News, Geography and Disadvantage: Mapping Newspaper Coverage of High-needs Neighbourhoods in Toronto, Canada

Abstract

The quantity and subject matter of news coverage has been implicated in the success or failure of efforts to address social exclusion, poverty and other complex problems in disadvantaged city neighbourhoods. Using a methodology that combines traditional content analysis with computer-based mapping of geographic references in local news items, this study examines the Toronto Star newspaper’s news coverage of 13 troubled neighbourhoods in Toronto, Canada. The results indicate that the paper is making only a limited contribution to the story-telling practices that are key to the development of neighbourhood engagement. It also suggests that media coverage may be a significant contributing factor to negative stereotyping that shapes internal and external opinions of the neighbourhoods. Both results have the potential to undermine strategies aimed at addressing problems such as social exclusion and poverty.

The Dilemmas of Spatializing Social Issues

“…A study about the Kingston-Galloway priority area found that its media mentions, often centered on gun violence, increased in the years after the designation (Rhodes 2015). In 2008, as much as 30 percent of the media coverage of priority neighborhoods was about crime, compared with only 10 percent in downtown Toronto, where crime rates are in many cases higher (Lindgren 2009). The overrepresentation of negative coverage relative to underlying crime rates is a key indication of stigmatization.…”

“…These externalities-incentive and informational distortion-interact with a third identified in the literature, stigmatization, particularly when programs get media attention (Lindgren 2009;Rajput 2013;Sriskandarajah 2020). Targeting social policy to certain neighborhoods over others is a form of social differentiation generally based on assessing an area as distressed, disordered, disadvantaged, dangerous, or beset by poor services.…”

Telling scholarly stories: Translating research outcomes into multimedia stories for the purposes of dissemination

“…The great advantage of taking a web-based journalistic approach to the dissemination of research is that it provides widespread access to results, methodologies and other aspects of scholarly investigation in language that is readable and easily understood. It is unlikely, for instance, that many people would devote significant amounts of time to reading the Local News Project's lengthy research paper on portrayals of disadvantaged areas in the Toronto Star (Lindgren, 2009). They might, however, read the researcher's much shorter op ed piece.…”

Buying the news: A quantitative study of the effects of corporate acquisition on local news

“…In Buchanan (2009b), local content is defined as the description of events "occurring within the circulation area (the area in which the newspaper was delivered to subscribers) of the newspaper at the time of its publication." Subsequent empirical studies of local news have shown that local content is in most cases contingent on the presence of named entities from the geographic area the publication purports to cover (Buchanan, 2009a(Buchanan, , 2009bLindgren, 2009). Local content is thus not understood here as pertaining to a region's population density (i.e.…”