The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has released a new report detailing the decline in local news media over the last 16 years, indicating Newfoundland and Labrador has seen the worst of it.
The report, which tracked changes to 2,900 news outlets across the country since 2008, says this province has seen “cataclysmic losses of local print outlets.”
Outside St. John’s, they say the province lost three quarters of its news sources in the last 16 years.
The fact many small towns and rural areas have a single, local outlet, typically a newspaper, translates into a 100 per cent decline in print outlets for those communities, said the report.
Meanwhile, based on an index that the centre has created, they say St. John’s has seen some of the least news deprivation out of larger cities across the country.
They say that’s because the capital city is a “regional hub” that produces broadcast content that serves the rest of the province.
On a national scale, the centre says the country has lost 11 per cent of print media outlets since 2008, including newspapers and online, and a loss of nine per cent of broadcast media outlets in the same timeframe.
The overall result of the changes, according to the report, is that 2.5 million Canadians now live in a postal code with only one, or no, local news outlets. It says that accounts for seven per cent of the total population, up from three per cent 15 years ago.
