The Local case for going deep

The Local began in Toronto as an unusual experiment: a storytelling project designed to help make sense of public-health data that statistics alone could not explain. It later became an independent nonprofit newsroom known for deeply reported features, investigations and coverage of communities often overlooked by larger outlets. Newsjunkie managing editor Peter Landau spoke with executive editor Nicholas Hune-Brown about The Local’s origins, its funding model, its expansion into Peel, the importance of community ties in reporting and what small newsrooms can—and cannot—replace as traditional local media shrink.

Before we get into The Local, can you give me a short version of how you became a journalist and how you eventually arrived at this publication?

I should first say that I’m an executive editor here. We do have an editor-in-chief, Ty Winn. I don’t want to steal his title. I became a journalist as a freelance magazine writer. That was my route through this. I got a degree in English lit, and then I began freelancing for Canadian magazines. That’s been my specialty for most of my career: long-form, magazine-style stories. Doing that kind of work eventually led me to Tai Huynh, and this slightly different local news organization was born through that.

The Local began as a hyperlocal storytelling project connected to UHN [University Health Network] Open Lab in 2017, and it became an independent nonprofit in 2019. What problem in Toronto journalism were you trying to solve when it started?

It has a very unusual beginning for a publication. It wasn’t trying to solve a problem in Toronto journalism. It was trying to solve, initially, a problem in Toronto health. This was one of many projects that my colleague Tai was working on. In this case, they were getting stats from a Toronto neighborhood about mental health visits that were through the roof there and nowhere else, but that wasn’t helping them understand what was actually going on. They needed some sort of interviewing and storytelling project that could help make sense of what they were seeing. Tai was doing this work as someone without a background in journalism, but as he thought about it, it began to sound more and more like journalism. That’s where he brought me in, initially as a consultant and then as someone to help do that work.

At the beginning, we were funded through a hospital to tell stories about different health issues in Toronto neighborhoods. As we did that work, with my background in journalism, we started seeing the value of it. We saw the readership, and we were able to figure out how to spin that health storytelling project out into an independent media organization—one of the weirdest, most unlikely ways a journalism publication is born.

You covered places and issues that were maybe ignored or misunderstood, but how did you determine when a community or subject was being underserved by the existing local media?

There’s not a formula or anything, but traditionally in Toronto—and in a lot of cities—there’s a downtown bias. Downtown is where the wealthiest people live. There are studies looking at coverage of some of our suburban communities, and first of all there’s very little of it, and second, it’s almost always about the police, even when crime rates are lower than they are in different neighborhoods.

I think there are lots of reasons for that. If your readership or your writers are living in a neighborhood, that’s where you tend to write about. There’s also the business side, where you’re going to make more money if you’re writing about places where you have more readers.

Those general patterns were clear to us in our reporting and in digging into statistics around the city. Those are the places we tried to focus on. As we switched from being this weird project into a nonprofit, we were trying to fill gaps that weren’t being filled. We wanted to tell stories, not be the third person to tell the same story about whatever was happening in downtown Toronto that day, but to tell something new from a place people weren’t covering enough. That’s always been our guiding light.

Local journalism is usually built around the immediacy of city council meetings, crime, elections and breaking news. But The Local tends toward deeply reported features and investigations about systemic problems that may not have an obvious news hook. Why did you choose that model?

We didn’t see a lot of that work being done. To have someone write about an important issue in your neighborhood with care and rigor, and with attention to beauty and detail like a great New Yorker story, was something we didn’t see.

We found there is a market for it, and that people want to read deeply reported, thoughtful stories about the places where they live or work. Personally, that’s the kind of work I like to do. So we leaned into the things we were good at and the gaps we saw.

We’re a small newsroom. We can’t keep up with the daily stuff. We’re finding room for people who want to read smart stories with a slightly wider lens about the place they live and the systemic issues that are here.

You work at a slower pace and can’t keep up with what the daily newsrooms are supplying. What are you giving readers that the larger news media in Toronto is not providing?

I think we’re hopefully covering stories that other people aren’t. What we want to do is the smartest, most in-depth version of those stories.

There were a whole bunch of stories about violence at a particular school that was on the evening news for a week at a time. In the coverage, no one had spent the time to speak to the students. We weren’t there first, but we came afterward and were able to spend time talking to community members. I think we told the very best version of that story, and it was read by a lot of people.

We’re generally trying to do the best version of those pieces, if not the first. We also want to be first. We want to break news. We do investigations, and we do a lot of data journalism that has revelations that aren’t revealed anywhere else.

Are larger newsrooms more likely to move on to another story while you take the time to report it deeply? Is that what differentiates you?

Broadly, yeah. We’re still lucky in Toronto. We have a great city newspaper, the Toronto Star, and we have people doing great work. But the nature of journalism right now is that they have fewer people covering these neighborhoods than they did in the past. They’re not able to spend the time to build some of those relationships.

We’re very conscious of working with writers who are connected to some of the communities we cover. I think that makes our work stronger and gives us access to stories that maybe some other people don’t have.

You’re a nonprofit. There’s no paywall, and you don’t rely on advertising. Instead, The Local receives foundation support and donations from readers. How does that model work financially, and how sustainable has it proven to be?

It’s proven to be pretty sustainable. We started in 2019, and the number of foundations and larger supporters backing The Local has only grown. We’re not reliant on one or two big funders, and the number of individuals has grown. That’s been the best thing to see over the last few years: we’re getting more and more donations from individual readers who give us something every month.

They do this not because we have a paywall, but because they want to support the kind of journalism we’re doing. It’s gratifying to see the way that model is working. That’s basically our model right now: a mix of those two things. We’ve dabbled in a few other areas, but that’s how we make our money.

Newsjunkie is talking to community-based newsrooms to find out whether small organizations can replace some of the journalism being lost as traditional local newspapers shrink. From your experience, are there important things small outlets simply can’t replace?

I know I should say that scrappy independents are ready and eager to fill the role of the tired mainstream media, but that’s not true. I think we can begin to fill the gaps that already exist as mainstream media has shrunk, but a small-town paper or city newspaper has the size and ability to cover the city every single day and do the unglamorous work of saying what happened yesterday at city council.

We’re not able to replace that. We can augment it. We can fill gaps that I see are pretty clear in the work they’re doing. But I see the need for both types of publications to exist right now to have a healthy media environment.

There’s an assumption that sustainability means scale—more readers, more geographic territory, more stories. Is that necessarily true for community journalism? How do you define the right size for The Local?

No. We’ve been very conservative with our growth, with an eye toward sustainability.

I think the days of doing a startup and having a bunch of money come in because people hope your growth is going to be astronomical—that is not the business of community journalism, now or ever. Maybe there was a delusion for a few years with the internet.

We want to build a sustainable place that can, for many years, continue to do this work from our city. We have expanded slightly. We’re going into neighboring municipalities that, according to a number of studies, are even bigger news deserts. Here in my area, it’s Brampton and Mississauga. They’re enormous suburban cities that don’t have enough reporters on the ground. We’re consciously trying to move into places where there’s a need. But our business model and our aim are not to create The Local Edmonton, The Local Montreal and then The Local Vancouver.

What prompted you to move into Peel [a large regional municipality immediately west of Toronto], and what have you learned from expanding geographically without losing the intensely local character that made the publication work in the first place?

It’s kind of a work in progress. We’ve just started that. We’ve hired a new Peel reporter.

This is the first municipal election coming up in October, and we’re trying to figure out how to cover the Toronto election and also the election in Peel, in Mississauga and Brampton. We’re learning as we go. It’s a challenge. We’re able to tell in-depth, careful, magazine-style stories from these communities, and we want to apply that to our Peel coverage as well.

We’re also conscious that there are even fewer journalists out there. Maybe the most useful thing is just telling people who these councilors are and where they stand, because no one has done that basic work before you get into more complicated, in-depth work.

So it’s thinking about what those new readers might need and want, and trying to marry that with the identity we’ve developed in Toronto over the last few years.

How important is it for journalists covering a community to come from, or have meaningful ties to, that community? And how do you avoid parachuting reporters into places they don’t understand?

It’s important for us. I believe it’s possible for a journalist to learn and tell a story from anywhere. I think that takes a whole lot of time, and a shortcut to that is to have someone who actually knows and lives in that community.

In our work, that has always been a huge priority. Even just talking about what racial backgrounds people come from or whether they’re immigrants—in Canadian media, it’s a very white industry. The Local is different in that we work with freelancers from all sorts of communities.

Our staff comes from everywhere. We’re conscious of working with people who understand the communities they’re reporting about. So when going into Peel, that was a huge priority because it’s a different place. A lot of the work written about it is from people in Toronto writing from their laptops in the city or occasionally driving down the highway.

That kind of coverage is not necessarily written for the people who live there, and it doesn’t have the nuance you need to actually be useful to people. We looked long and hard and found a great young Peel reporter whom we’ve hired, and we’re currently working with a bunch of freelancers on this election coverage who are from those neighborhoods and can quickly jump in and understand the issues without months of trying to parachute themselves in.

You’ve also created journalism fellowships aimed at journalists from communities underrepresented in Canadian media. Is developing new journalists part of the publication’s mission rather than just a staffing strategy?

It’s absolutely part of our mission. It came out of our coverage during the pandemic. That was a turning point for us as a publication. We had this healthcare background, especially a public-health background, and we were interested in how neighborhoods experienced the pandemic. Suddenly everyone was interested in the same thing we were.

One of the things we noticed was that two things were happening at the same time. The story of the pandemic in Toronto was the story of what was going on in these inner suburbs. That’s where people were hit the hardest. That’s where the death rates were the highest. Those were the essential workers continuing to get sick and keeping the economy humming. At the same time, it was clear there were no reporters from those communities. It was especially evident during COVID, when people were in their homes. You were not getting reporting from those places.

We worked with some reporters we happened to know from those communities, but at the same time we thought: if they don’t exist right now, we need to help develop people who have this life experience and give them the journalistic experience they need to be the next generation of reporters.

That’s how we started the fellowship. Now it’s about seven years in. In the other room here, I’ve got four young, smart people doing this work. It’s twofold: we want to get stories we couldn’t get anywhere else and publish them on The Local, and develop journalists we can work with going forward.

So it’s good for us, but hopefully we’re also strengthening the pipeline of young Canadian journalists who don’t come from the backgrounds that fill most Toronto newsrooms.

You started your career doing long-form magazine articles for Canadian magazines. What happens to that kind of reporting when the economic foundation beneath magazines and newspapers continues to erode? Could a small nonprofit provide a new home for ambitious narrative journalism?

Yeah, that is the goal. The model of, for lack of a better term, magazine writing—long-form writing—in Canada is freelancer-based. There aren’t a lot of staff writers. As more of those publications close, publish less often or fail to increase pay, it becomes harder for freelancers to make a living. Obviously, this was my job for 15 years, and I noticed it getting harder.

We can replace some of that, and we pay a good rate and we’re good employers, but we’re not replacing all of it. That means there are fewer people who can make a living as freelancers, and therefore it’s surprisingly hard to find writers equipped to do that kind of work.

If you’re in middle age, maybe you’ve left and are working in communications now, and there are fewer hungry young writers. So it’s difficult. We’re hoping to fill some of that role, but I’m happy to see a few new publications start up locally that are paying our great freelancers when we’re not paying them.

That’s the tricky thing. Part of what we’re doing is hiring more and working more with staff than we were before, when the majority of our work was done by freelancers. Now we’re bringing more people on, which is good as well.

Speaking of freelancers, one of your recent investigations began with a suspicious freelancer pitch and ultimately led several publications to remove stories apparently connected to a questionable writer. What did that experience tell you about the pressures news organizations face in the AI era, and whether a smaller newsroom is especially vulnerable?

That was the story of Victoria Goldiee, the person who pitched me. In the aftermath of publishing that, I heard from so many editors from around the world—from giant publications, but especially smaller publications like The Local. It was astounding.

The breadth of this person’s range with fake pitches was incredible, and they were all telling me the same thing: it has become incredibly difficult, as a publication that works with freelancers, to do that work. That was the last time we put out a public call for pitches.

Working with new writers and developing new voices is part of our mandate. That’s what we want to do, and pitching was, until last year, a great way to make that happen and bring in people you maybe hadn’t heard of before—people who didn’t have tons of bylines at incredible places but could show you in a pitch that their ideas and prose were worth taking a bet on.

That system doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t work for me. This was one person who had pulled the wool over the eyes of a bunch of publications, but my inbox in that same round of pitches was filled with even worse nonsense. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to go through that stuff.

If I were a freelancer today trying to compete in that marketplace, I don’t know what I’d do. I’m often asked to give advice to students. I don’t have great advice. My career was built on cold-pitching editors ideas. You can’t do that anymore. This great new technology that promises it’ll make everything a lot easier has made my job significantly harder.

When you look at The Local today, what tells you that this experiment is succeeding? Is it readership, donations, policy impact, community response, awards or something less measurable?

We literally have a page where we’re tracking all those things. We’re trying to track our impact. We’re seeing if the work we do gets brought up at Queen’s Park, the legislature, if it makes policy changes, if we’re seeing changes on the ground that way.

We’re looking at readership numbers. That’s not the most important metric to us anymore. We’ll occasionally have a story that goes viral, and those readers come and then they go, and they often leave very little behind.

We’re interested in creating a stronger community of readers—people who know us, who subscribe to our newsletter, maybe, and who come to events. We’re doing more face-to-face stuff to put a face to the journalism people read. I think this is part of what small newsrooms are doing, and something you can offer in a world filled with information of questionable veracity. You show up and you talk.

We’re interested in awards, and we’ve won a whole bunch for a tiny newsroom of our size. That’s gratifying, and I think it speaks to the quality of the work we do.

We’re looking at donations. We’re looking at doing more of the good work we want to do. Last year, I think we published twice as many stories as the year before, our readership numbers were twice as high, and we got more people donating to us. That’s important to keep the lights on, but it also gives you a good indication that readers like what we’re doing.

Sometimes we’ll have two stories: one will go viral, and one will have a small group of intent readers who have never seen their school board covered in this way. They want to engage with you in a more meaningful way than whoever came by because they happened to read about a pop star you accidentally wrote about. That’s where our aim is: to build those sustainable relationships.

Finally, if somebody came to you and said, “My community lost most of its local journalism and I want to start something,” what would you tell them they absolutely need to get right, and what mistakes would you warn them not to make?

I don’t have good advice here. Everything happens almost accidentally. We got lucky with how The Local happened. The business side of who we work with here is incredible. My colleague Tai was able to figure out how to build a nonprofit at exactly the right moment and find the right funders, at a time when I know there are people doing great journalism who cannot find their way to the business side of things.

I don’t have great advice. At the bare minimum, you have to be doing incredible work that people want to share and want to read. The aim of just doing something that can get a few clicks or a few reads is over. You need to be developing something people actually want to spend time with and feel proud to be a part of.

Beyond that, it’s all sorts of other luck and business skills, beyond me as a writer.