Canadian community foundations rally to support local news, calling it essential to democracy
A couple of weeks ago, a neighbour mentioned our son's school might be moving. I couldn't find anything about this online.
But I did find plenty of news from down south. While the erosion of democracy in the United States is something to pay attention to, some news outlets appear to be capitalizing on its sensational aspects.
When Donald Trump and Elon Musk get into an online fistfight, local news can seem like the less glamorous cousin.
But there's really not much we can do about American democracy.
Still, U.S. media reports have contributed to news burnout. Many Canadians are tuning out from their regular news sources. Forty per cent of Canadians responding to a survey from the 2025 Reuters Digital News Report said they were sometimes or often avoiding the news, as compared to 28 per cent eight years earlier.
Hearing about problems we can't do much about is disempowering, according to a study on solutions journalism. Researchers found that readers who were treated as active civic participants rather than passive consumers felt more empowered.
The news about my kid's school is something that profoundly impacts my family. And I can do something about it, at least in theory. I can attend public meetings and organize my neighbours to take a stand, in hopes of affecting the outcome of the discussions.
Local news can help me do that. It's the very stuff that can help rebuild frayed community ties and mis- and disinformation. Without access to quality local news, malicious entities can more easily step into communities with misinformation designed to sway or mislead.
Voter turnout is higher in places with more newspapers. Local journalists act as news brokers, ensuring the flow of information, which is essential to fulfilling the information needs of communities. We know that when less local news is present, communities become more polarized, and that polarization leads to increased sharing of misinformation.
But local news is increasingly in trouble. Local news outlets are closing - 566 across Canada, to be precise, between 2008 and April 2025. That's compared to the 283 that opened and remain in operation in that same period, according to the Local News Research Project.
My recent report for The Canadian Philanthropy Partnership Research Network, "In Defense of the Local: How Community Foundations Across Canada are Supporting Local News" describes an increasingly popular way to support these local news outlets.
Through case studies, I documented - along with my research assistant, Jessica Botelho-Urbanski, and supported by our research team at OCADU - the early signs of a growing movement of Canadian community foundations supporting local journalism.
Community foundations across Canada are becoming ever more aware that many of the issues they care about, like building just and sustainable communities, are connected to the availability of local journalism.
And some communities are starting to fund their local news outlets.
For example, the Toronto Foundation made a rare, 10-year commitment to support The Local, a non-profit news outlet founded in 2019 that describes itself as "unabashedly Toronto, reporting from corners of the city that are too often ignored or misunderstood."
Sharon Avery, Toronto Foundation's president and CEO, says the organization hadn't spent much time prioritizing journalism because "the dots have not been connected ...that a healthy local journalism equals a healthy community." But she grew convinced of the essential links between local news and democracy, and realized local news is a powerful tool.
The Winnipeg Foundation has been interested in local news for a while. Most recently, it funded the salary for one reporter, shared between Winnipeg's The Free Press, a major local newspaper, and The Narwhal, an environmentally focused digital news startup that had been looking to expand its coverage in the Prairies.
This kind of collaboration can improve the quality of work produced while also increasing the attention garnered by the resulting journalism in a way that is truly a win-win for all partners.
All of this is happening alongside government support, delivered through solutions like the Local Journalism Initiative, which funds journalists to report on under-covered topics, and the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit, which covers a portion of salaries of eligible journalists.
Our report also includes recommendations on how place-based foundations can turn these initiatives into a movement to support local journalism. Community foundations could start by getting to know their local news ecosystems. What news organizations exist? What audiences do they serve?
They should also consider policies to direct some of their ad spending to local media, following the lead of the provincial government in Ontario, which has its four largest agencies allocate at least one-quarter of their annual advertising budgets to Ontario publishers.
Perhaps the most powerful - and most challenging - of our recommendations includes working with other local players to set up a community news fund.
the U.S., Europe and South America.
Community foundations have the power to promote journalistic collaboration, which can help to combat mis- and disinformation.
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