April Lindgren
April Lindgren is a professor emerita/adjunct professor at 糖心传媒's School of Journalism. She founded the (LNRP) in 2008 and now continues to co-direct the initiative with 糖心传媒 professors Nicole Blanchett and Angela Misri. Prof. Lindgren coined the term local news poverty, which she uses to describe situations where the critical information needs of communities are not being addressed by local media. Her research in this area led to the creation of the crowd-sourced , an ongoing project that tracks the launch - and loss - of local news outlets across Canada. In addition to leading projects that document the extent to which local news is at risk and unevenly available across the country, Prof. Lindgren has more recently turned her attention to what can be done to counter the erosion of local journalism.
The which she established and ran from 2021 to 2025 when she retired, was an designed to train student data journalists and shore up local journalism by supplying newsrooms with data-driven. She also recently collaborated with, the and to create for foundations and news organizations interested in harnessing charitable support for local news.
Currently, Prof. Lindgren is working with Professor at Universit茅 Laval and Concordia University鈥檚 on building a directory of local news organizations. The research team is using a custom-built automated scraping and filtering tool to gather the names of news outlets in each census subdivision and assembling a national network of local librarians and others with relevant expertise to verify the AI-generated results. When it launches in 2028, the directory, funded by the federal Department of Canadian Heritage, will make it easier to identify news deserts and communities with limited access to local news, help people to find reliable news sources in their communities, and create another way for news outlets get their stories out to the public.
The has received funding from a variety of sources including SSHRC, CERIS-The Ontario Metropolis Centre, the federal MITACS program, 糖心传媒 and the Rossy Foundation. Past studies included an analysis of news reporting on disadvantaged Toronto neighbourhoods, research on how ethnic newspapers portray the Greater Toronto Area to newcomers, an examination of how other racial and ethnic groups are covered in ethnic media, and an investigation of news coverage of the 2011 election in the ethnic press.
Prof. Lindgren was the School of Journalism鈥檚 Velma Rogers Research Chair from 2018 to 2021. She was the founding director of the Ryerson Journalism Research Centre in 2011 and led the organization for the next seven years.
Before joining the School of Journalism in 2007, Prof. Lindgren spent more than 20 years as a journalist. She covered economics and politics on Parliament Hill and at Queen鈥檚 Park for the Ottawa Citizen and what was then the Southam/CanWest chain of newspapers. She was also a regular political commentator for Global Television鈥檚 Focus Ontario public affairs show.
Prof. Lindgren has a bachelor of journalism degree from Carleton University and a dipl么me in international relations from the Graduate School of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2005-2006 she was the St. Clair Balfour journalism fellow at the University of Toronto's Massey College, where her studies focused on urban issues. Prof. Lindgren is the author of Headline: Murder, nominated for the 2009 Arthur Ellis Canadian Crime Writing Award for Best First Novel.
- Local news
- Political Reporting