The Canadian small-market news that manages to continue under these difficult economic circumstances has a fairly diversified ownership base. The following data is from the Local News Research Project out of Ryerson University in Toronto. According to this survey of newspapers with less than 50,000 readers, family-owned and regional chains continue to play a significant role (see Table 2).
[supsystic-tables id=18]
Support for local news has come at the level of national media policy as well. The CRTC recognised the significance in supporting local news broadcasting in small markets and established the Independent Local News Fund in 2016. This policy required cable and satellite providers to contribute 0.3 per cent of their previous year’s broadcast revenues to help support local, small-market television news (CRTC, 2016).
Perhaps it is because local news is more diverse in ownership that it does not have the same capital to draw from as the more vertically integrated major national news, and has not been able to sustain the pressures of the loss of advertising revenue, coupled with people unwilling to pay for small-market digital news.
