Ottawa commissions project to track 'news deserts' in Canada

The federal government is working on a project that would map out areas of Canada that lack local news coverage.

“Canadian Heritage has recently engaged a team of independent industry experts to develop a local news directory — a multi-phase, multi-year project that will ultimately measure the extent and spread of news deserts and areas of news poverty in Canada,” the department said in a December memo to the culture minister.

The memo, obtained through access-to-information law, said the government is responding to stakeholder calls for better data and that the information would allow it to better target its policy efforts.

A separate document for the deputy minister of Canadian Heritage said the project is a response to a long-standing problem.

“The challenges of creating an up-to-date list of local news outlets at the community level have vexed researchers and policymakers for some time,” said the document, noting prior lists have tended to be incomplete and to become outdated quickly.

April Lindgren, professor emerita at Toronto Metropolitan University’s journalism school, is one of the academics working on the project.

Lindgren said that while there probably aren’t many absolute news deserts — places where there is no local news coverage at all — there are regions where news outlets aren’t meeting the “critical information needs” of the community.

They might be places where newsroom staffing levels have dropped to a level where they can’t consistently cover municipal politics, businesses or the local environment.

“Maybe they still try to cover all of those things, but the newsrooms are so diminished that it’s very hit-and-miss what they pick up on,” Lindgren said in an interview.

Lindgren has been a proponent of a news directory for years — not just to target government supports where they’re needed but to help Canadians find dependable local news sources.

“It’s getting more and more challenging for people to find reliable local news in this era of AI misinformation and disinformation and pink slime websites that imitate local news,” she said.

Adding to the problem is the ongoing ban on news content on Meta’s platforms. That means Canadians aren’t encountering local news by chance on Facebook, she said, while the emergence of AI summaries means people are no longer clicking on links to news websites.

The Investigative Journalism Foundation is using AI to help the federal government compile the directory.

Lindgren said that before AI, there was no cost-effective, efficient way to identify all news outlets in Canada’s 5,000 municipalities and keep the list up to date. She said AI can help by doing a first pass to collect the data, which will then be reviewed by a network of human verifiers, including local librarians.

Max Hartshorn, technology manager at the Investigative Journalism Foundation, said the project uses a computer program to comb through data from multiple sources, including Statistics Canada and Google, to identify local news outlets.

The results of that data collection in a particular community might include thousands of URLs, some of which — results with a Facebook URL, for example — are easy to identify and eliminate as non-local news sources.

The researchers ask the AI “to basically make its best determination as to whether or not this website is a local news outlet for that community,” Hartshorn said.

After the researchers have a refined list that may have 40 or 50 potential news outlets, those are passed on to human verifiers, he said.

Hartshorn added in an email that one benefit of the machine-assisted approach is that the AI is “capable of surfacing new outlets that our reviewers had no prior knowledge of, for example, small community and ethnic media outlets that fly under the radar.”

“This is important since we want to ensure our survey covers the entire Canadian media landscape,” he added.

The memo drafted for the deputy minister of Canadian Heritage said there has been international interest in the project, including from Australia and the United Kingdom.

The first stage of the project was a proof-of-concept that cost the government $110,000, the document said. The second phase will map news outlets in all communities in Ontario and Quebec. Phase 3, set to be completed in 2028, will expand the data set to the rest of country.

The document says the government is looking for funding partners for the second and third phases of the project and suggests Statistics Canada, the CRTC and CBC/Radio-Canada could contribute.

A government spokesperson didn’t answer directly when asked if the government has secured the necessary funding and whether the project definitely will be going ahead.

“The Department of Canadian Heritage is currently assessing the second phase of the project,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

The statement said the first phase found “the decline of local news outlets is disproportionately affecting smaller, rural, and lower-income communities. The absence of local news leads to lower civic engagement, increased misinformation, and rising political polarization.”

It added that existing initiatives to address news gaps include the Local Journalism Initiative, which by March 2027 will have contributed $128.8 million toward the creation of local journalism.

The Local Journalism Initiative is one of the government supports for journalism listed in the Canadian Heritage document, alongside the Online News Act and fiscal measures like the Journalism Labour Tax Credit.

Lindgren already runs a crowdsourced map that tracks closures of news outlets and the establishment of new ones. The Local News Research Project has found that since 2008, 613 local news outlets have closed in 391 Canadian communities, while 270 opened and remain in operation in 196 communities.

Magda Konieczna, a Concordia University associate professor of journalism who is also working on the directory, said as local news disappears or shrinks, “we see some of these societal impacts like loneliness, disengagement, mistrust.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she said, “we saw how disinformation can fill those gaps when folks don’t know where to look, when they don’t trust the official messaging.”

Konieczna said there is no reliable data indicating where the problem is most acute.

“Is it certain neighbourhoods of Toronto or of Montreal that have problems with access to news? Is in more rural areas, which is what we sort of tend to think?” she said.

A study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published in March 2025 found 2.5 million Canadians live in a postal code with only one news outlet, or none at all.

It said that Canada has seen a net loss of 11 per cent of print media outlets since 2008, including both newspapers and online publications. Private broadcast outlets experienced a net loss of nine per cent.

The report also said the urban areas suffering most from news deprivation were the suburbs of large cities, including Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.

“They have their own city governments, they have their own school boards, they’ve got hospitals, and they have almost no local news coverage,” said David Macdonald, who authored the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report.

Macdonald said about 25 news outlets are closing every year.

“At the end of 2024, we counted just over 2,900 local outlets in Canada, but that was a year and a half ago,” he said. “It’s probably lower today.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 8, 2026.