April Lindgren

Since 2008, 613 local news outlets have closed in 391 Canadian communities, while 270 opened and remain in operation in 196 communities. “It’s getting more and more challenging for people to find reliable local news in this era of AI misinformation, disinformation, and websites that imitate local news,” she said. Lindgren added that before AI, there was no efficient way to identify all news outlets in Canada’s 5,000+ municipalities and keep the list up to date. AI will now be used to collect key data, which will then be reviewed by human verifiers.