Mapping the decline of local news · ↗ localnewsresearchproject.ca
Who watches city hall when the newspaper leaves town?
Local journalism in Canada is dying. When a local paper closes, municipal government gets easier to ignore. There is no one paid to sit through council meetings, read the zoning agenda, or call the mayor’s office when something looks off. Decisions just seem to happen.
The Local News Research Project has been tracking the decline for years now. Between 2008 and April 2026, over 600 local news outlets closed across nearly 400 communities in Canada.
The project is a collaboration led by April Lindgren of the Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism and Jon Corbett of the University of British Columbia’s Spatial Information for Community Mapping Lab. Their full crowdsourced database of events related to local newspapers, such as instances of papers closing, opening, merging, or moving online, is also available from their Local News Map data report page.
I first came across the project a little over three years ago, when I wrote an op-ed in The Globe and Mail (unpaywalled link) arguing for accessible video of municipal proceedings to help overworked local journalists find stories with the help of AI tools.