The Local News Data Hub, launched at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2020,  was a collaborative data journalism project that involved students, early career journalists and faculty from the School of Journalism in partnership with the Canadian Press wire service. It was a response to the erosion of local journalism and smaller newsrooms’ limited capacity to produce data-informed stories.

The Data Hub, which ran until 2025, sought to shore up local journalism across Canada by i) supplying newsrooms with data-driven stories at no cost ii) training early-career data journalists and iii) providing support for/collaborating with individual journalists and news organizations on data journalism projects.

The Data Hub’s reporting team consisted of data journalists and data analysts who were either students or recent graduates. Working under the supervision of faculty at Toronto Metropolitan University, they identified government and other data with the potential to generate local stories for more than one community. Once a dataset had been analyzed and preliminary reporting was completed, the Data Hub team reported and wrote data-informed local stories, a process that in most cases involved producing one or more story templates that were then customized with data/content for specific communities. The local stories were posted on the LNDH website and were available at no cost to all local news organizations. Stories were also shared with the Canadian Press wire service for distribution to CP clients across the country.

The Data Hub initiative was inspired by the BBC’s Shared Data Unit, which has been generating community coverage since 2017. It produces data-based national stories accompanied by “story packages” that provide partner newsrooms with clean data and guidance on how to produce local versions of the story. We also drew upon the approach adopted by RADAR News (Reporters and Data and Robots) out of the U.K., which billed itself as the world’s only automated local news agency when it launched in 2018. Its process is to “analyse data, discover its stories and develop a tailored algorithm to generate copy in hours, not days or weeks.”

The Local News Data Hub differed from these models in that it produced stories at no charge for local newsrooms, used only a very basic form of automated journalism, and was a collaboration that brought together working journalists, students and faculty from post-secondary institutions.

Financial support for the Local News Data Hub was provided by CTV News; the Journalism Research Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University; the Toronto Metropolitan University School of Journalism; and CWA Canada, The Media Union.

 

Operational partners