Local, independent news publishers across Canada are fighting to build trust, promote dialogue, and foster engaged, informed communities on shoestring budgets.
“I could have taken a crochet class,” says Stacey Brzostowski. Instead, she co-founded Haida Gwaii News – a twice-a-month, free newspaper – in the summer of 2024. Brzostowski sits in a makeshift office in the unfinished basement of her house. “It can get cold down here,” she says. “So I light a candle and bundle up.”
For more than a year, The Philanthropist Journal has been making the case for funders to support journalism. Now it’s time to up the ante. Yes, it’s important to fund journalism because healthy local news ecosystems are critical to the well-being of our communities, planet, democracy, and funders’ missions. But the local-news-is-dying-and-our-communities-are-suffering narrative now seems almost quaint.
When a billionaire declares “You are the media now” to 200 million followers, the game rules change. Add this to a mis- and disinformation crisis, mass polarization, and “rapacious AI-driven platforms” and what you get is a call to arms. In a shift from defence to offence, non-profits such as Report for America are deploying corps of reporters to re-establish journalism as a public service, noting, “This is about fighting for truth and strengthening our communities.”
This is about fighting for truth and strengthening our communities.
Report for America
Our best weapon in this fight is a new type of journalism that tackles root causes, that intervenes earlier, notes Peter Pomerantsev, the author of How to Win an Information War. A type of journalism that’s more “a social service that responds to people’s frustration and sense of abandonment,” fostering community and a sense of agency.
The question is this: will you join the fight? To answer “yes” means getting to know the independent, local news publishers already doing this work in Canada. Spend some time with them and a similar story emerges. They describe being overworked and under-resourced, expressing emotions ranging from forgotten to misunderstood to angry. But they’re also undaunted. They still believe that journalism can change the world and, especially in traditionally marginalized and underserved communities, that it can right historic wrongs.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m the lonely soldier fighting for everybody, you know? It’s a heavy burden,” says Lela Savić, publisher and editor-in-chief of Montreal’s La Converse. “But it’s a burden I’m proud to carry.”
“Sometimes I feel like I’m the lonely soldier fighting for everybody, you know? It’s a heavy burden.
Lela Savic, La Converse, Montreal
In the fall of 2024, two first-of-their-kind conferences – in Toronto and Charlottetown, where local, independent news publishers rubbed elbows with policymakers, researchers, and funders – provided a glimmer of hope.
In hosting Toronto’s Future of Independent Media Summit, Ana Serrano, OCAD University president and co-founder of the Open Democracy Project, sent a clear signal that independent journalism deserves a place at the table. The value proposition of local media has changed, she says. Twenty years ago, prior to the “change and churning” of our media landscape, one might have argued their value wasn’t as critical. But not anymore, she says. “We need to live in a kind of evidence-based reality that we can see, hear, and touch.” The “localness” of local news allows us to see what we’re reading “reflected in the material reality we’re living.” That connection creates value that can’t be found elsewhere.
To build “a pluralistic society that works independently and collectively,” Serrano says, filled with citizens “equally able to succeed,” local media is essential. “It’s almost impossible to build that capacity if you don’t have a media system that addresses how we understand our shared reality.”
In Toronto, the shared reality of meeting in person became news itself. “First of all, we don’t have gatherings of those folks,” says journalist and lawyer Julie Sobowale, vice president of the Canadian Association of Journalists. “Folks” as in the alternative, independent press, from across the country. Second, the summit provided a “dedicated space” for honest conversations. “Like, why do we not have those conversations about how we make money, or how we don’t make money? Or how do we get audiences or don’t get audiences?” Sobowale asks. “I don’t know why these things are almost like a secret.”
At one point, secrets were on full display as publishers moved from white board to white board on OCAD’s lecture hall stage, scribbling answers to questions they’re rarely asked: Q: What is the biggest obstacle to growth for independent journalism organizations? A: Money. Q: If our journalism sector was robust and healthy, how would we know? A: I would sleep at night.
The foundations . . . don’t understand us. So how do we educate them on who we are?
Julie Sobowale, Canadian Association of Journalists
Funders watched from their seats. Sometimes, especially when a spirit of camaraderie erupted from the stage, the distance from bucket seat to white board felt farther than just a few metres. Panels where funders expressed their expectations from journalism outlets indicated another disconnect. The whole day was about change, about the future, Sobowale says, but “it sounded like, to me, the foundations don’t even know us, so the people who are giving us money don’t understand us. So how do we educate them on who we are?”
Journalists, keen to tell other people’s stories, don’t tell their own very well. Let’s start with ditching the “journalism is dying” narrative, Sobowale says. Funders “have no idea what that means.” Instead, she wants to talk about how journalism helps build and shape communities. For example, the story of The Narwhal could be told as a publication reporting on climate change through an Indigenous lens. Or maybe: “We’re supporting people who are educating communities about how climate change affects their world and what they can do about it.”
The Narwhal is an example of a solutions-oriented newsroom, creating jobs and hiring people from diverse backgrounds. We know it’s easy for people from diverse backgrounds to feel marginalized in the workplace, Sobowale says, and these types of newsrooms are working to combat that. “So, it’s not just what they’re doing outwardly, but also what they’re doing inwardly.”
Newsrooms practising community-centred journalism shift traditional power dynamics. Publications such as La Converse are asking funders to follow suit. For Savić, this begins by getting rid of the “S” word. The term “sustainability” is not the right word for mission-based media, and its ubiquity at the Toronto summit was “triggering,” she says. The pressure to be sustainable is “oblivious to the realities we face.”
The conversations La Converse cultivates, such as “Listening to Palestinian Pain,” take months of trust-building. For Savić, this is journalism as intervention, “because when we hear people’s pain, we are preventing more harm, right?” Treat us like any other non-profit serving a community, she says. “If we were a homeless shelter, you wouldn’t ask us to be sustainable. If we were a youth centre, you wouldn’t ask us to be sustainable. Yet we are providing services that serve these communities, that serve very marginalized communities.”
“I don’t need another training session on how to be sustainable,” Savić says. What she needs is money to fulfill her publication’s mission. “There’s no magical solution.”
In “The Myth of Nonprofit Media Immunity: A Deep Dive into Sustainability,” Andrew Ramsammy, co-founder of Equimedia Advisors, notes that the balancing act to create impactful work while operating “on the knife’s edge of insolvency” is in itself unsustainable. It’s time to reframe what’s at stake: “We owe it to the public, journalists and the future of informed democracies to ensure that we aren’t just surviving on borrowed time and borrowed dimes.”
If you’re going to look at funding media, you need to think about how you are going to fund us equitably.
Lela Savic
Savić turns her camera to face a crib. While on maternity leave, she worked for free for nearly a year, bringing her newborn to the office. “I feel pulled from all strings,” she says. “I don’t see my kids anymore. I don’t see my friends. I don’t have a social life. And yet it’s still not enough.” She knows that other racialized colleagues share similar struggles: “We’re over-demanded and under-compensated, which is something that systematically happens to women of colour. So if you’re going to look at funding media, you need to think about how you are going to fund us equitably.” “Sustainability” is not the right word, she says, it’s “reconciliation.”
There’s much to reconcile. Decades of media-perpetuated “misinformation, sweeping generalizations, and galling stereotypes” have caused significant harm in Indigenous communities. Pervasive anti-Black racism has prompted journalists Nana aba Duncan and Eternity Martis to write a guidebook to help rebuild trust. In Under the White Gaze: Solving the Problem of Race and Representation in Canadian Journalism, journalist Christopher Cheung notes, “Just as we can’t talk about reconciliation without talking about colonialism, we can’t talk about journalism without talking about whiteness.”
Nor can we talk about philanthropy without talking about both colonialism and whiteness. How does being white, knowing the language of whiteness, aid publications that seek funding? Savić asks.
A lot of funders, I assume, don’t know how they can fund journalism, and don’t know why they should.
Allison MacLachlan, Rideau Hall Foundation
Funding journalism means entering a realm that’s as much about questions as answers. “You know, we don’t know what we don’t know,” says Allison MacLachlan, director of external relations and public engagement at the Rideau Hall Foundation (RHF). “A lot of funders, I assume, don’t know how they can fund journalism, and don’t know why they should.” So the first step is “really laying down the why of this whole thing,” she says.
After attending both the Charlottetown and Toronto conferences, the why is simple for MacLachlan: “Ultimately, having a strong media ecosystem benefits us all. Even if it’s not part of your mission statement or objectives to think about democracy, we all really are thinking about our communities and how to better our communities.”
Researchers have been laying out the why for anyone who’ll listen. To support communities means to recognize access to quality information as a “life-and-death issue,” according to UNESCO, and should be viewed as a public good. “People still live in physical spaces, and they go to school in physical spaces, and they go to the hospital in physical spaces, and they go to the rink in physical spaces,” says Edward Greenspon, co-author of The Lost Estate report, in a video appearance at the Charlottetown conference. “And the fact that they do creates an opportunity, in this age of polarization, for greater understanding of one another.”
Perhaps equally pressing is the how. How can local news publishers approach Canada’s more than 11,000 foundations, which control $135 billion in assets? New regulations around disbursement quotas and non-qualified donees create more leeway for foundations, a recent Philanthropic Foundations Canada and PhiLab study notes; however, data about what they support and how is “surprisingly difficult to access.” Two-thirds of the largest family foundations lack websites or grantmaking specifics. The foundation, like Bigfoot, is “a notoriously elusive creature,” writes Devon Ayer, vice-president of programs at Imagine Canada.
But with networks that span sectors and a bird’s eye view to “track broader trends and needs in society,” foundations have the power to “respond in ways that others can’t or won’t,” charity policy expert Sara Krynitzki notes.
MacLachlan knows journalism can’t top every foundation’s to-do list. She recalls a conversation with Steve Waldman, co-founder of Report for America, in Charlottetown: “‘Journalism is never going to be everybody’s number one or number two issue, right?’ he said, ‘but if the idea of and the importance of journalism could be thing three or four, we would advance it in so many different kinds of ways.’” One way is through buying ads, MacLachlan says. As of November, RHF dedicates 30% of its advertising budget to for-profit local news outlets across Canada. Another way is “using our own voices and networks” to advocate for local news. This is where the “convening piece” comes in, she says.
The RHF and Michener Awards Foundation–hosted Charlottetown conference, From Haida Gwaii to PEI: Putting the Local Back into Local Journalism, put the spark back into an oft-neglected part of the media landscape. In a post titled “Could Local Media Become Sexy?” Eastern Graphic publisher Paul MacNeill writes, “For years local news has allowed others to define us. We’re lumped in with THE MEDIA. But we’re different. And vital. And ready to fight back.” It’s time to rethink “capital ‘J’ journalism,” researchers urge, and plumb the “breadth and depth” of local information and news networks.
With such a laser focus on place, these outlets can become insular. That’s why attending the Charlottetown conference was like an “electric shock,” Brzostowski says. For the publisher of a paper on an island archipelago that’s an hours-long ferry ride from the BC mainland, forging connections across the country was a “game-changer.” She came home with success stories, stories of outlets thriving for generations, or being revitalized by locals. It made her think, “I can do this. I’m not going to give up.”
Rural residents often feel forgotten. People sitting in fancy rooms making decisions have no idea.
Stacey Brzostowski, Haida Gwaii News
Rural residents often feel forgotten, Brzostowski says. “People sitting in fancy rooms making decisions have no idea,” and this “trickles down” to local media and supports they receive, or don’t. “Who is community-centred media? How do we define that? And why are some being supported and others aren’t?” The answers can translate into cold, hard cash vis-à-vis designations serving as gateways for everything from a fully funded reporter to tax credits to how the $100-million-per-year Google payout is divvied up to receiving grants.
Unable to access any supports, Brzostowski and her husband started Haida Gwaii News with around $2,000 and a suite of digital skills. Advertising dollars and Patreon donations cover printing and shipping costs, but the rest (including her 300-kilometre paper route) is an unpaid act of faith. Brzostowski’s faith has been tested more than ever since her main reporter left in October 2024. “I may be a one-woman show,” she says, “but I have the support of the community.”
That doesn’t mean they’ll go easy on her. Since having their paper “taken from them” by Black Press Media (which stopped printing in 2020), increased polarization has led to a “huge disconnect” between island communities, with the “rumour mill running rampant on Facebook.” Gaining back trust has been her first priority. “I really wanted this to be a Haida Gwaii paper,” she says. Locals see themselves reflected in its pages. “There is such an ownership of things they don’t own.”
When hot-button issues range from Haida Aboriginal title to old-growth logging to oil tanker traffic, locals are wary of media with an agenda. One wrong move and they’ll turn on you, Brzostowski says. But she’s an island girl, born and bred. “I know the power of the people here,” she says. And she knows the power of local news. “I have to fight. I have to stand up for myself. I have to stand up for my paper.”
For publishers such as Will Pearson of Peterborough Currents – founded in 2017 as a volunteer-run podcast and relaunched in 2020 as a news website – the fight may soon be over. Pearson says their for-profit business model no longer works; if his proposal to switch to a non-profit model and secure funding doesn’t pan out, they’ll run out of money by fall 2025.
From a distance it might seem like Currents has “cracked the code,” Pearson says, consistently growing their subscriber base and donor list, winning accolades from community members and fellow publishers. But “we’ve only survived because we’ve just worked for free for a long time.”
Sustaining local news is a lot harder to pull off when your audience is capped at 80,000 people to begin with.
Will Pearson, Peterborough Currents
All this runs counter to the narrative of “upstart, digital-first media outlets” forging a path to sustain local news. The most successful examples seem to be “national brands that can pull from a really big potential base of supporters,” Pearson says, “but it feels a lot harder to pull it off when your audience is capped at 80,000 people to begin with.” The costs of producing journalism don’t change that much, but the pool of potential supporters is that much smaller, he notes. “I don’t know that people have solved that yet.”
Pearson’s predicament could well be unsolvable, forming one of the core arguments to fund local news. An EU report notes that whether distributed to one thousand or one million subscribers, the first copy’s production costs are the same. In “The Value of Local News in the Digital Realm,” Oslo Metropolitan University professor Ragnhild Kristine Olsen argues that business logic cannot be applied to a product that’s not really a product; local journalism sells “public connection functions to citizens.” Trying to serve both common-good and economic interests creates a “complex and contradicting” relationship, especially in areas too small to sustain commercial news operations or in marginalized, low-income communities.
Pearson struggles with this contradiction daily. As a shareholder, he knows a business should close when it stops making money. But it’s hard to view Currents in a “capitalist framework.” The “citizens-first” stories they write are a community service, he says, answering community questions with whatever form works best. A reader’s question about municipal boundaries was answered by a video exploring 200 years of growth. Curiousity about councillors’ voting records resulted in a vote tracker. That all this could disappear “makes me really sad,” Pearson says. It’s not like it’s a coffee shop closing; “the stakes are higher.”
The stakes are high for Canada, too. Each outlet closure means another thread of the local news web severed. Pearson sees Currents as a test case, or a cautionary tale. Don’t overlook the little guy, he warns. Federal problems start locally. Investing in local news is investing in an engaged citizenry, one “well informed enough to meet the challenges we’re facing.”
