About
Team
Projects
Events
About
Team
Projects
Events
The purpose of this study is to contribute to knowledge at the intersection of journalism studies and critical health communications through a study of journalistic innovation. The study traces the impact of the The Local, an online multimedia magazine focused on urban health and social issues in the greater Toronto area (GTA). The Local, one of only two outlets to qualify under new regulations for not-for-profit journalism outlets with a charitable status, centers its journalism on two pillars: being data-driven, and offering compelling, community based storytelling. The Local maps closely onto Callison and Young’s (2019) categorization of new journalism start-ups: it has a Code of Ethics emphasizing transparency, editorial independence, fairness and accuracy, and a race, representation, and equity commitment which takes a structural approach to equity in the newsroom. Callison and Young posit that start-up journalism is a site of innovation that increases the diversity of the journalism landscape, responding to the ‘crisis’ in Canadian newsrooms that is not only technological and economic, but also an ongoing crisis of lack of representation of and by marginalized communities. The Local also has a commitment to data-driven journalism, a form whose ‘messiness’ Hermida and Young (2017) argue encourages evolutions in journalism practice, such as greater collaboration rather than competition.
This study aims to understand if and how the Local’s innovative journalism helped shift media and public sphere covid-19 pandemic conversations in the GTA, towards a greater focus on vaccination equity. In March of 2021, The Local began tweeting links to a series of its maps and articles that highlighted disparities in covid-19 health outcomes in the GTA in relation to inequities in social determinates of health, including vaccination access. The study encompasses an analysis of how key Local tweets tracked across Twitter over a six month period beginning in March of 2021. The study questions are Q1. What were the key characteristics the Local’s pandemic reporting? Q2. What role did the Local’s reporting and the work of the Local’s reporters play in reframing debates about the Covid-19 vaccination rollout to better incorporate health equity? More broadly, how have innovations from the Local as representative of practices of new journalism start-ups impacted the journalism landscape and mainstream reporting? Q3. How did the Local have influence: how did the Local’s journalism reach different constituencies?
The study has produced a paper, currently in peer review, written in partnership with Sibo Chen from TMU. This paper presents the results of a network analysis of top tweets from three Local affiliated Twitter accounts, establishing what Local content circulated widely among networks of journalists and health advocates. I aim next semester to finish the research component for a second paper. This includes completing the last five of approximately fifteen in-depth interviews with key health justice advocates and journalists, and finishing an ongoing analysis of shifts in journalism coverage in the GTA of covid-19 vaccination during the study period. Findings from this section of the project will be translated into concrete policy recommendations for how the federal government’s local journalism initiative can better support journalism start-ups that reach underrepresented and underserved constituencies.