The Local News Research Project investigates the evolving role of local journalism in communities, how it is practiced in newsrooms across Canada, and potential solutions to the myriad challenges facing local news. Launched in 2008 by Toronto Metropolitan University professor April Lindgren, the project is now co-directed by Lindgren and her TMU colleagues Prof. Nicole Blanchett and Prof. Angela Misri. Prof. Lindgren’s research focuses on mapping local news ecosystems and news poverty, philanthropic support for journalism, and the use of data journalism to boost the quality/availability of local news. Prof. Blanchett’s projects include an initiative aimed at empowering citizens to document civic meetings, an ongoing study of how journalistic roles and relationships with audiences are changing, and the development of an AI-search agent for local politics. Prof. Misri’s work explores the role of artificial intelligence in the ethical production of journalism. This website includes information on LNRP researchers’ publications and projects, as well as the latest Local News Map data on the closing/launch of local news outlets.The Local News Map is a crowd-sourced online resource that tracks what is happening to local newspapers, broadcast outlets and online/digital news sources in communities across Canada. Map markers display changes dating back to 2008 in the availability of local news, including information on the launch/closing of local news organizations and service increases/ reductions. This project, funded by the Rossy Foundation, is a collaborative effort by Toronto Metropolitan University’s April Lindgren and Professor Jon Corbett, who leads the University of British Columbia’s SpICE (Spatial Information for Community Mapping) Lab. Every two months, the LNRP publishes the latest raw data from the map along with reports summarizing the changes to date.Documenters Canada/Documentalistes Canada launched as a pilot project in September 2024 in partnership with The Green Line in Toronto. The project is inspired by the U.S.-based City Bureau’s Documenters network, training and paying citizens to document public meetings relevant to their community. After fact-checking, Documenters’ notes are available to everyone through the Documenters Canada website and social media feeds and the publications of partnering news organizations.The network has now grown to Montreal, working with Pivot, and Crowsnest Pass Alberta, in partnership with the Crowsnest Pass Herald. Students in the Journalism program at Toronto Metropolitan University taking the Reimagining News Class have also documented for course credit. This initiative incorporates citizen perspectives into newsrooms and journalistic processes and helps to shed light on civic issues that often go uncovered due to shrinking/disappearing local newsrooms. Professor Nicole Blanchett from TMU is co-director of the SSHRC- and InSpirit-funded Canadian expansion team, working with co-director professor Madga Konieczna at Concordia University and journalism instructor Tyler Nagel from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. TMU’s professor Angela Misri is also a collaborator on the project.At On The Record News, a student newsroom at Toronto Metropolitan University, Prof. Angela Misri is exploring (with different cohorts of students) how AI transparency can be built directly into local journalism workflows. The project adds a custom AI disclosure field to the newsroom’s publishing system (Wordpress), prompting student reporters to identify any AI tools used in the production of their stories. This activity opens the newsroom up to conversations about AI tool usage, and because the AI disclosure text appears on the published story itself, it creates a transparent record for the audience to understand as well. As local news organizations face increasing pressure to adopt AI tools while somehow retaining public trust, this work becomes a live experimental space for testing responsible and sustainable practices in AI-assisted local journalism. This work is funded in part by a fellowship grant from the Centre for Learning and Development at TMU.Professor Nicole Blanchett from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) is the principal investigator of Canada’s Journalistic Role Performance project. The Canadian team for the third wave of this international study, spanning almost 60 countries, also includes professor Colette Brin from Université Laval; professors Angela Misri, Charles Davis, and Sibo Chin from Toronto Metropolitan University; and professor Karen Owen from Mount Royal University in Calgary. Funded by SSHRC, Centre d'études sur les médias, and The Creative School at TMU, the research team is performing a comprehensive content analysis of Canadian news and interviewing and observing journalists on the job to better understand how journalism is performed in Canada. Findings from this study will allow industry professionals, in both English and French markets, to better understand how the journalism they create is serving/could better serve their audiences in a media landscape where innovation is key, but resources are scarce, and journalists and journalism are facing unprecedented issues of trust and news avoidance. We’ll also track how the use of artificial intelligence in journalism is labelled in published content, something of critical interest as AI transparency really matters to the Canadian news audience. Additionally, the Canadian team is developing automated/AI methods for more efficient collection of online news stories to be analyzed, and exploring automating some of the complex coding required for JRP analysis.The Local News Outlet Directory, launched in late 2025 with funding from the federal Department of Canadian Heritage, will be a bilingual, open-source map and listing of local news outlets in every community across Canada - one that can be regularly updated at a reasonable cost. The project is a collaborative effort by professors April Lindgren at Toronto Metropolitan University, Colette Brin at Université Laval and Concordia University’s Magda Konieczna. The research team is working with the Investigative Journalism Foundation on a custom-built automated scraping and filtering tool to gather the names of news outlets in each Canada’s 5, 161 census subdivision. A national network of local librarians and others with relevant expertise will verify the AI-generated results. When it launches in 2028, the directory will make it easier to identify news deserts and communities with limited access to local news, help people to find reliable news sources in their communities, and create another way for news outlets to get their stories out to the publicProfessor Nicole Blanchett from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) is the project lead for this exploratory project designed to make public meetings, processes, and political decision-making more transparent. This research is part of the SSHRC-funded The Political Accountability, Transparency, and Representation Oversight Network (PATRON) – an interdisciplinary collaboration of investigative journalists, scholars and public interest advocacy organizations and activists from across Canada focused on representation, transparency, and accountability in Canadian politics. TMU professors Angela Misri, AJ Cordeiro are also part of the team hoping to create an AI agent that will use visuals and text to summarize issues/initiatives being proposed, discussed, and implemented at the local level. They plan to pilot the project using Toronto as a test case, with data gleaned from publicly accessible transcripts of committee and council meetings, community meetings and information sessions, meetings of local business improvement networks and neighbourhood groups, including notes by Toronto Documenters. Ideally, the agent will allow users to track an issue, identify how their local representatives voted, and then point them to trusted local news sources to learn more.The Local News Data Hub, which ran from 2021 to 2025 under the direction of Professor April Lindgren at Toronto Metropolitan University, was an experiment designed to train student data journalists and shore up local journalism by supplying newsrooms with data-driven stories. After identifying a data set relevant to multiple communities, the Data Hub team did the necessary reporting to produce stories populated with data for individual cities and towns. These local stories on topics ranging from the representation of women officers on local police forces to aging in Canada’s grayest communities were available to all local media. Many were also shared with the Canadian Press wire service and picked up by dozens of CP clients across the country. CTV News, the School of Journalism and the Journalism Research Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, CWA Canada and the Local News Research Project all provided support for this project.
