This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Peter Menzies, August 31, 2026
Ottawa is trying to map out which parts of the country constitute “news deserts,” a sign the government is considering making its funding of journalists a permanent feature within the Canadian policy aesthetic.
Canadian Press, using an access to information request, reported Aug. 8 that the Heritage Department has been working since last December to establish some precision regarding which communities are the most lacking in local media coverage.
To do so, it enlisted the services of academics, such as April Lindgren of Toronto Metropolitan University, who has been tracking turbulence within the local media world through her Local News Research Project for the past several years. It’s a complex task because, while it’s relatively straightforward to keep track of the many failures experienced in the industry since the advent of the internet, it’s not always as easy to keep up with the many new launches that have emerged to replace them.
So far, Lindgren has depended on crowdsourcing for input. Further complicating the tracking, it’s fair to say, is how to quantify the hundreds of online news sites launched by local radio stations.
And of course, there is then the thorny issue of how to assess the value and reach of many of these entrepreneurial ventures. In other words, just because a media outlet exists, how does one determine whether it provides coverage that might be worth subsidizing? What were once major dailies in the country with comprehensive coverage of, to name a few beats, city hall, school boards, post-secondary institutions, courts, police, fire, health, crime and more still exist. But the coverage doesn’t.
As one editor informed me a few years ago, sure, they still cover city council but only “when something big happens.” Alas, the editor had abandoned the once predominant concept that there is, indeed, always something “big” going on at city hall—it is the job of a good beat reporter to discover what it is and let the public know. Which, of course, they can’t do if they are not present and have to depend upon tips from members of the public via social media to find out what “big” stories are unfolding.
First, it may be asked: what use is the CBC (which until Friday had instructed its journalists to not refer to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. as terrorist attacks) if not for this? If the public broadcaster put its immense tax-payer funded budget to use doing real shoe-leather journalism, filling the gaps in small, rural, underserved news markets instead of overstuffing its big-city bureaus, it would be solving a pressing need in this country while also insulating itself from much-deserved criticism.
Beyond that, there are two ways of looking at this. One is that, provided the government is involved in the newsrooms of the nation and creating funds such as the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI) in order to address “news deserts,” it might as well know what it’s talking about. That would help direct the funding to those publishers most in need as opposed to those located in relatively well-served major centres such as Vancouver and Winnipeg, where platforms such as National Observer and the Winnipeg Free Press have benefited from direct LJI funding in recent years.
This would also provide more specific direction to the panel that reviews funding requests. It approved, for instance, 23 applications for the (up to) $60,000 grants from Vancouver-based National Observer since the LJI was created in 2019.
The other way of looking at it is that, as funds such as LJI become embedded in the news industry’s infrastructure, the government guidelines regarding funding risk becoming more and more specific regarding the nature of the reporting conducted in exchange for the funding. This could result in specifying coverage of, for instance, climate change, LGBTQ issues, Indigenous/BIPOC matters, or other topics dear to the government’s heart. Or, even, as one funded National Observer reporter was tasked to do, report on federal government activities in British Columbia—a role easily interpreted as equivalent to a government comms job.
Funding could also be made contingent upon the demographic makeup of applicants’ newsrooms. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) oversees the panel managing the $100 million-plus Google fund that subsidizes more than 400 news outfits and has been, for instance, inquiring into the demography of recipients’ newsrooms. Seeing as the promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion of designated groups is a CRTC obligation, it’s not difficult to see pressure being applied in this regard.
Better, one would think, that the focus would be on ensuring reporters were in place in Atlin and Inuvik, with the nature of the coverage left up to editors and publishers aiming to prioritize the needs of the community as opposed to those of the funder.
That sort of arrangement can be problematic at the best of times. When the benefactor is the government, a pall falls over the work of the reporter and the publication.
But, so far, the industry and the government have done a good job muting the details of their increasing codependence. The deeper that bond becomes—and that is the direction this is all heading in—the smaller the chance the public will ever even be aware of the details.
Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, a Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, and a former vice chair of the CRTC.
