Mapping community news coverage in Montreal
A year after I moved to Montreal in 2021, there was an election. I’d never heard of any of the candidates or many of the parties. Google wasn’t helpful — even the reporting on my incumbent was thin.
I had noticed my neighbours subscribed to The New Yorker, so I figured they must be information savvy. I could read the party platforms online, they said, and look at candidate websites.
I was shocked. I had taught journalism for many years in Philadelphia, a place that some people now call a “news jungle,” as opposed to a news desert. I knew that the information climate was different in Canada.
Still, I couldn’t help thinking back to the Guelph Mercury, my last journalism job before I left for academia 15 years ago. We reported on every candidate in every election – sometimes excessively. (How many stories did we really need on that independent candidate with a budget of $200 and his dad as campaign manager?)
Maybe in a city the size of Montreal there are just too many candidates to report on, I figured. After all, we covered two ridings at the Mercury, and there are 27 on the island of Montreal. But, shouldn’t there be proportionately more news outlets in Montreal? Indeed, how many news outlets is enough to get the kind of local granularity that good citizenship requires?
These are complicated questions, and ones that journalism scholars are increasingly grappling with as it becomes apparent that there are no easy ways to improve the amount and quality of local news.
But before we can figure out how to solve the crisis, we need to understand its scope. Mapping is emerging as a useful technique for this. News maps in Oregon and New Jersey, and one covering the whole United States, have helped detail the dimensions of the crisis.
These projects have demonstrated that some areas have more local news than others, and that, while digital startups can offer some hope, declining access to local news continues to be a major concern.
There are some Canadian news maps already. Perhaps the most cited one, produced by the Local News Research Project, pinpoints where outlets have closed. A Quebec-specific list shows an increase in digital-only sites in Montreal that more than offsets the loss of daily and weekly newspapers between 2011 and 2019.
But even so, there is still a shortage of local coverage, and none of this answers the question that animated my interest in this topic in the first place: Do citizens have enough information to make decisions at the very local level?
Along with Jessica Botelho-Urbanski, a student in the masters of digital innovation in journalism studies at Concordia University and the project’s research assistant, we decided to create a list of every news organization in the Montreal media landscape.
We have a spreadsheet anyone can consult that offers two other ways of visualizing the data. The first tab is a list of all the news organizations that we found in Montreal. The second tab groups those by geographic area. There you can see how many news organizations there are per borough or town.
If you come across something that should be added to, removed from or edited in our spreadsheet and map, please email Magda at magda.konieczna@concordia.ca.
We chose to focus on Montreal because it happens to be where we live, study and work. Still, as we examined this city that is still quite new to both of us, we discovered a level of local governance neither of us had previously experienced.
The island of roughly two million people has 19 boroughs and 15 towns, and there are 91 municipalities in Montreal’s Census Metropolitan Area. That translates into a lot of issues, meetings and officials that should be covered.
We wanted to understand how many of these local realities are adequately reported on. And, while we focus on Montreal, we hope this is a pilot project that can be replicated across Canada.
What our map taught us
We learned that, indeed, there are plenty of Montrealers who don’t have a local news source. The problem was so large that our findings surprised us, even though we study the issue and thought we knew about it well.
Of the 34 local municipalities on the island of Montreal, seven – that’s just over a fifth – had a dedicated news outlet covering the whole municipality. Two more outlets covered portions of boroughs. A single municipality, the Town of L’Île-Dorval, Canada’s smallest municipality, has no local news outlet at all.
The rest – 24 towns and boroughs – were covered by an organization reporting on a large swath of the island, lacking a dedicated local news source. Just five news organizations serve as the only local news source for 22 island municipalities.
Among those municipalities without a dedicated local news source is the largest on the island, Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, and those with the highest levels of poverty and the highest proportion of immigrants.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest borough, Outremont, is the only one with two outlets covering it exclusively. (This is in line with research from the U.S., which found that community wealth correlated with the economic integrity of a local news outlet.)
Of course, a number of large and established news organizations such as CBC/Radio-Canada, the Montreal Gazette, Le Devoir and La Presse report on the city or island as a whole. But it can be argued that this broad coverage lacks the level of local detail required to, among other things, figure out who you want to vote for.
How we did it
To be included on our map, we decided that an outlet must have published original, reported content relating to the geographical area of the island of Montreal within the past year. We occasionally used Google Translate for languages other than French or English to determine whether the content was truly local, and whether it appeared to be reported by the news organization (rather than a rewrite of something published elsewhere).
If they met our criteria, we included outlets that covered particular topics like seniors, the arts and sports, as well as campus media. We excluded trade publications produced by industries themselves, like trucking, law or movie-production magazines.
We also consulted various existing lists, including an inventory of local news in Quebec from 2019, produced by researchers at the Université Laval, a list maintained by the Fédération Professionnelle des Journalistes du Québec; and an inventory of 270 news outlets started across Canada in the last 25 years. And, in terms of the mapping process, we started with an amazing borough map created by Amy Luft at CTV News Montreal.
Over the course of our research, we found that Métro Media offered some of the best local news coverage. It produced 20 digital verticals dedicated to each city borough. Its print publication was in flux at the time, however, and in the middle of our research the entire company abruptly shut down.
Of course, there are some shortcomings in our research, mostly when it comes to publications that exist primarily offline, and those in other languages. Where possible we erred on the side of including a publication.
Next steps
Our goal is to not just document the challenges, but also contribute to solutions. In that vein, we have several hopes for this project.
- We hope it will inspire others around the country to map their own news ecosystems. Doing this is hard work, but we think it’s worth it. This project involved a lot of word-of-mouth and manual searches. How would we replicate that on a regional scale? While there is no easy answer, a network of local informants, perhaps librarians, could help.
- We hope this project, and its possible spinoffs, will focus efforts to solve the crisis in news. In its first five years, the Local Journalism Initiative spent $70 million on journalist salaries around the country, and has been renewed for another three years. The program has been criticized for not making clear how news organizations are selected for funding. Similarly, foundations make decisions about which projects to support, and entrepreneurs decide where to start news outlets, both often acting from a gut instinct about where the news might need help. We hope that our map and others like it will encourage an evidence-based approach to deciding which projects should get funded.
- Eventually, a map like this could help identify ideal locations for news interventions such as planning small-scale or mini-startups in Montreal. But, we recognize that our map is limited. While it shows the areas that news organizations say they cover, what happens in practice?
Answering this requires examining actual news content, which we did not do. We also didn’t explore any social-media accounts, but know from anecdotal and other evidence that these can be great sources of local news in a community (as well as problematic ones). We hope that other scholars will take on some of these questions.
Magda Konieczna is associate professor of journalism at Concordia University in Montreal. Her work focuses on the connections between journalism and democracy through examinations of new business models for news, the growth of collaborative news production, and a community-centered approach to journalism. She is the author of Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails (Oxford University Press, 2018) and was a city hall reporter at the now-closed Guelph Mercury.
Jessica Botelho-Urbanski (she/her/elle) is a master's student in Digital Innovation in Journalism Studies at Concordia University. She previously worked as a journalist in Winnipeg and now studies journalism as a researcher and podcast producer in Montreal.
