With ‘Documenters,’ newsrooms get help from citizens
The Scadding Court Community Centre in Toronto’s Alexandra Park neighbourhood is unmissable. With red detailing and a blocky structure, it stands out amongst the towering apartment buildings, greenery from the nearby park, and the largely residential district on nearby side streets.
In the building behind the community centre one can spot the youth lounge. Situated near the entrance by the outdoor pool, the lounge is at the heart of the action when it’s warm out. The newly renovated room, with bright yellow and blue walls covered in decals, has tables, couches and a foosball table.
In early September 2024, amidst the bustle, you could spot five community members sitting together in the lounge, engaged in a workshop. Throughout each meeting, the participants engaged in deep discussions about their neighbourhood, how news outlets covered local matters and resident concerns over government actions affecting community members.
Over the month, The Green Line, a hyperlocal news organization based in Toronto, had been training these residents to document public meetings.
“Usually when you go into a training, the scariest part is the open-ended discussions or conversation. My biggest fear is hearing crickets, but that didn’t happen, ” explains Yara El-Murr, The Green Line’s managing editor. “They (the trainees) were even adding onto each other’s stories and reflections and thoughts.”
These were training sessions for community members to partake in Documenters Canada, a joint project inspired by Documenters.org, founded by City Bureau in Chicago, and launched in the fall by The Green Line and Concordia University. Documenters is an initiative to train and pay citizens to cover public meetings and develop public information records.They run in 22 communities across the United States – and now also one in Canada, independent from, but working closely with, the U.S. network.
A need for local information
According to the Local News Research Project at Toronto Metropolitan University, 525 local news outlets have shut down across 347 Canadian communities since 2008, while only 260 new ones have opened up. Documenters Canada aims to fill the gap left by these closures by equipping community members to report on and increase accountability of public bodies. Participants become the eyes and ears of the communities they serve.
“We’re not just doing one story with a big catchy headline and bouncing. We’re there for the long run, more or less,” explains El-Murr.
Documenters are area residents covering public meetings. They are not journalists by trade, and they’re not producing journalism. Instead, they’re documenting and developing notes that sit somewhere between news stories and meeting minutes. These are publicly available and aim to inform the community. They can be equally accessed by journalists who want to know what happened at a particular meeting and by community groups that may be affected by local decisions.
The Documenters’ own experiences living in their communities give them insight into what issues matter the most. In Alexandra Park, for example, one of the participants is also a board member at the Kensington Market Community Land Trust. Another is a community worker at the Fort York Food Bank, and one is a former street medic and an artist.
“The Documenters have developed their skillset around looking at the agenda and zoning in on the things that would have the most relevance to our neighbourhood,” says Sebastian Tansil, The Green Line’s community engagement lead. “Whether it’s the school lunch program, or the safe consumption site closing down our street, (…) they know their needs.”
The program can be a boon for resource-hungry local newsrooms. Through partnerships with journalists, these notes can help spur news reporting grounded in the community’s information needs. In the first training session, Tansil watched as the Documenters passionately discussed the redevelopment of a particular space in the neighbourhood and the media’s coverage of it.
“One of the people in training pointed out that this is why we need community and local journalism,” he says. “A lot of people who reported on these topics don’t have a stake in the ground of what they’re reporting on.”
Autumn of engaged journalism
I learned about Documenters during my first semester at Concordia University’s master’s program in Digital Innovation in Journalism Studies. Every Friday, my classmates and I sat at a roundtable with our coffees, notebooks and laptops to discuss Documenters in the United States and participatory approaches to community reporting led by professor Magda Konieczna. She is a scholar focusing on newsroom collaborations, funding journalism and nonprofit news organizations and, for years, had been interested in engaged and local journalism and wanted to see how Documenters could migrate to Canada.
Our class project aimed to see if we could bring Documenters to Montreal, focusing on how communities received information in three boroughs.
Many of us students chose the boroughs where we live. As Konieczna explained, we would “get to know those spaces better, understand how folks inform themselves and where the gaps are.”
Throughout the semester, I spent afternoons traversing my borough of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, understanding its geography and talking to politicians, journalists, community members and various organizations.
Whether it was in community round tables or local government, or just amongst community members themselves, every borough approached information in their own way. This begged the question, could Documenters work within community organizations, Facebook groups, and hyperlocal publications? During several of our classes, we discussed The Green Line and how their unique Action Journey approach focused on systemic issues facing Torontonians, and engaged community members in coming up with solutions.
“We can hear about solutions that have worked and feel a bit empowered, but Anita (Li) takes it to the next level,” says Konieczna of the news outlet’s founder and CEO. “Let’s not just find a problem and a solution and then tell you about it, but let’s also encourage community members to share their own solutions and work with each other to develop those.”
A few months after that class, Konieczna and Li officially partnered to pursue bringing the Documenters program to Toronto, secured a SSHRC grant, and launched the project. Along with my class partner and fellow research assistant Clément Lechat, we’ve been working on the deployment of the project in Alexandra Park.
Documenters Canada in Alexandra Park
Since its launch, The Green Line has trained five community Documenters, three of whom have gone on to document public meetings, from the Toronto East York Community Council to the city’s Aboriginal Affairs Advisory Committee and many more.
So far, The Green Line team feels like Documenters Canada has been successful.
“There’s a lot of interest from the community themselves saying, ‘This is such a cool initiative! I want to be a part of it!’” says Li.
After each meeting, the Documenters team fact-checks community member notes, distributing their work through The Green Line’s weekly Documenters Canada newsletter and videos.
They’re still fiddling with the best approach. Initially, they published the full notes coming out of the meeting, like this one. More recently, they’ve been experimenting with a more abbreviated version and short video explainers. El-Murr and Tansil say the response to the videos has been positive.
At Concordia University, our goal of expanding Documenters Canada beyond Toronto feels like a possibility. In November 2024, we received a $50,000 grant from the Inspirit foundation to grow our network across more neighbourhoods in Toronto and try it out in Montreal. We’re also applying for future funds that will enable us to work with partners in rural Alberta.
For Konieczna, this is the beginning of what could become a national network of Documenters working alongside other professors, journalists and anyone interested in strengthening knowledge in communities suffering from their own information gaps.
“It’s not my vision to keep it here at Concordia,” says Konieczna. “Our aim is to be really transparent about everything we do and share anything that we learn so that others can document too.”
If you are interested in starting your own Documenters project, we’re making all our resources available to anyone to use, and we’re happy to share our experiences with you. Feel free to reach out to documenters-canada@concordia.ca.
Sara Mizannojehdehi is completing her master’s in digital innovation in journalism studies at Concordia University in Montreal. Outside of journalism, she’s a freelance illustrator.