Missed opportunities for community engagement: An examination of the government-funded Local Journalism Initiative

Abstract

This article examines the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), initially a $70-million, five-year program of the Canadian government to fund new reporting positions in existing newsrooms across Canada, with the goal of increasing the amount of civic journalism. Using a mixed methods approach, we analyzed the language in almost 100 publicly available documents, conducted interviews with 11 participants and did a content analysis of 240 stories to examine how newsrooms defined the news desert they were trying to fill, whether work was civically focused and professionally produced, and what the LJI tells us about what kind of journalism the market can’t fund. In comparing the implementation of the program to an emerging set of best practices in journalism, we argue that the LJI represents a missed opportunity to help newsrooms evolve to better focus on the kind of information their communities need. We conclude with the one outlier in our sample, a community-access television station, that does make efforts to engage its community. Keywords: local news, qualitative methods, case studies, Local Journalism Initiative, political economy of news