When Cory Bilyea arrived in North Huron, Ont. in 2020 as a reporter of the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), the local newspaper had already lost much of its presence in the community.
Bilyea was hired straight out of college and she became the only reporter covering the community for the Wingham Advance Times. She was told the newspaper’s office had moved out of town and that residents were turning away from their local paper.
“I worked very hard to regain their trust,” said Bilyea, who eventually bought a house in Wingham.
Buying a home in the community meant becoming part of it, and she continued to report on the news even when stories were uncomfortable for the people she knew. During a regional amalgamation process involving the Maitland Valley Conservation Authority, Bilyea received information about local municipal governments that were reluctant to criticize Ontario’s provincial government because they feared losing funding.
She took the issue to the local Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP), Lisa Thompson. Bilyea said Thompson did not answer her questions; instead, she provided government talking points. After a follow-up interview, Thompson again declined to address the issue and stopped speaking to Bilyea for a time.
Developing relationships in a small community does not mean protecting those relationships from scrutiny. Bilyea said she had a good relationship with former Reeve Bernie Bailey, but when he made comments she regarded as inappropriate about the Pride flag during a council meeting, Bilyea reported them in a news story.
Bailey was angry, but Bilyea says he eventually thanked her, and said her reporting had helped him learn something, including that he had been wrong.
Another situation went differently. A certain resident of the community had broken a COVID-19 directive and been charged, then appeared in court. Bilyea covered the story for the newspaper. The accused objected to the coverage and dismissed her as a government-funded LJI reporter who could not be trusted.
For the most part, Bilyea says people in the community did not know, or didn’t care, that her LJI reporter’s position was funded by taxpayer dollars. But to the accused, the source of Bilyea’s funding became part of how her journalism was perceived.
The incident highlights the complicated terrain facing reporters whose job is to become sufficiently embedded in a community to understand it while retaining enough distance to report on it critically. It is also the subject of a new study by Chris Arsenault, a professor at Western University’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies.
Arsenault interviewed 22 journalists funded by the LJI and asked them how they understood their work. The study emerged from a broader concern about whether government funding could introduce a pro-government bias into LJI-funded journalism, possibly compromising reporters’ watchdog role of scrutinizing the government.
Established in 2019, the initiative provides $128.8 million in federal funding over eight years to local news organizations struggling with declining revenues, closures and shrinking reporting staff. Its purpose is to help restore civic journalism in communities under-served by the mainstream news markets, including Indigenous, ethnocultural, francophone and 2SLGBTQ+ communities.
The reporters Arsenault interviewed, all paid with LJI funding, told him they were not influenced by the source of their paycheques, and that they believed they maintained their roles as watchdogs and wrote balanced stories. Yet two-thirds of the interviewees shared some concern that the source of the funding could affect how audiences perceived their role, or create the appearance of a conflict of interest. The reporters said they considered advertiser pressure a more tangible threat to their autonomy than government funding.
April Lindgren, professor emerita of Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism, spent more than two decades as a reporter covering politics and economics in Ontario and on Parliament Hill. She has dedicated much of her academic career to documenting what the loss of local news outlets means for Canadian communities.
She founded the university’s Local News Research Project in 2008 and spearheaded the Local News Map, which tracks the loss and emergence of local news outlets across the country. According to data she has collected, 529 news outlets have closed across the country since 2008, reducing public discourse in 351 communities.
Lindgren defines the uneven availability of community journalism as “local news poverty,” a term she uses to describe communities where critical information is no longer adequately addressed by the local media.
The distinction between actual interference and the perception of compromised independence is important to Magda Konieczna, associate professor of journalism at Concordia University in Montreal.
Konieczna does not regard journalistic independence as something that exists outside the economic and institutional structures that sustain journalism. Every source of funding, she argues, creates its own complications.
She points to the LJI’s use of intermediary organizations and external reviewers as safeguards against direct government control. And she says that greater transparency about how funding decisions are made would strengthen public confidence.
Konieczna said the LJI’s specific production requirements for reporters can favour quick, frequent stories over more ambitious reporting, particularly at smaller news organizations. For example, she said the Eastern Graphic newspaper on Prince Edward Island, wrote a 32-part series on mental health and addiction, Through the Cracks.
The series prompted the premier of the province to commit to increased funding to address challenges the series identified, but the editor was subsequently questioned by the organization that administers the LJI program about why the newsroom had not produced the required five to seven stories per week.
In a written response from Canadian Heritage, which oversees the LJI program, New Canadian Media was told that the arrangement involving the use of intermediary organizations is designed to keep editorial decisions at arm’s length from the government. The response said that funded news outlets are wholly responsible for deciding what to cover, whom to interview and what to publish, and that Canadian Heritage has no role in prescribing, directing, approving or reviewing news content.
The response also said that where production targets exist, they are established between the news outlet and the independent body that administers LJI funding. The LJI’s purpose is to support original civic journalism in underserved communities, including the coverage of local institutions and matters of public interest, according to the emailed response. It refers to the periodic program evaluations as ways of assessing the program and shaping its future.
Disclosure: NCM is a recipient of LJI funding and publisher George Abraham is a member of the panel that advises the Community Radio Fund of Canada. Chris Arsenault, the principal investigator of a study cited here, was one of the examiners of reporter Aloa Alota’s recent PhD thesis defence.
PhD Student in Media Studies at Western University Canada.
