Abstract

This study seeks to reveal the role of Access to Information (ATI) and public records in local journalism by conducting a thematic analysis of 107 news media articles about Montreal’s housing crisis, and by examining original and previously released Access to Information request packages. This work highlights how local news media have covered the housing crisis thus far, with a deliberate focus on the sources and angles used, and how they might address the issue differently going forward, with increased focus on using official documents and ATI requests in the coverage. Importantly, this study focuses on Montreal’s municipal ATI system, as previous work in academia has mostly focused on either Canada’s federal ATI system or provincial/territorial systems.

This study reveals that, in stories about the housing crisis, local news media have tended to favour the voices of politicians and official statements, while only a few rare outlets sporadically use ATI to deepen their reporting.

This study recognizes that tight deadlines in news work and long delays in the municipal ATI system are in part responsible for local journalists’ heavy reliance on political sources and official statements. However, the result of not using ATI as a journalistic source leads to a journalism that remains at the surface level and fails to provide citizens the information they are entitled to, that would allow them to make more informed decisions about municipal policies related to housing and municipal elections. With this important function of local journalism in mind, this study suggests increased use of ATI requests in gaining a deeper understanding of complex issues that directly target citizens.