Coverage on civic affairs drops
New research indicates that news coverage of civic institutions including city halls, courts and legislatures fell sharply over the past decade as newspapers struggled with the double whammy of the financial crisis and disruption from the internet.
Public Policy Forum, an Ottawa-based think tank, found the number of newspaper articles on civic institutions dropped by more than one-third (36 per cent) as the overall volume of articles shrank by half from 2008 to 2017, according to its review of newspaper output from 20 communities across Canada in the report Mind the Gaps: Quantifying the Decline of News Coverage in Canada.
“What we’re seeing is that the news business, as we suspected, is in a free-fall in terms of serving democracy,” said Edward Greenspon, a former journalist and the Public Policy Forum’s president.
While less news was largely expected given lower print advertising revenue, journalism job losses and newspaper mergers or closures, the think-tank believes there has been “virtually no research” that quantifies a loss of actual reporting on public institutions. As such, it sought to quantify the decline despite limitations with the data set.
“What we found was pretty scary,” Greenspon said. “It did validate the fear, the anxiety a lot of people have that there is less information, less original news.”
The research was conducted over three months in partnership with Nordicity Group Ltd. with funding from foundations and unions. It selected communities with the aim of gathering a representative sample based on language, region, provincial capitals, market size (small or medium) and whether the community had a newspaper closure (40 per cent did).
It analyzed 813,122 articles from newspapers in Bathurst, Brandon, Chilliwack, Guelph, Halifax, Kingston, Nanaimo, Okotoks, Parry Sound, Quebec City, Red Deer, Rimouski, Sherbrooke, St Hyacinthe, St. Johns, Surrey, Sussex, Timmins, Victoria and Whitehorse.
The researchers determined whether an article addressed civic issues using keyword searches such as “city council” and “legislature” in Infomart, an online newspaper database.
They found the number of articles covering civic affairs fell to 3,965 in 2017 from 6,278 in 2008. Notably, the proportion of civic affairs articles was relatively stable, rising to 7 per cent from 6 per cent a decade ago.
“That perhaps suggests that editors are trying to protect the core, in a way,” Greenspon said.
Still, all 20 communities reported declines in news, according to the report. Declines were more pronounced in communities with closures. The research period included the closure of 36 community papers as part of a transaction to swap 41 papers between Torstar Corp. and Postmedia Network Inc., owner of National Post.