Filling the news void: Media deprivation in 2025 hits communities across Canada, stifles democracy
British Columbia cities have more people than ever served by fewer local news media outlets than 20 years ago
The population of the Fraser Valley from Abbotsford to Hope in 2025 is more than 20 per cent higher than it was 17 years ago in 2008, but the number of paid professional journalists is down more than 50 per cent, by one estimation.
These numbers are not unusual across Canada. In some places it’s not as bad (southwestern Ontario) and some it has been “cataclysmic” (Newfoundland).
Over the last 17 years there has been a net loss of 11 per cent of print media outlets (newspapers or online) across Canada. As many as 2.5 million Canadians live in a postal code with only one or no local news outlets, according to a March 2025 study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives titled News Deprivation: Canadian communities starving for local news.
“This accounts for seven per cent of Canadians, up from three per cent a decade and a half ago. However, the more common situation for most Canadians is that they have some local news coverage but are in a state of constant news deprivation.”
Today I posted the 215th story on my website Something Worth Reading since launching on Jan. 4, 2025. That's almost four months and 108 business days, so two articles per day. All of those were either 100% exclusive to Something Worth Reading as in, no other media outlet touched or knew about the topic, or I took a unique approach to news items covered by others. This is not to be boastful, just to point out that doing what I want to do on this site is all too easy to fill a gaping hole in the media landscape locally and beyond.
I do not not include what you're are reading now in the remaining number of media outlets in British Columbia or Canada. I am a professional journalist, but so far I am not monetizing the website in a way that it makes me a living. I’m just a pathologically curious blabbermouth.
The void in local and regional news across Canada is growing faster than the population is increasing, which means it’s not hard to find important stories that no one is accurately writing about or information the public is not getting, which is sad.
No matter how easy that is, however, it can’t always be free and the day is quickly approaching when I need to be able to fund this work moving forward.
Story continues below graphic.
Where did all the media go?
To look at those numbers listed at the outset here in more detail, the Fraser Valley Regional District (FVRD) area includes Mission, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Hope, Agassiz, Harrison Hot Springs and unincorporated areas in between.
That’s where I’m writing this, but a version of this to some degree more or less could be done for Metro Vancouver, Vancouver Island, the Okanagon, southern Alberta, Manitoba, northern Ontario, rural Quebec, all of the Maritimes, and the territories.
In 2008, the population of the FVRD was approximately 275,000, and it was served by seven community newspapers and two radio stations with small news bureaus. In total by my calculation, there were approximately 25 paid journalists working in those jobs, a number that fluctuated slightly, lower with unfilled jobs, higher with summer paid interns.
That year was also the year of the global financial crisis, which hit all industries hard, including news media. Since then, the decline has been steady with little or no bounce back, with increasing concentration of ownership, and the rise of the use of social media.
In 2025, the population of the FVRD is now approximately 350,000 and is served by two fewer newspapers and no more news bureaus at local radio stations. There are just five community newspapers and two professional paid news websites, again, not including this one.
Those five papers in 2025 have approximately 10 journalists down from at least 20 journalists at seven papers in 2008.
The Fraser Valley Current website has two paid journalists and Fraser Valley Today (a Pattison property) has one.
B.C. news, from Victoria to Tuscaloosa
As for the actual medium used by the media, when I moved to Chilliwack in 2006 the population was under 70,000 and The Progress produced two 40-to-64 page papers a week with a five-person newsroom (a Saturday edition was discontinued right before or soon after 2006 when I arrived). At The Chilliwack Times we published two papers a week usually in the 32-to-48 page range coming out of a four-person newsroom.
At the very low end on the slowest advertising weeks of the year, early January, if The Progress, say, had two 40-pagers and The Times had a 24 and a 36 that would mean local residents had 140 pages of newsprint land on their doorstep each week. A September week would be closer to 200 pages.
Now? The Chilliwack Progress is the only newspaper in town distributed once a week. The Friday, May 23, 2025, edition was 20 pages.
As for ownership, between Black Press and Glacier Media, they own just about every newspaper in B.C. But Black Press, which was founded by David Black in Victoria and had head offices in Surrey until January 2025, was acquired in January 2025 by Carpenter Media, a news company based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
The demise of local media from those early days in the late 2000s was steady and consistent. I have joked for so long that I am re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic that it’s not funny anymore.
What is filling the void?
Mostly social media, which is full of links everything from reputable news outlets to useful tidbits of information not accurately sourced and verified all the way to full-on disinformation and lies repeated by a population who is increasingly not very media savvy.
There was a time early on in the days of Facebook, say 10 to 15 years ago when if a citizen in Chilliwack might have a question about a large conglomeration of RCMP vehicle, or fire trucks heading to a neighbourhood, or another situation in the city that elicited questions from the public: a closed road, a flood, a new housing development, not to mention everything that happens at the Chilliwack Law Courts. People on Facebook would ask questions and someone would tag myself or Tyler Olsen or Jessica Peters or Jennifer Feinberg or Mike Hellinger and one or more of us would either already know what was going on and explain it or we would look into it and a news story would be shared.
Now there are virtually no professional journalists left to hold the elected officials and bureaucrats to account, and no one to fact check and rely upon to ask questions of on social media. Those that remain are stretched so thin they can’t scratch the surface.
The Progress has become an events listing flyer. Fraser Valley Current is doing big picture stories across the entire Fraser Valley. Only Mike at Fraser Valley Today is really telling local people what is happening locally.
“One thing is certain: nature abhors a vacuum,” according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives study. “If responsible local news coverage is lacking, social media will quickly fill the gap – often with misinformation.”
This is a serious problem for democracy that I am attempting to fill, not out of some sort of benevolence but out of an obsessive need to continue to do what I love doing. As of this week my website has 52,000 active users in the last 30 days with 230,000 interactions with my stories.
One step at a time, hopefully I can make Something Worth Reading something worth reading indeed, and hopefully it continues to fill a need that is growing quickly.
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Paul J. Henderson
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