversity, in some communities more than others. We did one more measure, which was to look at the variety of voices. Again, what we found was that in Brampton just one local news producer dominated the production of news, whereas in places like Thunder Bay and Kamloops the news coverage was spread more evenly among the different news organizations there, so people were able to hear from a greater variety of news organizations.
Our data so far indicates that news coverage of local contests for MPs varied significantly according to where you lived. By all three measures, people who lived in a place like Kamloops enjoyed relative local news affluence compared with people who lived in a city like Brampton or a rural area like the City of Kawartha Lakes.
The next step in our research is to take all these measures and reduce them to a single number in an index that we can use to create a ranking of communities in terms of the existence of local news poverty. In other words, the single number will reflect relative levels of news poverty, and then we can look at the characteristics of poorly served communities and try to figure out why they are more poorly served than others. There are some possibilities of lines of inquiry I can talk about, if you like.