As necessary as safe drinking water: an interview with local news researcher April Lindgren

Imagine two neighbouring small Canadian towns. Both leafy burgs with the kinds of concerns Canadian towns are facing: increasing rents, an opioid crisis, budget crises, to name few. One of the towns has a newspaper that republishes articles chosen by editors in the next province and a radio station that announces the traffic and the weather. Meanwhile, the town next door has one newspaper with three staff reporters, a copy editor and a photojournalist, all led by a managing editor and a publisher. Which one is the “news desert?”

That’s why April Lindgren prefers the term “local news poverty.”

“It allows us to create a continuum and show that some places are underserved, but some are really underserved compared to others,” she says.

In February of 2024, she published a story for the Walrus titled, “Local News Is Dying. The Consequences Are Worse than You Think” that uncovers what local news poverty really looks like for Canadians. When a swirl of rumors about a serial killer and disappeared men hit the small Ontario town of Smith Falls, Lindgren finds that there’s something else missing from the picture: the ability for the community to learn any truths about what happened.

Recently retired from teaching at TMU, Lindgren looks at what happens in communities  – from watching the nightly news to navigating emergency situations like wildfires – when reliable, accessible and consistent news has all but disappeared. She says, “I wanted to go beyond producing academic studies and reports to looking at how that translates into reality on the ground in different communities. I didn’t have to scratch the surface very much to find a gazillion examples. “

Lindgren is committed to researching local news poverty, particularly through a database she maintains, the Local News Map. Press Forward called Lindgren to talk about journalism as a public good, the signs of hope, and how publishers can better connect with the communities they serve.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Press Forward: There’s a broad societal acceptance that everyone’s just on social media and that’s where they’re getting information from. Young people especially are getting their information from social media. How do you see that fitting into questions around the news’ longevity?

April Lindgren: It really varies by demographic. If you look at older people in Canada, there’s still quite an extensive reliance on television news, actually. Among younger people, they’re more reliant on online and social media sources. The problem right now is, even on social media, there’s not very much news because of the meta ban. And news organizations are using social media less and less to get their stories out. So to rely on social media now is also increasingly problematic. 

It was a major blow to some news organizations that really relied on these, especially digital news organizations that really relied on these news on social media to get their stories out. So the stories aren’t there. It’s more difficult for people to figure out where to go for news because they’re not seeing a news story from a media organization in their Facebook feed. They may not even know that the news organization exists. So there’s discoverability in finding the content of local news outlets, and then there’s discoverability and just actually knowing what local news outlets are out there. 

Press Forward: You do say that “Canadians are waking up to the local news crisis.” How do you see that effect?

April Lindgren: The couple that I talked to in Kingston who turned on their TV and got a blank screen where they used to get their evening news: I asked them if they paid for news at all, if they subscribed to anything or supported any news organization, and they said no. But then they called me back a week later to say that they started supporting the Kingstonists news organization in their community. It hadn’t been an issue for them before because they were getting their news from this television newscast. But when that disappeared, they were again, like people in Cornwall, feeling adrift because the major source of their news had all of a sudden vanished. And so they started seriously thinking about where do we go for news? When I told them that only 15% of Canadians pay for digital news, and most Canadians just don’t think they should have to pay for news, they actually were willing to step up. 

The core transaction now that local news organizations have to realize is you have to produce coverage and news reporting that matters to people and matters to the communities you’re serving. Because if you don’t do that, people aren’t going to give you any money. They’re not going to give you their subscription, they’re not going to give you a donation, they’re not going to maybe sponsor an event if they’re a local business, and they’re not going to give you any advertising if you still have an advertising model. You have to show the community that you’re deeply engaged with the community and that you’re producing information people can’t get anywhere else. 

If you think about the model that we lived with for many years, there were fewer and fewer reporters in the newsroom of many newspapers, but the subscription rate would remain the same or the price would increase. It was just saying to people, Hey, I’m going to give you less and I want you to keep paying the same or more. Is it a surprise that that model hasn’t worked? No, I don’t think it’s a surprise. So now it’s just staring us in the face. If you want people to support your news organization, you have to be serving the community by producing news that matters.

Press Forward: At the end of the article, you write, “local journalism at its best is demonstrably as essential to well-functioning communities as potable drinking water”. What makes you say that? 

April Lindgren: I use this argument a lot when I talk about the need for more collaboration between news organizations. People are still wedded to beating the other guy or getting the scoop. And I say, well, okay, that’s fine for your ego, but is it serving the best interests of your community for each of you with your skeletal news staff to be producing a little bit of coverage of say, the opioid crisis? If you have an opioid crisis in the community, is it best serving the community if each of you just writes the occasional story based on one interview every once in a while? Or are you better serving the community through a collaboration that takes a bit of a deeper dive into looking at “what have other communities our size done to try and address this problem”? What solutions can we put out there? That’s probably too ambitious a project to take on for a small, stretched newsroom. But if you collaborate or two or three of the smaller news organizations collaborate, I think it is possible.

They’re putting the community’s interest first. They’re putting service to the community first, which is what I think needs to happen. This argument about putting community first and producing news coverage that matters is also relevant if you have any hopes of tapping into philanthropy to support your work, because it’s exactly the same thing. You have to be able to show the funders that you’re doing meaningful journalism that serves the community.

The core argument there is that for a community to function well, it needs to have these fundamental services. You need to have clean drinking water, and a reliable ambulance service. A fire service that is going to turn up when you have a fire. And you also need a reliable stream of information so that you can pay attention, so that you know what’s being discussed at city council. And, as a resident, you can get involved in those decisions way before they’re fait accompli.