Media
The Local News Map: Tell us what is happening to local news in your community
Published by Geolive.ca
June 14, 2016
Local news research project
Municipal communication strategies and ethnic media: A settlement service in disguise
Published by Global Media Journal :Canadian edition - Multicultural Media and Immigrant Integration
August 3, 2015
The Canadian Federation of Municipalities has declared cities the “unofficial welcome wagon” for new Canadians. Research suggests, however, that they embrace settlement and integration policies to varying degrees. While scholarly examinations of municipal policies include analyses of corporate communications strategies, efforts by city governments to reach residents through ethnocultural news media have received little attention. To address that gap, this study investigates why the suburban community of Brampton, Canada adopted one of the most proactive ethnic media strategies in the country in 2015 when, just a decade earlier, it was for the most part unresponsive to the needs of its burgeoning immigrant population. As a starting point, the case study uses the determinants of municipal responsiveness identified by Kristin R. Good (2009) in Municipalities and Multiculturalism: The Politics of Immigration in Toronto and Vancouver. Employing a mixed methods approach, it concludes that rapid demographic change, the emergence of an activist political leadership, and efforts to reduce friction between newcomers and other residents influenced Brampton’s communications policy over time. The case study identifies challenges associated with adopting an ethnic media strategy, including issues related to translation and the relative lack of sophistication of some ethnic media outlets. Furthermore, it demonstrates that reaching out to ethnocultural communities via ethnic media requires more than just distributing news releases in English. Translation of these releases has the potential to increase municipal news coverage in ethnic media, the paper suggests, if only because it makes it easier for smaller news organizations to report on such matters.
Interpreting the city: Portrayals of place in a Toronto-area ethnic newspaper
Published by Aether: The Journal of Media Geography
September 3, 2012
This study investigates the sense of place portrayed in Ming Pao, a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).
URL: http://mgm.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/articles-pdf/lindgren.pdf
Canada’s local news “poverty”
Published by Policy Options
January 23, 2017
Newsrooms outside the big cities are closing, and with them goes the critical information citizens require for everyday life.
URL: http://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/january-2017/canadas-local-news-poverty/
Biography
Professor April Lindgren is the principal investigator for the Local News Research Project (LNRP) at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism. Her research focuses on local news poverty, a term she uses to describe situations where the critical information needs of communities are not being addressed by local media. Her work explores the extent to which local news outlets provide timely access to verified news about local politics, the economy, education and other information essential to well-functioning communities. She spearheaded creation of the crowd-sourced Local News Map, an ongoing project that tracks the launch - and loss - of local news organizations in Canada, and has led research projects that document the extent to which local news is at risk and unevenly available across the country. In January 2021 she launched the Local News Data Hub, a student-industry collaborative project committed to shoring up local journalism across Canada by supplying newsrooms with data-based stories and training student data journalists.
Before joining the School of Journalism in 2007, she spent more than 20 years as a reporter, covering economics and politics on Parliament Hill and at Queen’s Park for the Ottawa Citizen and what was then the Southam/CanWest chain of newspapers. She was also a regular political commentator for Global Television’s Focus Ontario public affairs show.