Local Blackout in Effect? Major Daily News Coverage of Three Municipal Elections in Calgary Alberta

Abstract

Voters in local elections (such as those for municipal offices, school boards, and other local entities) face a major barrier to making informed choices due to difficulties in obtaining information. Media coverage is allegedly getting worse as daily newspapers retrenchment and close across Canada. Although exclusively online sources have emerged that cover local politics, most lack the resources to do actual reporting and focus on commentary. Consequently, newspapers still play an important if imperfect role in informing municipal voters. This paper presents the results of a quantitative content analysis of coverage provided by Calgary’s two daily newspapers of the city’s 2010, 2013 and 2017 local elections. These papers are The Calgary Herald and Sun. In October 2014, The Herald’s owner acquired the Calgary Sun. In 2016, the two newsrooms merged and several journalists were let-go. This paper tests three hypothesis about the impact of this restructuring on the coverage of local elections. One: When compared to 2010, in 2017 a greater proportion of the stories will be about the mayoralty contest or the election in general, as opposed to the contests for individual city council seats. Two: In 2017, a greater proportion of the stories will be opinion pieces (columns, op-eds and editorials) as opposed to news stories than in 2010. Three: In 2017 a lower proportion of the news stories will be written by local politics “beat reporters”. The net effect, if these three hypothesis are shown to be true, is that not only has the merger further reduced the already low information that Calgarians have access to regarding municipal elections, but the breadth and quality of that information will also have been reduced. However, the evidence presented here only provides mixed results. Hypothesis 1 is not supported, hypothesis 2 is only somewhat supported, and hypothesis 3 could be supported if restated somewhat.