This report is part of a series on local news in Canada, which includes two previous reports: The Lost Estate and Uncovered. The series is published in partnership with Rideau Hall Foundation and Michener Awards Foundation.

Introduction

What a difference a year makes.

When the Public Policy Forum, the Rideau Hall Foundation (RHF) and the Michener Awards Foundation (MAF) began working on the crisis in local news in 2025, raw numbers told a familiar, grim tale.

According to the Local News Research Project,^[1] 605 local news outlets closed in 388 Canadian communities between 2008 and 2025. Almost three in four of those closings were community newspapers that published fewer than five times per week. Over that same time frame, 420 news outlets launched — but 156 of them subsequently closed.

Last year, with democracy under siege around the world and media scrutiny needed more than ever, we published The Lost Estate: How to put the local back in local news^[2] and Uncovered: How to build back election coverage for a better democracy.^[3] The moment was ripe for solutions: a Canadian federal election that was quite possibly the most poorly covered in modern Canadian history; growing concerns about polarization and social cohesion; and threats to this nation’s future coming from south of the border. It all fed into a renewed sense of purpose around the issue. Something had shifted.

Since our work began, initiatives have emerged with such intense frequency that PPF, RHF and MAF now produce a weekly newsletter^[4] to keep up with developments. Those new projects involve more than 20 institutions and include:

• University of King’s College, together with the Canadian Media Lawyers Association and the Canadian Association of Journalists, set up Lawyers for Reporters Canada,^[5] whose network of pro-bono lawyers will provide legal guidance for public service journalism;
• RHF and MAF awarded two new fellowships, named for Norman Webster (former editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail and Montreal Gazette) and valued at $125,000 each, to “help smaller Canadian newsrooms with big journalistic ambitions by augmenting their resources;”
• PPF, RHF and MAF launched a journalism fund to help local news outlets cover the 2025 federal election. Five foundations — Donner, Echo, Gordon, Metcalf and Rossy — donated a total of $525,000 to the Covering Canada: Election 2025 fund.^[6] Seventy-nine applications from across the country were received in the first three days and grants ranging from $2,500 to $35,000 were quickly issued to 40 media organizations;
• Researchers from Toronto Metropolitan University, Laval University and Concordia University began a pilot project using local experts, including librarians, to build and check lists of local news outlets generated through an artificial intelligence tool developed in collaboration with the Investigative Journalism Foundation and the University of Toronto. The goal of the project, funded by the federal Department of Canadian Heritage, is to “build a public directory that lists where residents in every Canadian municipality can find original, timely, verified local news that is produced independently of special interests;”
• Inspirit Foundation launched the $3-million Journalism Futures Fund^[7] together with the McConnell, Sonor and Euphrosine foundations and individual donors to “support small-to-medium organizations that produce impactful journalism;” and
• The CBC, making use of government funding, has made historic contributions to local media with plans to hire 33 journalists and create 11 new bureaus in 2026, a year after it hired 30 journalists in 22 communities. The CBC now has journalists based in 77 Canadian communities.

As well, last fall about 100 philanthropic leaders, local news outlet owners and public policy experts gathered in Charlottetown, P.E.I., for the second consecutive year at a symposium organized by RHF and MAF to discuss the fate of local media and double down on industry-generated solutions. Over three days of animated discussion, a consensus began to form: although catalytic government and philanthropic funding is part of the answer, ultimately most local news outlets will have to create a portfolio of revenue streams to be self-sustaining, leaning hard into partnerships and collaborations to do so.

Here’s how some Canadian outlets have already begun leading the way — and how others can follow.

Diversity in revenue streams

“One thing that gets lost in the lore of startups is that you’ve got to be 22 years old in a hoodie in your basement or dorm room to do it,” says David Skok, CEO and editor-in-chief of The Logic. “The people who are most successful as startup funders are people who have been doing their jobs for a while.” Skok had already managed a newsroom of almost 400 employees when he started The Logic, and he was armed with an impressive network and a trove of institutional knowledge.

“Could I have been able to do this at 22? I doubt it.”

Skok may be a bit of an outlier in independent media. In its eighth year of operation, he says his digital business and technology outlet still feels like a startup. Quoting from Alexander Starritt’s novel Drayton and Mackenzie, he says he and his colleagues “felt like surfers in flat water, paddling hard ahead of a wave that hadn’t quite formed.” In 2025, he says, the tenor of the times melded with the goal of his publication. Skok now swims with the big boys.

“Whenever the times have changed,” he says, “we’ve changed our business, and that resiliency is my goal. Don’t ever mistake the status quo for the end game of where things are going. Always view things through the prism of shifting sands and be prepared to shift with them.”

Regardless of the size of the outlet, Skok says, one should have at least four to five revenue streams so that when one inevitability slumps, the others can provide ballast. The key is resiliency, he says.

In The Logic’s case, that meant selling personal subscriptions (a key to stability was yearly subscriptions), and when companies came to Skok seeking multiple subscriptions, he bundled them, creating a second revenue stream. Those two came on board in the first six months. A third stream involved conference calls, which became webinars during the pandemic and evolved into events with expert speakers in their field. During the webinars, advertisers came to him saying they would like to be in front of his readers and The Logic went from having no advertising to fielding offers of sponsorships for events.

Then sponsorship events led to display ads in the newsletters. Then came licensing fees if government or other media wanted a stream of these events, along with syndication. The fourth branch consists of government programs — The Logic has received grants from the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, the Canada Emergency Rent Subsidy, and the Special Measures for Journalism – Canada Periodical Fund — grants Skok makes clear do not influence its coverage.

Indeed, Skok is critical of government funding, saying the direction to cover local news with a government Local Journalism Initiative (LJI) grant is overbearing. “Who is the government to presuppose what journalism is and telling me to cover city hall?” he asks. There is a danger of reorienting your newsroom to meet the needs of the funder, he believes.

Others also warn of becoming overly reliant on government funding. Tai Huynh, founder and editor-in-chief of Toronto-based The Local, believes his colleagues should be wary of depending on government programs for more than 15 percent of their revenue streams. Governments change, their priorities change and austerity measures perpetually loom. In 2024, government programs were responsible for about 12 percent of the budget of his non-profit outlet but that rose to about 16 percent this year because the government increased the percentage of the labour tax credit.

The LJI is the largest of the government’s support measures for local journalism. It pays the salary of reporters and will provide $128.8 million from its inception in 2019 to the end of 2027, which is the latest government commitment. Some publishers, however, say the application process is burdensome and lengthy, sometimes leaving them uncertain about making journalistic commitments because they are unsure of the size of their staff.

Another $10 million over the same time frame comes from the Changing Narratives Fund, which is money dedicated to emerging journalists from marginal communities. The Special Measures for Journalism (SMJ) program provides $38.4 million in funding to small, community-based print and magazine publishers under the Canadian Periodical Fund. There are also tax credits and funding from a Google fund of $100 million ($63 million of which will go to print and digital media) — compensation the company agreed to pay to gain an exemption from the Online News Act.

“I don’t know if 15 percent is a magic number that would work for everybody,” Huynh says. But he points to outlets where all reporters are funded by LJI, calling that a “big risk.” He knows the risks: a government move to remove online publications from the SMJ cost him $45,000 in funding.

Anita Li, founder of Toronto’s The Green Line, has used innovation and partnership to not only diversify revenue streams but to form a “media company” that has broken completely with traditional media. She bills The Green Line as “a community information services organization,” and rather than provide old-school journalism, she tries to provide solutions through the site’s “action journeys,” which include an article that might introduce an issue, followed by a piece explaining it in more depth, followed by an in-person collaborative session for those interested in the issue, followed finally by a solutions piece.

She brought to Canada the first chapter of Documenters,^[8] a network of citizens who are trained to write from public meetings that have an impact on their neighbourhoods or on issues that affect their lives. The program, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Inspirit Foundation, has now expanded to include Pivot in Montreal. Li also collaborates with Toronto’s CityNews, where a producer paid by the television station does work for The Green Line, and she has branded content on the television station.

She received startup funding of $15,000 from Inspirit, (she has received one-off funding from RHF and the Toronto Foundation), but she also put $30,000 of her own money into her project. She aims to sustain The Green Line with membership funding and advertising, not through ongoing philanthropy, which she calls a bad business model. Right now, just under five percent of her revenue comes from reader memberships and donations, and events bring in just over three percent. A bit of merchandise sales adds to her diverse funding streams. Not everything she does can be surefire revenue generators, but one reason The Green Line can grow is saving money through collaborations. She has accessed a Toronto non-profit fund, funding from her partners and audience revenue, memberships, merchandise and events. She believes she is well on the path to sustainability, but this is a chaotic world. “Five years from now? You’ve got to go with the flow.”

The role of philanthropy

Philanthropy and independent journalism in Canada have concluded that they just might need each other.

Independent journalism can shine a light on issues that align with foundations’ missions, and the philanthropic sector is belatedly — and slowly — coming to the realization that a local media outlet can bring communities together, soften political polarization and repair a battered democracy. More than 50 foundations have given grants to local media in this country, some for years, according to the Inspirit Foundation.

But philanthropic funding cannot be seen as a long-term funding source. Canadian foundations have a fraction of the assets that American foundations have granted to U.S. media, and they are faced with new requests daily. U.S. philanthropy, led by the Knight Foundation,^[9] has granted some US$400 million to local American news since 2023.

“I don’t think philanthropy can ever be considered as a permanent fix,” says Teresa Marques, president and CEO of the Rideau Hall Foundation. “Where it is best deployed is where it can be used strategically, quickly, more nimbly than other sources of funding to pilot new ideas, to infuse funding to try something new.” In other words, it should be used for more than just keeping the lights on.

Lorne Johnson, vice-president of the Ivey Foundation, told the Charlottetown conference that foundations, their boards and their directors are “terrified” at what they see south of the border and worry about protecting democracy and this country’s social fabric. But they don’t have local media as a conduit to stronger democracy on their radar, he said. “To translate concern into funding and action, you need to show solutions,” he said. “There are solutions on the democracy side to this thing. You have to show urgency. There is a nihilistic sense out there among funders who feel there is very little they can do about social media or the erosion of the social fabric.”

Philanthropy works best when it is used to help a worthy outlet find its initial footing or when it is used for a short-term specific goal, like the Covering Canada: Election 2025 fund mentioned above. It is also valuable in finding a voice for the underrepresented, like the Inspirit Foundation’s Journalism Futures Fund, which launched with donations from three other foundations. Grants will go to small- to medium-sized organizations led by members of communities “that are underserved in Canadian media and have a strong vision for the future.”

Ana Sofia Hibon, senior program manager at Inspirit, agrees that philanthropy cannot solve the crisis in local news, but she still sees room for growth in the relationship between the two sides.

“Philanthropy was never going to solve the crisis,” she says, “but it has a role to play. There is also room for growth among foundations in forming more collaborative funding.” Her Journalism Futures Fund is a testament to the power of collaboration.

Many local news outlets still do not know that philanthropic funding is available, she says, or are hesitant to tap that source, feeling they may be taking money from food banks or other front-line services. But she sees a vibrant local media and its role in disseminating unbiased news (which can lead to stronger democratic foundations in communities) as a goal as worthy as any other for philanthropy. Indeed, in a recent New York Times op-ed,^[10] Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project, wrote that the number of U.S. startups aided in part by philanthropy showed that local journalism is being treated as a public good, “essential to civic life, akin to a museum or food bank.”

The Local is perhaps the most successful example of foundation dollars spurring quality journalism. Huynh was originally funded by five foundations, but his revenue stream now combines foundation dollars, reader contributions and a sprinkling of donor-advised funds. Today, he says, philanthropy still makes up 70 percent of his revenue, but he has a much wider mix of foundations, with smaller amounts, and his reader revenues are now close to 12 to 14 percent of his total revenue.

Sweat, hard word and uncertainty

Peterborough Currents was a child of the pandemic, born as a newsletter distributed to 40 recipients. Co-founder Will Pearson, with Ayesha Lye, editor and publisher, determined there would be an increased appetite for local news and he incorporated his Currents as a business.

For two to four years, it limped along as a business that was mainly operating on volunteer labour. It received grants from Indiegraf,^[11] which provided money and infrastructure and some cash from Google and Facebook funds. Pearson applied for — but did not receive — LJI funding. He had received a $10,000 grant from Inspirit Foundation in 2021, but after the more than $100,000 in IndieGraf’s money dried up, he was unable to access any other philanthropic funds. Donations had always been the most important revenue stream.

That stream is often called “membership funding,” but Pearson prefers to call it reader driven. He had amassed more than 400 recurring donors who gave monthly or annually, and a couple hundred who provided one-time donations. All in, readers were contributing about $5,500 per month, slightly more than $60,000 per year. In fact, his revenue from readers jumped from $24,292.65 in 2021 to $63,910.99 in 2024 and the numbers are getting back on track after publishing was briefly suspended in 2025.

A story with impact would lead to a jump in donors; a two-week email campaign asking for help was even more crucial. “We’d try to cram all the fundraising into a week or two of emails. We didn’t want to bug too much.”

In a healthy, competitive news ecosystem in a small city, Currents not only held its own, it also broke news stories and gave readers richly researched features. It fought for more than a year to obtain documents on a contaminated site in the city, telling readers the extent of underground deposits of trichloroethylene, a cancer-causing industrial solvent.^[12] It revealed the errors in the local budget claims by Progressive Conservative MPP Dave Smith,^[13] and went deep to find out who really rides local transit and tell readers the history of an iconic local late-night takeout joint that has been serving Chinese food since the 1930s.^[14] With transit cuts looming, Currents went to local residents who depended on the bus every day to tell their stories.^[15] “There were a handful of stories that seemed to make an impact and demonstrated that we were positioned to do deep reporting, and the community needed that work,” Pearson says.

But about a year ago he began to believe a for-profit model was not the best way to provide a public service.

“We got more and more donations and expressions of gratitude and community buy-in,” he says. “To hear that feedback from the community and how invested they were in our work, I began to think we should transition to a model that gave the community a little bit more ownership.’’

If he was to leave, there was a way Currents could remain to serve the community and Pearson decided to transition to a non-profit and seek registered journalism organization status so that those who were contributing could receive tax receipts (he does not yet have that status.)

In five years as a business, Currents never turned a profit, “but there was always money in the bank. We weren’t insolvent,” Pearson says. Currents was growing and each year there was more revenue, a cause for encouragement.

“We never got to the point where we felt we had reached sustainability, even though we thought we were on that path.” The growth of donations was accelerating and he was beginning to get comfortable thinking he could sell ads and sponsorships. But he admits he didn’t put as much effort into growing those revenue streams as he might have.

Peterborough is a healthy media ecosystem. It has legacy media (Peterborough Examiner) and a digital newsletter (Kawartha Now), a student newspaper and a student radio station. “Peterborough has a civic culture that is more engaged than the average city of 85,000,” Pearson says. Good media leads to engagement and engagement leads to a demand for good media in a university town that is largely ignored by larger print and broadcast outlets outside the community.

But additional funding was not coming and he had to ultimately lay off his two reporters and then essentially lay himself off. “Getting to the end of five years, I thought it was time for me to stop making personal sacrifices to keep this alive,” he says. “Looking back, I wish we had pursued other revenue streams such as sponsorships and ads more forcefully when we had the chance,” he says, although he never thought he had a realistic shot at competing against other outlets in town with entrenched advertising. “But I try not to be too hard on myself about it… we had so much to learn and we made progress in so many other ways.”

It became a non-profit early in 2025, under the auspices of the Peterborough Association for Local News (PALN), which took over the Currents assets. Pearson hopes non-profit status will better align with the Currents’ values and perhaps open up new revenue sources. He has moved on to a job at The Narwhal but sits on the four-person PALN board of directors.

“Local news isn’t about making a profit, after all,” he told his readers. “It’s about serving the community.”

But Pearson also tells a story too often untold by leaders in independent news. While he tries not to be hard on himself, he acknowledges there is an emotional toll in trying to keep local news alive. When he left, “it really had an impact on my mental health in some severe ways,” he says. “Expressions of support from the community always motivated me and made me feel good about the work I was doing. It felt good to be part of the community. But it also created guilt when it became apparent that our finances were not going to sustain what we had built. I felt I had let the community down. As a publisher, it is a huge emotional investment.”

When local is local

The Eastern Graphic has been in Paul MacNeill’s family for 62 years, appearing in rural Montague, P.E.I., mailboxes and stores each Wednesday. It’s a reliable 20-page print report for locals who depend on it for news of a local councillor who has resigned, an expansion to the Access PEI building for Child and Family Services and, of course, the latest obituaries.

It is certainly not a model for all to follow. The median age of Prince Edward Island is 44 years old and getting older, a demographic that is used to getting their news on paper. Some 5,000 copies of the Eastern Graphic are distributed in an area of no more than 10,000 to 12,000 residents. His sources of revenue are traditional — advertising, subscriptions, government grants, digital revenues and classified advertising. Here, local print works.

The slogan for MacNeill’s Island Press, which also publishes the West Print Graphic, Island Farmer and Atlantic Post Calls, is “Because Life is Local.” MacNeill has another principle: “My reality is rural.”

His website, peicanada.com, logs 136,000 unique page views per month, but the revenue it generates wouldn’t pay for two reporters, MacNeill says. He has 15 employees.

“The word ‘local’ is a powerful word,” MacNeill says. “Local defines who we are. The one thing that binds us together is the people on the ground in local communities with skin in the game.”

His publications remain relevant to Main Street, but hyper local print products are vulnerable to a couple of trends that do not even register for digital startups — Amazon and big box stores.

MacNeill’s publications are dependent on advertising from the local dress shop, the sporting goods store or the auto parts depot. “Every main street has been hammered by Amazon,” MacNeill says. “Those stores are gone.” Local stores have been taken over by franchisees who don’t see the need to advertise locally. The local opening of a Costco was cheered by residents, but local Island shops can’t compete with Costco. “When every purchase is made with a keyboard click,” MacNeill says, “it has an effect on local business donations to a rink, or local infrastructure. These are our advertisers who are disappearing.”

For anyone arguing that there can be too much reliance on government help, MacNeill has a message: they would be laughed at by hundreds of Canadian publishers who rely on that lifeline.

“I agree that if you rely too heavily on that, you can get lazy. But I still have to rely on Main Street, and we are pretty good at finding the low-hanging advertising fruit.’

His newspapers are punching above their weight, and he has an abiding faith in the future of print. After all, he says, his daughter just spent $70 on a vinyl album, another medium left for dead. “Print will become a premium product,” he says. “It has to be unique, though. If you’re not giving unique content, what’s the point of printing it?”

When Karen Valihora and her partner Christopher Fanning purchased The Picton Gazette in 2023, they were buying much more than a local media franchise. First known as The Hallowell Free Press, its first edition was published in 1830, making it the country’s oldest community newspaper. It’s dropped in the mailbox of 14,361 homes each week and another 700 copies are available in newspaper boxes and local businesses. Its website has 22,000 unique views each month but has been slow to grow.

The Gazette has a staff of eight and relies largely on advertising. The Local Journalism Initiative provides 28 hours of salary for a reporter each week. The paper also gets funding from Heritage Canada and the so-called “Google” fund from the Online News Act. A newsletter goes to 1,100 paid subscribers and an event featuring former MP Charlie Angus raised about $2,000, but the paper needs about $12,000 in advertising each week to stay afloat. That is attainable in the summer when the community expands by 8,000-10,000. A special Weddings edition raised $20,000, but Picton’s chain outlets do not advertise and that strikes a nerve with Valihora. A McDonald’s across the street from the office will not advertise nor will the local Tim Hortons. The Giant Tiger just recently purchased an ad and Canadian Tire has occasionally advertised. “Every single ad is a tough sell,” she says.

They are both English literature professors – she at Toronto’s York University and Fanning at Kingston’s Queen’s – and say they were neophytes in newspaper publishing when they made the leap. “We really believe in local news,” she says. “We believe in transparency and oversight and the role of journalists in scrutinizing local government. We believe in educating people. We are passionate about this… We believe in the watchdog role of journalism, and we believe we are providing that.”

It’s easy to look at independent print publications in this country and lament their inevitable demise, but there are many who would wave you away. And they are not all in rural areas. Dave Bidini’s community newspaper West End Phoenix in Toronto, bills itself as “Slow Print for Fast Times.’’ Peterborough Currents recently published its first magazine to local acclaim. In east central Alberta, Kerry Anderson, the owner and publisher of Caribou Publishing, produces four weekly newspapers with rich histories. The Weekly Review, Tofield Mercury, Community Press and Lamont Leader, like MacNeill’s Prince Edward Island publications, are unapologetically local, rural and proudly print. The Tofield Mercury has been publishing since 1918.

“Without community newspapers, where would rural citizens get their information?” Caribou asks its readers. “Rant and rave pages? Coffee shops? Carefully worded corporate or municipal press releases?” Those papers ask important questions to those in power, read through council minutes, meet with police, hospital staff, MPs, MLAs and cover local sports events, dance recitals, Christmas concerts and 4-H events. And they remind us that local has many meanings across this country.

Bingo and burgers

CHCO TV Bingo in southern New Brunswick’s Charlotte County employs station manager Patrick Watt and three journalists who are paid from LJI government funds. The station is run out of an old hockey school building in Saint Andrews, but it’s Bingo Tuesdays that keeps the community station going, bringing in about $150,000 in revenue each year.

The station does a week in review for an hour, a Your Town Matters news program and about 90 minutes of civic news per week, all posted as well on a YouTube channel. When CHCO began in 2005, it was licensed as a non-profit, giving it a bingo licence, Watt says. It started out locally, selling $7 bingo tickets and playing bingo every Tuesday night. The 90-minute game starts at 7; the newsbreak is at 8. “We integrated the news into the bingo show, otherwise they would sit doing bingo for 90 solid minutes,” Watt says.

The station sells, on average, about 1,000 tickets per week. Bingo started locally, with the station being seen by the 1,800 people in Saint Andrews, an iconic seaside resort nestled on the shores of Passamaquoddy Bay. But its bingo tickets are available in every major city in the province, typically eight to 12 convenience outlets in each. The station makes a 40 to 45 percent profit on bingo, after printing and ticket distribution (the show is staffed by volunteers). Players chase a typical payout per week of about $1,500 although some jackpots can randomly bring home up to $5,000 for a lucky viewer.

“I’m trying to create a cushion here so if we lost an LJI position, we wouldn’t have to let anyone go,” Watt says. “We have fun with it and it keeps them watching the news.”

Other outlets raise money by selling merchandise, running contests or build their brand by giving back to the community.

The Narwhal will send you a tuque if you become a member, The Local offers a tote bag. West End Phoenix was offering T-shirts to donors and brings in guest speakers and local bands to raise funds, drawing on founder Bidini’s literary and musical roots. On Giving Tuesday, The Walrus raised $36,818, including a $5,000 matching donation from former CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge through his charitable foundation.

Village Media, which owns a number of local news sites across the country, allowed readers to bid on nearly $500,000 worth of gift cards, with bids starting at 50 percent off, to help local merchants and provide revenues to the company.In Yellowknife, N.W.T., Cabin Radio held its sixth annual Burger Week, which resulted in 3,182 burgers sold, $13,000 in donated prizes and a donation of almost $7,000 to the Yellowknife Food Bank. Eleven Yellowknife restaurants produced 18 varieties of burgers — from bison burgers to cauliflower paneer, fish, crab and yam. Yes, yam.

Recommendations

In 2025, the Public Policy Forum, the Rideau Hall Foundation and the Michener Awards Foundation produced two local news reports with recommendations for governments, philanthropists and consumers to help ensure a resilient future for local news in Canada. Those recommendations, rooted in PPF’s original work in its groundbreaking Shattered Mirror report in 2017,^[16] focused on helping to sustain access to reliable information, whatever the distribution channel or business model, and without the need for perpetual government funding. Those recommendations stand, including stepping up community foundation involvement in local news, reconceiving the Local Journalism Initiative, mandating a sales notice period for local news outlets, and creating a local advertising tax credit.

To those recommendations we add a few more, focused on affecting a business transition for local news outlets to be sustainable organizations themselves. We recommend:

1. Launching a national philanthropically funded local news accelerator. Apart from the many headwinds facing local news outlets in Canada, they share two common problems: they lack time and expertise. These outlets are often very small operations, paddling hard just to stay afloat. And yet they are unnecessarily duplicating many functions — for instance, the training of ad reps and new writers, or the recruitment of journalism students to fill summer positions. As well, local news outlets often lack expertise and cutting-edge tools to develop new products, conduct audience research, better leverage technology and grow their subscription base and/or advertising revenues to ensure economic stability. Where regional newspaper associations used to provide business training, those organizations have atrophied.

An accelerator would provide intensive business development support to very small local news operations, including short-term advice, training, expertise and tools. A model exists in the International Press Institute, which has been running a local news accelerator for the last three years.^[17] Core components could include:

• Business strategy development and deployment;
• Digital marketing training and social media skills;
• Revenue diversification strategies (subscriptions, advertising, sponsorships, donations);
• Access to business consultants and mentorship; and
• Training on accessing government programs and advertising dollars.

2. Creation of a shared services hub. Inspired by Quebec’s Les coops de l’information, a co-operative that includes Le Soleil, La Tribune, Le Quotidien, Le Droit, Le Nouvelliste and La Voix de l’Est, this hub could provide back-end administrative support, including payroll and HR. Perhaps by pairing medium-sized outlets with very small outlets, it could also offer potential for shared editing. This hub could be a standalone initiative or a partnership with an existing larger non-competing entity. Member outlets would pay subscription fees based on their size and economies of scale to significantly reduce per-outlet costs. Philanthropy could fund startup costs and initial operations until a subscription model became self-sustaining over the course of several years.

3. Changes to the Canadian journalism organization qualification (QCJO). To qualify for QCJO status,^[18] which enables claims for the Canadian journalism labour tax credit among other benefits, an outlet must “regularly employ two or more journalists who deal at arm’s length,” the federal government states — and the owner/founder doesn’t count. This rule is at odds with the reality on the ground. In rural areas, in particular, where the norm is a single local news source, the local economy may not immediately have the advertising base required to sustain more than one journalist/owner. This does not make the necessity of the local stories any less vital. If policy can help grow the organization to two journalists — and it can, given that QCJO status can facilitate the hiring of a Local Journalism Initiative reporter — then the product can be made more relevant and other sources of revenue can grow. So many “mom and pop” local news operations are the lifeblood of communities; getting this right will unlock the potential of outlets across the country to supercharge their own growth.

This change will not happen overnight, and this is where philanthropy can be very useful indeed. A short-term fund with a firm sunset date could sustain very small media until this important policy change occurs.

4. Creation of a “one-window” government approach to funding. The process of applying for journalism funding in Canada is overly onerous. It’s no accident that only 17 organizations have been granted registered journalism organization status so far,^[19] a designation that can unlock charitable funding but involves a mountain of financial work. Applying for the LJI is less onerous but still requires a time commitment beyond some small outlets’ capacities. The Canada Revenue Agency, as well as the Department of Canadian Heritage, which oversees so many of these government supports, has some work to do here. A patchwork of programs has evolved to meet various needs over many years, including some journalism COVID-19 supports, which were extended, as well as funding for underserved communities. A review of programs is needed to recalibrate delivery models, as well as better identify what support is most useful for what type of media business and which programs are still relevant and fit for purpose. Given the fast pace of change across the media ecosystem, both departments should be asking themselves: If these programs were being launched today, how would they be designed? A one-window approach should remain the north star — an idea that would ensure the efficiency needed to serve the sector’s needs.

5. Getting it together. The problem noted above extends to the media itself: even seasoned professionals have a difficult time understanding the disjointed ecosystem of news umbrella organizations in Canada and their sea of acronyms that include the CAJ, CJF, CJFE, CJC, NNC, NMA, NNA, JHR, etc. As we heard in Charlottetown, Canadian media must aggressively lean into a change to their own internal narrative. Again and again, attendees said media has forgotten to fight for itself. The local news ecosystem must begin to tell its own story and speak with a unified voice in working to impact policy.

Conclusion

An industry raised on competition and a winner-take-all approach must, with increasing urgency, learn to lay down its swords — at least for use against each other. Audiences are excited to see outlets working together, and that collaboration sends a good message to donors as well. There is safety and strength in numbers, and an urgent need to strengthen the connective tissue across Canada’s local news ecosystem.

If there is any single answer to the future of local journalism in Canada, it lies in a portfolio approach to revenue streams, as well as partnerships with other outlets and institutions. Philanthropy and government funding must help, including enacting the recommendations included in this report, but nothing beats a sustainable business with the ability to weather economic downturns, capricious policymaking and the vagaries of charitable funding.

A local news accelerator and shared services can help on that front but, ultimately, the heavy lifting rests with local news outlets themselves. Battered by years of forces largely beyond their control, the most important work still lies ahead: connecting their journalistic work to community health and the protection of democracy; selling the value of local journalism to the public, government and philanthropy (bolstered by more research and data); and building innovative, resilient business models.

We rely on the creators, innovators, dreamers and doers across the Canadian local news landscape to use that most precious of all resources — their own passion — to get us there.

About the authors

Tim Harper is a Toronto-based journalist and author. He was most recently a national affairs columnist at the Toronto Star, where he also served as Washington bureau chief and Ottawa bureau chief.

Alison Uncles is the former vice-president, PPF media at the Public Policy Forum. Before that she was editor-in-chief of Maclean’s magazine and has held senior positions at the Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen and National Post, which she helped launch.