Ottawa Offers $58.8M to Continue Local Journalism Program for Another Three Years

Canada’s government is spending another $58.8 million to fund local journalism jobs. The money will go toward the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), a program created in 2019 aimed at helping media organizations increase “civic journalism” for underserved communities. The funding will allow the program to continue for another three years, until 2026–27, according to a March 1 news release from the Department of Canadian Heritage. In 2022–23, news organizations under the program were able to hire or maintain over 400 jobs for journalists in nearly 1,500 underserved communities across Canada, the department said. Many of the publications that benefitted were in small towns or cities. And among those journalists, 60 provided coverage in indigenous communities, 84 in ethnocultural communities, 161 in official language minority communities, and 11 in 2SLGBTQ+ communities, said the news release....