Nordicity research indicates drops in Canadian news coverage of civic affairs

Date: Sep 25, 2018

Area of Expertise: Screen Industries

Services (tags): Economic Impact Assessments

Team members: Dustin Chodorowicz

Public Policy Forum, an Ottawa-based, independent, non-partisan organization, engaged Nordicity as research partners in their review of the declining newspaper output of 20 small to mid-sized communities across Canada.

The report aimed to examine how news coverage of democratic institutions and civic affairs have changed and found as a result that reporting dropped by over one third (36%) from 2008 to 2017.

Primary research was completed through an analysis of 813,122 articles from the communities of Bathurst, Brandon, Chilliwack, Guelph, Halifax, Kingston, Nanaimo, Okotoks, Parry Sound, Quebec City, Red Deer, Rimouski, Sherbrooke, St Hyacinthe, St. Johns, Surrey, Sussex, Timmins, Victoria, and Whitehorse.

Project Team