Documenters: Keeping eyes on government
National program sees a new role for citizens in today’s depleted media landscape
EVERY WEEK, in every city and town across Canada, thousands of below-the-radar but often highly influential government public meetings are underway.
This is the ‘committee system’ of municipal governments at work, under which city councils delegate responsibilities and workload to smaller groups of council member who research issues, review policy options, and make recommendations to the full council.
Most often these meetings are unattended by a reporter or any other public observers. Their deliberations tend to be out of public view and yet their work directly impacts the quality of our everyday lives.
It has not always been this way. For many years, our own daily newspaper had multiple reporters focused specifically on the doings of city and township governments. Today, in Kingston and across Canada, that kind of intense public scrutiny is long gone, a victim of digital advertising, shrinking budgets and near-empty newsrooms.
A movement now gathering steam may help change that. Under a national program being spearheaded by two Canadian journalism schools, citizens are being given an opportunity to play an active and meaningful role in the democratic process.
Meaningful accounts
Documenters Canada trains citizens to create an accurate and meaningful account of a public meeting that can reliably be used by others, including journalists.
Participants undergo a six-hour crash course on everything from how to read a city council agenda and how you quote someone to how to get access to relevant documents. Before setting off on their own to cover meetings, these new Documenters attend a meeting together and later compare and compile their notes to create an official version that can be posted as open source material.
“Citizens learn about how government works and how the process of decision-making moves through local governments,” says Dr. Nicole Blanchett, a journalism professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and co-director of the SSHRC-funded Documenters Canada expansion team.
The Documenters Canada approach is grounded in community-centred journalism that focuses on producing information “for” and “with” community members, instead of “about” them, she says. It’s also about creating opportunities for newspapers and other news outlets to leverage the information. “We see us as working in partnership with journalist organizations that have the ability to amplify that information,” says Blanchett.
Most often, documenters seek out meetings that local journalists are too stretched to get to.
“This is a way to encourage citizen participation but to also help surface information and the important decisions that are being made every day,” Blanchett says.
Rethinking journalist roles
The rise of various forms of citizen journalism has coincided with the hollowing out of local newsrooms under corporate mergers. In her course Reimagining the News, Blanchett addresses the rethinking of journalist roles currently underway as newsrooms are diminished, social media has become the main source of news for young people, and AI is altering our relationship to reality.
“This is happening in a journalism landscape where cuts just keep coming and newsrooms – particularly local – keep closing,” she says.
There is no Documenters program per se in Kingston, but local residents here and in many other cities and communities have found creative ways to fight a decline in transparency and accountability.
In Kingston, numerous community groups come together annually to produce a detailed report card for the City that includes a grade for transparency and accountability.
The latest 2025 report card assigned the City an “F”, noting growing frustration with the level of public engagement and lack of consultation on major projects, most notably the proposed soccer stadium at the Memorial Centre site.
Perspective gap
As evidence of the gap in perspective between The City of Kingston and citizens, the City this week just proudly announced receipt of a national award for its public consultation process on the stadium. Granicus, the award sponsor and a U.S.-based government technology firm commissioned by the City to build its “Get Involved Kingston” portal, praised the City’s performance in the trust and transparency category.
Blanchett’s colleague at Concordia University Magda Konieczna was first to help launch a pilot Documenters project in Toronto in the fall of 2024, working with The Green Line. A year later Documentalistes Canada centred in Montreal was created.
There are 35 municipalities on the island and 82 in Greater Montreal. “Many of these used to be covered by journalists, but we have little local media left,” Konieczna says. This has left a vacuum that some of her Documenters are attempting to fill, “working on the ground in several boroughs that don’t have local news outlets.”
Last fall, some Documenters were attending a council meeting of the Ville-Marie borough (of Montreal when it veered into a sensitive discussion about police use of bodycams. The Documenters were able to flag the debate for a local news startup known for its interest in covering police violence. It was an act of collaboration that produced timely media coverage. “We’re hoping to do more of this going forward,” says Konieczna.
Documenters Canada, founded in 2024, is now also being adopted in partnership with the Crowsnest Pass Herald in Alberta. Close to 40 Canadians have gone through Documenters training to date.
Blanchett is part of an international study, the principal investigator in Canada, of how journalists perform their roles in a new, vastly transformed media landscape.
Now moving into its third stage, The Journalistic Role Performance Project (JRP), funded in part by the Creative School at TMU and SSHRC, is focusing on how current affairs journalists across television, radio, print, and online platforms are operating in today’s shifting media industry. One of six journalistic roles the researchers are analyzing is the watchdog role (i.e. protecting public interest by monitoring and sometimes challenging those in positions of power).
At a time when journalistic norms are being challenged by technology and the changing demographics of newsrooms, this area of inquiry has become fresh ground for debate and research, Blanchett says.
Analysing avoidance
Though still early into this wave of the projects, which involves an analysis of thousands of news stories and interviews with journalists, Blanchett says she’s already detecting patterns in how journalists are dealing with avoidance and unresponsiveness from public institutions.
She’s noted that more journalists are explicitly stating as part of a story that requests for an interview or response were declined or not answered. “That is something that seems to me to be increasing. It’s important to acknowledge when we are not getting answers,”
Blanchett notes as well that the notion of accountability has grown increasingly fuzzy in today’s fragmented media world, and those who wish to dodge a reporter can easily do so.
“I hear this from my friends and colleagues who are still working in newsrooms and also from my students. That because of how drastically communications have changed, it’s much easier to duck any real accountability.
“A politician, for example, can post a video on social media as a safe way to respond to an issue. Or they can just respond by email or choose a softball kind of interview or podcast rather than sitting down to an interview that might be a little more uncomfortable for them.“
Unfortunately, she says, “this is how some people view accountability, particularly the ones who need to be accountable,” she says.
The Documenters’ movement is partly about pushing us to think about democracy as more than just casting a vote. “We want to raise awareness that citizens have a right to go to these meetings, to ask questions about how things are being done, and to voice an opinion.”