Clément Lechat and Sara Mizannojehdehi

Abstract

Documenters are citizens trained and paid to take notes at public meetings. This study examines the implementation of Canada’s first Documenters site, launched in September 2024 by The Green Line in Toronto. Seven semi-structured interviews and one focus group were analyzed following a grounded theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2015). Findings underscore the contrast between Documenters’ aspirations and its perceived impact at the community and individual levels and highlight the ongoing negotiation of journalistic standards, challenging traditional objectivity. Recommendations include aligning Documenters’ scope with local governance structures and audiences, and developing a framework for including lived experiences in documenters’ notes.

Keywords: Documenters, participatory civic media, engaged journalism, local journalism

Résumé

Le programme Documenters forme et rémunère des citoyens pour prendre des notes lors de réunions publiques. Cette étude examine la mise en œuvre du premier site Documenters au Canada, lancé en septembre 2024 par The Green Line. Sept entretiens semi-dirigés et un groupe de conversation ont été analysés en suivant l’approche de la théorie ancrée, ou grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2015). Les résultats mettent en évidence le contraste entre les aspirations de Documenters et son impact perçu aux niveaux communautaires et individuels, et soulignent la négociation constante des normes journalistiques, mettant au défi la vision traditionnelle de l’objectivité. Les recommandations incluent l’alignement entre la couverture de Documenters, les structures de gouvernance, et les audiences locales, ainsi que le développement d’un cadre visant l’inclusion des expériences vécues des documenters dans leurs notes.

Mots-clés : Documenters, médias civiques participatifs, journalisme d’engagement, journalisme local

Article

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Perceptions versus reality: Exploring the launch of Documenters Canada

Clément Lechat and Sara Mizannojehdehi

 

Introduction

I didn’t realize people could go to city council meetings or watch them online. I didn’t know that community members could speak at meetings either. (Documenter 2, February 2025).

These are the reflections of one of the first Canadian documenters,^[1] captured after six months of involvement in Documenters Canada. This community member was recruited, trained, and paid to take notes at public meetings, ranging from city council to advisory boards and more, as part of the first Canadian site, launched in September 2024 within The Green Line, in partnership with a team at Concordia University. Documenters are neither traditional newsroom journalists nor ordinary onlookers, but somewhere in between: they want to help their community through sharing information and making it accessible (Holliday, 2023). As community members and note-takers, they “monitor local government and contribute to a communal pool of knowledge” (City Bureau, n.d. a). What they produce are not articles, but detailed, fact-checked notes of public meetings, which Documenters.org’s founders, in the United States, deem to form a “new public record” (Documenters.org, n.d.).

In Toronto, during the pilot phase of Documenters, spanning from its launch in September 2024 to March 2025, The Green Line focused on servicing the area of Kensington-Chinatown, which is home to three neighbourhoods, including Alexandra Park. This is a vibrant neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, a major metropolitan city, where 40% of residents are living in unaffordable housing and 72% are visible minorities (Statistics Canada, 2023). Since 2018, Alexandra Park has been undergoing a redevelopment project by Toronto Community Housing, to be completed in 2038 (Toronto Community Housing, n.d.). As part of a separate program, during the Summer of 2024, The Green Line trained several Alexandra Park youth in community consultation and video storytelling (El Murr, 2024), one of whom became the project’s Community Engagement Lead, responsible for training and managing the citizen documenters. The Green Line staff then trained five documenters from Kensington-Chinatown, which the Community Engagement Lead recruited, and selected three to cover public meetings.  The topics covered in the notes varied widely, from snow removal to the closure of music venues, but appeared to have largely focused on housing-related matters, a hot-button issue for a city facing a housing crisis. The meeting selection process was described as a combination of personal interest, meeting timing and location, and geographic and editorial relevance. They included meetings of the main city council and its various committees, as well as public consultations and community group meetings. At public meetings, documenters took notes and assembled a summary, often following a template (see Appendix A) that included a wide range of sections, such as a description of the atmosphere, attendance, community perspectives, and outcomes. The notes were then fact-checked and edited by the team at The Green Line. Documenters occasionally followed up with city officials or other sources to obtain additional information. Contextual information was often added by journalists during the editing process. As of March 2026, 60 sets of notes are available online. During the first seven months, 28 sets of notes were published in English by three documenters and the Community Engagement Lead (who was not a formally-trained journalist) on The Green Line’s website and newsletter, and archived on the Documenters’ Canada website. Organizations mentioned in the notes usually received the notes and were encouraged to share them with their members and on social media. Visuals systematically accompanied the published notes. Quickly after the launch, The Green Line’s staff turned to publishing vertical video summaries of the notes.

In the past, local newsrooms and legacy media alike often assigned public meeting coverage to professional journalists. With the shrinking or closure of these institutions across Canada (Saba, 2025; Lindgren & Corbett, 2025), public meetings have gone increasingly undercovered, despite the fact that significant decisions are made on behalf of the public. More recently, artificial intelligence has been mobilized to generate and navigate transcripts and summaries of public meetings in several countries, including Canada (Thomson, 2025) and the United States (Spencer, 2025; LocalLens, n.d.). While these are often textual, AI-generated video summaries also exist (SeeGov, n.d.). The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the transition to virtual meeting formats, allowing for the mass generation of voice-to-text transcripts that provide a complete (although not necessarily accurate) picture of all interventions. Virtual public meetings have, in some respects, improved accessibility (Spicer et al., 2023), although the pandemic induced other challenges to public decision-making, including the cancellation of public meetings, reduced frequency and scope, prohibitions on public participation, and an increase in closed sessions (Smit et al., 2020). Tensions remain around accessibility and transparency of public meetings. Notably, the Doug Ford government in Ontario banned school boards under provincial jurisdiction from livestreaming their meetings (Yazdani, 2025), and private citizens’ right to record public meetings is subject to diverging interpretations across Canadian provinces (Bicknell, 2025; Normandin, 2017; Sweetman, 2025). In Quebec, even journalists have been prevented (successfully and unsuccessfully) from recording municipal council sessions (FPJQ, 2015; Afou, 2025). Overall, public meetings can be sites of contention between elected officials, journalists, and community members (Corriveau, 2025; FPJQ, 2026; FPJQ, 2023).

Although in-person notetaking at public meetings by community members arguably differs from the outputs of AI-generated transcription tools, such technologies offer responses to issues of newsroom capacities, geographic distance and the volume of meetings to monitor (Deck, 2025). In addition to the most prominent tool, LocalLens, Clare Spencer (2025) identifies at least nine other “civic AI” tools available in the U.S. In Canada, Civic Searchlight allows for searching through municipal meetings transcripts using keywords, and access related video sequences. It was developed by Canada’s National Observer, a news publication, and is available in 550 municipalities. Available through a free subscription, it has contributed to countering disinformation targeting municipal councils (Thomson, 2025). Despite these benefits, in the absence of rigorous fact-checking, transcripts may contain inaccuracies. LocalLens explicitly cautions that its summaries may include errors about “people, places, or facts” (n.d.) and encourages users to report issues. It also struggles “to identify individual speakers” (Deck, 2025). Consequently, these tools are at best added resources for journalists to find otherwise overlooked story leads (Spencer, 2025; Deck, 2025), discover sources, and “expand the scope of their coverage” (Deck, 2025).

At the time we conducted our research, Documenters in Toronto was the first of its kind in Canada. While the project evolved during, and more significantly after, its first months, our exploratory study of Documenters Canada at The Green Line focuses on the pilot and months preceding its launch. Our research questions examined: (1) how the act of documenting shapes documenters’ understanding of their roles within their communities; and, (2) how this collaboration informs The Green Line’s relationship with communities. Our objective behind this investigation was to explore the possible impacts that Documenters might have had, in a way that could both inform future program design and assist in building a theory of public participation in journalism. Seven interviews with staff and one focus group with community members involved in Documenters were conducted and analyzed through a three-pronged, grounded theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2015). The findings point to a central theme titled Between ideals and reality: contrasting the hopes and practicalities of Documenters. This theme is articulated in two parts that reflect this tension. First, the aspirations and limits of impact, and second, how the co-production of information was navigated, leading to the negotiation of journalistic standards.

The findings highlight the opportunities and challenges brought by citizen participation in the media, a topic relevant to the Documenters community, civic media practitioners, and journalists alike. Recommendations suggest aligning Documenters’ scope with local governance structures and newsrooms’ audiences and invite further conversation on the opportunities offered by mobilizing documenters’ subjectivities, particularly how journalistic standards might be adapted to include lived experiences.

Literature review

The origins of Documenters Canada: The Green Line and the U.S. Documenters.org Network

Founded in 2022, The Green Line is a Toronto-based publication that aims to make local information more accessible to Millennials and Gen Z (Culpepper, 2024). Debuting as a “hyperlocal news outlet,” The Green Line recently rebranded itself as a “hyperlocal publication that delivers information you can actually use in your daily life” (Blanchett et al., 2025). Focusing on local issues and making information available is a significant part of The Green Line’s work and ultimately aids in forging connections within the community (Blanchett et al., 2025). This can be seen through its trademarked Action Journey editorial model. This solutions-oriented reporting cycle starts with an explainer article breaking down an issue, followed by a feature on the same topic. It ends with hosting an in-person community event to share knowledge and hear people’s perspectives. Following the journey, The Green Line crowdsources the top-3 solutions from the conversations at the event and shares them with attendees and the public (Li, 2023). Partnerships are a significant part of The Green Line’s “community-driven embedded model” (Goff et al., 2025, p. 42). In its 2024 Impact Report, The Green Line reported having over 20 partnerships, founders, and sponsors (The Green Line, 2024). One of these partnerships came to be in 2024, when The Green Line and a team from Concordia University came together to formulate Documenters Canada.

Documenters at The Green Line is the first branch of Documenters Canada. City Bureau and Smart Chicago Collaborative originally founded Documenters in Chicago in 2016 (Schmidt, 2018). In 2014, a police officer murdered 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. In the aftermath of McDonald’s death, Smart Chicago Collective, a civic technology organization, paired up with City Bureau and invited a team of mentees to annotate a police accountability task force report and cover related meetings (Faye Hart, 2018). This process inspired City Bureau to expand its roster of documenters and its meeting coverage, bringing about the first Documenters chapter in Chicago (Faye Hart, 2018). In 2018, a second Documenters branch opened within Detroit’s Outlier Media, forming the official Documenters network (Schmidt, 2018). As of January 2026, there were 31 Documenters branches across the United States recruiting, training, and paying community members to take notes at public meetings.

Civic technology (or civic tech) has been instrumental in supporting the rise of Documenters.org, and the initiative itself can be considered part of this movement. Through a practice-oriented lens, “civic tech is a deeply political attempt to hack and reconfigure institutional arrangements that dictate how resources are distributed in urban environments” (Schrock, 2019, p. 131). Its practitioners hope to solve public problems, achieve system change and, in doing so, “re-arrange power dynamics” (2019, p. 131). This is exemplified by the public meeting scraper tool used by Documenters.org and developed by City Bureau through open-source coding sessions across various Chicago neighbourhoods (Wei, 2018). This scraper creates lists of public meetings with details about location and time (Wei, 2018), countering the usual fragmentation of this type of information that hinders participation (City Bureau, n.d. b). More recently, a model context protocol (MCP) server was established based on Documenters’ notes, assignments and other documents from over 19 U.S. locations (Sinclair, 2025). Automatically updating itself, it allows for AI searches that provide information and context about public meetings (Sinclair, 2025).

Documenters and its impact

Scholarship on Documenters is slowly emerging. It is relatively new and typically focuses on the work done at specific branches, such as Grand Rapids (Kelly, 2025a; 2025b), Cleveland (Nickels et al., 2024), and Nebraska (Swiercek, 2025). Analyzing Documenters’ impact has been at the centre of this work, highlighting increased civic engagement and greater knowledge of civic structures among participants (Nickels et al., 2024), who felt more equipped to participate in local politics (pp. 12-13), hold power accountable (p. 17), and encourage citizen participation through their notes (p. 18). Documenters is often considered in the context of the crisis in the journalism industry as a potential way to sustain coverage of crucial sites of local democracy. Nina Kelly (2025a) argues that documenters help fill the gap left behind by the closure of local newsrooms through their notes, which are more accessible than meeting minutes provided by the City of Cleveland, follow a standardized template, and include additional information through hyperlinks (pp. 19-21). Compared to official records, notes add rich contextual value (2025a). At the Grand Rapids Community Media Center (GRCMC), which hosts a Documenters site, Kelly noticed how civic media practitioners, a term she uses to refer to staff and residents affiliated with the CRCMC, played an important role as proxies for both “traditional/professional journalists” and residents (2025b, p. 115), They allow for underreported issues to be surfaced, potentially picked up by journalists, and turned into stories, which aligns with a more traditional journalistic position that “sometimes overlaps with both the information disseminator and the watchdog roles” (2025b, p. 115). Documenters are also proxies for residents, as they “translate complex jargon and municipal procedures and amplify civic news and information” for residents who cannot attend public meetings due to meetings’ lack of accessibility (2025b, p. 116). Research in Nebraska underlines Documenter’s impact on democracy and the healthy functioning of public life and communities. Nebraska Documenters offers “public benefits of free coverage on underreported governmental board meetings as well as redistributive benefits by way of training and paying community members to follow and report on public proceedings” (Swiercek, 2025, p. 25). Notes are also useful to policymakers and elected officials, who benefit from increased transparency due to the scrutiny of public meetings. Public interest and community-focused organizations see their policy change advocacy efforts supported by Documenters’ notes (Swiercek, 2025, p. 26).

From participatory forms of journalism to engaged journalism

To understand the historical ramifications of Documenters, we mobilize scholarship on engaged and participatory journalism. We situate Documenters in movements and scholarship that aimed to renew the relationships between “the people formerly known as the audience” (Rosen, 2006) and journalists. Journalism scholarship has attempted to define where Documenters theoretically fits on varying terms, most often emphasizing its hybridity, allying citizen participation and professional journalistic intermediaries. Kate Mulligan (2023) describes it as a form of “community-led participatory journalism” (p. 36), and Nickels and colleagues (2024) refer to documenters as “a hybrid of citizen-professional journalists” (p. 4), classifying the program as “participatory civic media” (p.2).

Early on, with civic (or public) journalism, practitioners saw the value of allowing audiences to contribute more actively to news production. Civic journalism did not necessarily invite the public to produce journalism but often relied on feedback and suggestions to identify priorities and guide coverage. The goal was to move journalism beyond what Davis Merritt (1998 [1995]) called “the limited mission of ‘telling the news’ to a broader mission of helping public life go well” (p. 113). Participatory journalism emerged in the 2000s as a movement where citizens and professionals came together more closely to co-produce news (Vos & Thomas, 2024). Research has since noted the diversity of shapes participation takes in newsrooms, expanding to training (Luce et al., 2017), engagement (Bélair-Gagnon et al., 2019), and creating common spaces for collaboration and communication (Kim et al., 2024; Gerson et al., 2017). Citizen journalism represented a moment in participatory approaches that aimed to reconfigure journalistic power more drastically, supported by the advent of the internet, social media, and networked communication (Ellis et al., 2022, p. 64). In its heyday, citizen journalism, such as Independent Media Centers or “Indymedia,” was viewed as a radical redefining of journalism, moving power from professionals to amateurs (Pickard, 2006), emphasizing low barriers to entry for contributors and little role for professional intermediaries (Hamilton, 2000; Atton, 2009).

Despite decades of reform movements aimed at making journalism more participatory, research points out the difficulties of meaningfully engaging audiences in the production of news and information. Despite initial promises, “a combination of journalistic recalcitrance and audience indifference, along with exogenous factors like the rise of social media, would see this hope replaced with deep disappointment” (Vos & Thomas, 2024, p. 869). Introducing a dossier in Les Cahiers du journalisme et de l’information on the relation between the media and its publics, Nathalie Pignard-Cheynel and Olivier Standaert (2023) summarized the issue:^[2]

La recherche montre que les « nouvelles » relations entre ces deux entités n’ont que très ponctuellement abouti à un renforcement pérenne d’un dialogue, voire d’une co-construction de l’information. Au-delà des idéaux souvent portés par la profession mais plus encore par les acteurs de l’industrie numérique, les processus éditoriaux participatifs ont souvent peiné à faire cohabiter publics et journalistes dont les intentions, pratiques, cadres de pensée et valeurs s’avèrent rarement compatibles. La participation est l’objet de cadrages, voire de contrôles de la part des journalistes qui rechignent à abandonner certaines de leurs prérogatives. (Pignard-Cheynel & Standaert, 2023, p. R3)

Engaged journalism formed and grew in a context of disillusionment in participatory journalism approaches, increasing concerns from the profession regarding the widening trust gap, and the lack of diversity in coverage. Jacob Nelson and Thomas Schmidt (2022) define it as a “moral ideal and a set of practices” that focus on cultivating journalist-audience relationships that are collaborative, interactive, and reciprocal (p. 5845). Similarly, Wenzel (2020) defines engaged journalism as “a range of practices that aim to build relationships between journalists and the public and involve the public in the process of cocreating journalism” (p. 4). One way engaged journalism distances itself from early participatory journalism is through an emphasis on “equipping” potential contributors, acknowledging that historical marginalization and alienation from the media do not create the conditions for equitable participation (Wenzel, 2020). Mulligan (2023), reflecting on community-led participatory journalism, insists on the “supported” nature of this civic type of journalism, which “does not expect that participants are already able to tap existing resources, knowledge, social networks or privileges in order to participate” (p. 36), a point that closely aligns with Documenters’ philosophy. The involvement of communities is a strength, allowing power sharing, greater community dialogue, and building long-term capacity rather than extractive and transactional approaches to journalism (p. 36). However, in discussions of engaged journalism among American professionals, the interactions between journalists and the public are more commonly described by focusing on reception-oriented participation, such as how audiences react to news (audience engagement), to the detriment of production-oriented engagement, which brings the audience into the news production process (Nelson & Schmidt, 2022). Nelson and Schmidt, therefore, classify production-oriented approaches to audience participation as engaged journalism (p. 5854). When journalists take an engaged, production-oriented approach, their role must evolve into that of an “immersed journalist,” less detached and “more sensitive and better attuned to the diversity of voices in a community” (p. 5855). Simultaneously, measuring the success of engaged journalism has become complicated, as there are often no metrics associated with it. Journalists also tend to assume that the audience desires engagement with no way to substantiate this impression (p. 5856).

Beyond the Documenters program and journalism in general, community groups and members have long monitored public meetings. In Ottawa, Laura Blanchette’s monthly “Mid City” zine covers municipal issues and city hall meetings. Although the format is different from Documenters, it aims to create accessible journalism that shines a light on municipal politics in Ottawa, encouraging citizen engagement (Blanchette, 2026). Simultaneously, community groups like ACORN Canada and the Centre for Local Research into Public Space (CELOS) have also been attending and rallying (ACORN Canada, 2025) at public meetings for affordable housing, parks, and common areas. Unlike journalists, whose aim is to report on facts and events, ACORN is an advocacy group vouching for social and economic justice (ACORN Canada, 2013). CELOS, on the other hand, conducts research, attends and monitors public meetings and also uses city-provided information to keep track of what is happening across local parks in Toronto (CELOS, 2026). Their notes take various shapes but can include a breakdown of what happened in a public meeting while adding  their personal comments (Mason, 2018). In the United States, the Oregon-based group Respond to Racism trains its members to monitor and document public meetings to hold their county accountable for anti-racist and diversity, equity, and inclusion practices (Respond to Racism, 2020).

Methods

In this exploratory research, we draw from seven semi-structured interviews with staff at The Green Line and one focus group with two of three active documenters. All participants were contacted for an interview after receiving ethics approval from Concordia University’s ethics board  (No. 30019902). The interviews with The Green Line staff members ranged from 17 to 43 minutes and were conducted between May 2024 and March 2025. To capture their evolving experience with Documenters Canada, each interview took place at a significant time of the project’s implementation: before the launch, after the launch, and at the end of the pilot project phase in March 2025. The purpose of these interviews was to understand how The Green Line felt about Documenters: the expectations staff might have, the new co-production process put in place, the relationships established with trained documenters, the challenges faced and the hopes for the project. In conducting the semi-structured interviews, we referred to a list of questions, varying slightly depending on the role of the interviewee in setting up Documenters. We adapted the interview depending on what seemed most important to the interviewee, allowing us to take directions that we would not have imagined. We interviewed three individuals within The Green Line who were directly involved with establishing Documenters Canada, either working with the documenters regularly, being a part of the editorial process, or establishing the program.

We organized a one-hour focus group conversation in February 2025 with two of the three active documenters. These participants were adults coming from distinct professional and cultural backgrounds. Before the conversation, participants received a short survey that included questions about their demographics, educational and professional backgrounds, how and why they joined Documenters, and an assessment of their civic engagement. They were also asked to identify any point of conversation they would like to address during the focus group. During the focus group, participants were asked about how they perceived their role as a documenter in relation to their lived experience and community knowledge, how they felt Documenters Canada was doing, and the positive elements and challenges they had experienced. Through this focus group, we wanted to understand how participants made sense of Documenters, especially how they perceived their role, understood their experience in the launched program, and identified the type of effects the program might have had on them. The interviews and focus group were semi-ethnographic in nature (Kimber & Dairon, 2023), as we were attempting to see the environment at The Green Line during and after the launch of Documenters. However, we were not direct observers due to our roles and location in another city. We then transcribed and manually analyzed the data, following an approach inspired by Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss’s three-pronged approach to grounded theory (2015). In this inductive process, all researchers engaged in an immersive reading of the data, used the research questions as a guide to constantly compare their notes on the data along the way, refining the themes they judged stronger through three steps: open (initial pattern identification), axial (finding connections between patterns), and selective coding (identifying central unifying themes). We employed this approach for its theoretical flexibility, which seemed particularly well-suited to Documenters as an emerging object of study.

Both authors, who were journalism students in Montreal at the time of data collection, were involved in the ideation, design, and early implementation phase of Documenters in Toronto through their work as research assistants at Concordia University. Namely, we contributed to the creation of a field guide, training and other materials and illustrations. We took part in pre and post-launch conversations with the Toronto team, and occasionally helped with fact-checking public meeting notes. In collaboration with a Concordia professor and The Green Line team, we contributed to shaping the form and content of the program. Hence, we contributed to the early collective meaning-making of the program. Our conceptions of participatory civic media and the functioning of Documenters were directly inspired by the practice of Documenters.org in the U.S., as well as theoretical readings, such as on community-centred journalism (Wenzel, 2020). We approached the analysis through the prism of our double positionality, as both direct actors in the project and distant observers (and researchers) based in Montreal.

Additionally, we performed a preliminary content analysis of 28 sets of notes published during the initial seven months of the program. This analysis is aimed at providing descriptions of the notes in ways that help identify key moments, trends, and points of inflection during the pilot phase of the project, which spanned September 2024 to March 2025, after which the program restructured to deliberately expand its focus to other areas of the city. We paid attention to the type of meetings covered, the topics included in the notes, the geographic coverage area and the inclusion of lived experience. Simultaneously, we reviewed the notes’ structure, word count, hyperlinks, and whether they included a video summary.

Findings

One overarching theme proved strongest: Between ideals and reality: contrasting the hopes and practicalities of Documenters. Through this theme, we underscore documenters’ ability to upend power relations and bring community members into the process of creating news and information. We articulated this theme on two aspects: 1) the aspirations and limits of impact, and 2) navigating co-production and the negotiation of journalistic standards.

The aspirations and limits of impact

Within this overarching theme, a significant focus of participants’ accounts was how they articulated both the perceived impacts and the limitations of the program. These were described at multiple levels: civically, in terms of effects on the community, and individually, through participants’ accounts of personal transformation resulting from their involvement in Documenters.

Supporting civic and political engagement in the community

Documenters at The Green Line is a hyperlocal civic media project existing in an information niche: public meetings. Staff members therefore expressed a very conscious stance to raise awareness about the importance of these meetings for communities, insisting on how decisions taken in these rooms affect the daily life of the population in the neighbourhood of focus. In this perspective, their desired impact would mean increased civic awareness in Kensington-Chinatown. Staff members made a clear link between Documenters’ mission and The Green Line’s mandate, positioning the program as a way to provide civic information, which would lead community members to become more active. Success metrics for both The Green Line as an organization and Documenters were described as having people “more engaged, more involved, more organized, more in community, [and] more connected to one another” (Staff C, February 2025). This same staff member strongly emphasized Documenters’ aspirational goal:

I think it’s not just about the number of subscribers per se in Documenters, it’s about in what ways the information we produce, or articles we produce, help leaders or community organizers, or just average people, to take action on their own terms. (Staff C, February 2025)

Throughout the interviews, staff members expressed their desire for a civically minded Documenters project. This need for civic information was formulated by staff as a reaction to three issues: 1) the perceived failure of mainstream media to provide Torontonians with enough information about public meetings; 2) apathy stemming from lack of knowledge or interest among the population regarding local government; and, finally, 3) the inaccessibility of information about Toronto’s public meetings. These shortcomings oriented aspirations for Documenters’ impact on community members with one staff member describing their aspiration for Documenters to foster “stronger responsiveness from local governments,” but also to lead to “policy change” through “more equitable and just bylaws,” and create “a new culture where people are actively engaged [and look] past their own individual comfort and security” (Staff C, February 2025). Desired impact as voiced by staff members ranged from formal indicators of political participation, like increased voter turnout, to more informal manifestations, such as contacting city councillors, community organizing, and protesting. Staff members’ descriptions of hoped-for impact reflect how engaged journalism can be thought of as an information conduit that catalyzes communities toward action (Li, 2024), leading to a form of collective empowerment. A short explainer, How to give the city of Toronto your input on local projects (Tansil, 2025), published as part of the Documenters’ program, and several invitations to readers to “chime in” on municipal projects and bylaws in the published notes, exemplify the program’s aspiration to spur action through information. In the same vein, several published notes also included the contact information of municipal services, community planners, and councillors. To some extent, the wide variety of hyperlinks in the notes, often referencing administrative documents from the City (bylaws, proposals, reports, presentations) and information from community or advocacy groups, contributes to further contextualization of issues discussed at public meetings, supports transparency through fact-checking, and potentially guides readers toward greater involvement in how they consume information. The emphasis on turning documenters’ notes into actionable information was clearly visible in interviews with staff members and appears to reflect The Green Line’s efforts to renew the definition of newsworthiness and the accompanying formats necessary to re-engage with audiences that have deserted traditional journalism. Moreover, it seems to show The Green Line’s transition from the “polarized” term of “journalism” to “community-driven information services” that has become an element of the organization’s mission and identity (Blanchett et al., 2025).

On their end, interviewed documenters expressed their hopes for the program to increase trust between community members, so that they could even feel comfortable sharing their stories. Ideals of government transparency, increased accessibility of civic information for neighbours, and overall increased scrutiny of elected officials were expressed during the focus group, most vividly encompassed in the following quote:

I think it’s important work as far as doing this kind of close reporting on a meeting, on a certain issue, because there’s so much said in one meeting, most of it will not make the evening news or newspapers, mainstream news….More of that [work] is good, so people can see what our councillors are like on a weekly basis, as opposed to just ribbon-cutting ceremonies or campaigns. (Documenter 1, February 2025)

For this interviewed documenter, impact meant scrutinizing elected representatives and allowing other community members to input and share their opinions on city projects. This goal is reminiscent of journalism’s public accountability mission (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2021). In this case, community members are taking over the role of “witness bearing” and potentially “watchdogs” of local democracy (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2021, pp. 19-20). This watchdog role of journalism is further reinforced by what the interviewed documenter perceived as the failure of mainstream media to hold the government accountable and reverse politicians’ agenda-setting strategies and official narratives. This way, documenters’ notes were thought to offer a less glamorous, but ideally more “raw” account of policymaking.

As much as both staff and documenters expressed their desires for change in the community, thanks to the notes they produced together, staff members made the boundary between engaged journalism and advocacy journalism clear. Staff introduced this boundary to future documenters during the training session and reinforced it within the launched project. The content produced would provide contextual clues to understand what happens in public meetings and how to get involved in local decision-making. The mission of Documenters  was thought of as a form of community capacity-building. It was assumed that increased accessibility of civic information about public meetings would ease participation in public decision-making. One of the ways that The Green Line did this was through the duties of the Community Engagement Lead, whose role was described as a person who “organizes and manages” documenters’ weekly work and, in a second phase, “communicates and connects,” therefore being the link between civic information and community stakeholders. Through civic information, the Community Engagement Lead saw their role as a conduit for information, helping community members mobilize around their issues of interest. Commenting on the decision to become Community Engagement Lead, this person explained that “it mattered deeply that people are organizing, people are empowered, and people can speak to the sense of hopelessness that they are feeling” (Staff C, February 2025). However, direct advocacy or action was left outside the program’s realm. Early in the training process, staff and trainees discussed the potential overlap between documenters’ duties and their personal activism and agreed on the importance of setting up a boundary between the two. Nevertheless, this potential “activist” role was at times renegotiated by the documenters during the production process. This demarcation between more “engaged” approaches to information and advocacy journalism raises questions that complexify the relationship between information and action in programs like Documenters hosted at media organizations whose editorial frameworks stress impartiality as a core journalistic concept. The Green Line’s staff members often expressed nuanced perspectives on this question. While they stressed the difference between informing communities and advocating for them, this demarcation was never fully presented as a stark opposition. All of The Green Line staff who were interviewed expressed their organization’s affinity with the concerns of the Kensington-Chinatown community, which were at times of a personal nature, and their appreciation of the ongoing advocacy efforts in the neighbourhood. Nonetheless, they trusted their audiences to form their own opinions and local community organizers to lead advocacy efforts, based on the factual information documenters would provide. In the view of staff members, this stance replaced the need for The Green Line to engage in direct advocacy or for opinions to be voiced in the documenters’ published notes, which a staff member summarized as such:

As journalists, we’re not necessarily taking action on policies. We’re reporting on them, but it would be interesting to try and make that link and see who out there needs this information for their work in terms of local grassroots work, in terms of policy work, whatever it is, and making sure that we are reaching those people, and we’re able to get them meetings’ notes that they want and care about. (Staff B, September 2024)

Documenting: A transformative process?

Throughout the seven-month pilot phase of Documenters, between September 2024 and mid-March 2025, 28 sets of notes were published by The Green Line, originating from three documenters, as well as the Community Engagement Lead, who also contributed actively. These four authors wrote between seven and nine sets of notes each. Almost all of the public meetings covered were regular meetings (City council, executive council, district-level meetings, and various committees), except for five public consultations and two meetings from a community group, the Kensington Market Community Land Trust.

During the interviews, both staff and documenters went beyond talking about their hopes for external outcomes for the community, to sharing the impacts of their involvement in the Documenters program. Through participants’ discourses, there was a common understanding that the process of documenting public meetings mattered as much as the final published notes due to the learning opportunity and skill-building it offered. For one documenter, the reported impact included increased understanding of local government and public meetings and feeling slightly more involved in the community. This documenter shared learning that city meetings were open to the public to attend, that it was possible to watch them online, and for attendees to ask questions, which in many regards can be considered as fundamental rights in a democratic system. Another documenter explained feeling a heightened sense of connection with the community, particularly after coming back to Toronto after spending time away. Already interested in politics, this documenter described getting involved in the program as: “better than sitting and watching the news or participating just in some small issues here and there sometimes” (Documenter 1, February 2025). Finally, interviewed documenters also reported personal benefits, such as having an added experience on their résumés that may prove helpful in future job searches.

It seems that The Green Line staff experienced civic learning as much as active documenters. Staff members explored the functioning of city meetings and consultations in more depth and experienced how complex the municipal decision-making structure could be. Journalistically speaking, The Green Line staff reported learning how to deepen their existing community-oriented work and engagement practices; one of them said Documenters represented a “step further” in expanding this “mission and ethos.” At the personal level, one staff member described how being involved made them feel more connected to their Torontonian identity since, as residents, both journalists and non-journalists involved in Documenters shared common concerns about their neighbourhoods. However, this transformative discourse warrants a certain degree of caution, as the interviewed documenters also shared that they sometimes experienced the concise, written format notes as a limitation in their ability to have a greater impact in the community—one of them stated that Documenters would need to be asked to produce something more “ambitious.” They expressed the desire to grow their skills through learning about different formats outside the initial parameters of the program.

The ways forward for impact

To various degrees, all participants shared what they perceived as the shortcomings of the Documenters program, which consequently limited its potential impact. Participants shared suggestions for improvement and insights into what it might look like in the future.

Participants expressed the difficulty of evaluating the program’s impact beyond their individual perceptions. At the time of the pilot project, no systematic framework for tracking impact was in place. Therefore, there was uncertainty about whether Documenters had had effective or measurable effects beyond anecdotal evidence. For documenters, one of the barriers to perceiving potential impact was the absence of a more systematic feedback loop with those who read their notes or the wider community. They had the impression that the community did not necessarily know about their existence as documenters, which can be reasonably expected in a newly launched program, but also that their role could have been misunderstood. In their view, the conceptual blur or ambiguity around Documenters might have prevented the community from understanding the program, particularly the distinction between what a “journalist” and a “documenter” are:

Do [people] know what a documenter is? Not sure. I think they think that we are some [kind] of reporters, right? I think some people understand this idea of community reporting or civic journalism….I don’t think anyone sees us as anything different than a reporter or journalist, or someone who works for some nonprofit, journalistic, little organization. (Documenter 1, February 2025)

Documenters’ uncertainty about whether the community engaged with their notes was corroborated by staff members, who noticed lower engagement with the notes relative to the content usually published on The Green Line’s website and newsletters. This sparked a pivot to publishing video summaries on social media (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube) alongside the written notes. Videos were usually one-minute-long and used the front-facing camera, therefore better aligning with The Green Line’s existing Gen Z and Millennial audiences’ news consumption habits. This pivot occurred early after the launch of the program, with the first video published on November 1, 2024. Afterwards, all sets of notes were complemented by a vertical video summary. This decision, signalling flexibility and adaptability during the pilot phase, was likely weighted in proportion with the resources needed to run the Documenters program to maximize impact. Concurrently, during the pilot phase, staff members realized the resource-intensive nature of the program, which required significant time to train documenters, find and assign meetings, provide assistance, and then prepare the notes for publication by editing and fact-checking them and engaging in frequent back-and-forth communication with the authors and, finally, providing feedback. Staff described the program as multi-layered and far from a simple add-on to existing newsroom operations. Sustaining a high publication rhythm was at first challenging for both staff and documenters, which led to moving to a slower pace. Instead of each documenter covering one meeting per week, they alternated every three weeks, which in turn required the documenters to adjust their expectations to this revised workflow. In fact, the content analysis shows that documented meetings dropped by half in November 2024, decreasing from 10 in October to five. At the same time, the average length of the notes fell significantly, from 1,557 words in the first seven sets of notes to 521 words after October 24. This change might signal a push for increased efficiency, with staff spending less time on editing and fact-checking. It could also indicate that documenters became more acquainted with their role, shifting from writing detailed, verbatim notes to selecting information more strategically. The structure of the notes changed accordingly. Although still following a predefined template, the final product resembled more of a news story: the long lists of attendees became rarer, and “hooks,” contextual cues, or questions, were often placed at the very start. These stylistic changes aligned documenters’ notes more closely with The Green Line’s regular publications, thereby helping existing readers perceive a more coherent editorial integration between the two. Despite The Green Line and Documenters Canada jointly justified the importance of the site’s hyperlocal focus, which echoed both the publication’s editorial line and Documenters’ aspiration to be rooted in communities, it must be underlined that this same editorial choice came with consequences. Consistently covering meetings that resonated with hyperlocal audiences was not always possible because many weekly municipal meetings were not relevant to this hyperlocal focus. The hyperlocal nature of the Documenters site in Toronto was challenging to operationalize as public meetings often moved beyond neighbourhoods, focusing on a larger region, a specific topic, or a city-wide issue. Of 28 meetings covered during the pilot phase, seven focused on neighbourhoods located in Kensington-Chinatown. Of them, only one was directly about Alexandra Park. It is telling that documenters covered areas adjacent to Kensington-Chinatown as much as they covered the focus community itself. These included Yorkville, West Queen West, The Annex, Moss Park, the Garden District, Little Italy, Harbord Village, the Fashion District, and Bay-Cloverhill, which might signal an effort to cover meetings sharing common issues that residents might feel more connected to, or that were geographically accessible for the documenters living in Kensington-Chinatown.

Secondly, when covering city or community council meetings, finding a hyperlocal angle was necessary, but not always easy, so that it could resonate with the realities of Kensington-Chinatown. Half of the meetings covered during the pilot phase were about city-wide issues, and did not reference specific neighbourhoods. However, parsing through all the information to identify “relevant” information for the community of focus was challenging for the documenters, especially when neither the ward nor the neighbourhoods were mentioned, or local councillors did not address a point. To address this issue, The Green Line tried to bring back a hyperlocal focus in situations where the meetings or topics discussed seemed further away from Kensington-Chinatown by inviting documenters to share lived experiences related to the topics discussed at the meetings. Furthermore, the emphasis on covering public meetings related to housing issues, even city-wide or in adjacent areas of downtown, can be read as another way to connect with local (and wider) audience members struggling with housing insecurity and living through the housing crisis. Our content analysis reveals this connection, with 18 of the first 28 sets of notes addressing housing-related topics, whether it be so-called demovictions, affordable housing for artists, urban regeneration, demolitions, encampments, basement floodings, senior housing, heritage buildings preservation, condo developments, land trusts, or zoning.

Navigating co-production and the negotiation of journalistic standards

Grounded in a hyperlocal context, the Documenters’ pilot project was designed to re-centre journalistic practice in place by working closely with residents of Kensington-Chinatown as co-producers of civic information. This orientation carried expectations of more horizontal relationships and power-sharing between journalists and community members. Its implementation revealed the practical complexities of collaboration within the newsroom’s editorial framework. The process of co-production required ongoing negotiation over journalistic practices, and ultimately standards, particularly around impartiality and “objectivity.” It is in these negotiations that the participatory ambitions of Documenters came to be and were articulated by staff and community members.

Re-centring journalistic practice on place and the hyperlocal

Documenters at The Green Line initially aimed to focus on the Kensington-Chinatown area, and particularly its south-west corner: Alexandra Park. This emphasis on the local signals a desire to re-centre journalistic practice on the concept of place (Usher, 2023), which is overall consistent with The Green Line’s focus on hyperlocal topics and audiences. This hyperlocal site covered meetings affecting a particular area of downtown and worked with local community members, focusing on strengthening existing relationships between The Green Line and people living in the area. Before its launch in September 2024, The Green Line staff had trained local youth at a local community centre, inviting one of the trainees to become the Community Engagement Lead, responsible for relationships with documenters and the wider community. The hyperlocal ethos materialized through recruiting residents for training and documenting. In the pilot phase of the project, the three active documenters were residents of Kensington-Chinatown. This hyperlocal focus raised a sense of responsibility for The Green Line, which expressed a desire to act as a responsible social actor in the area by “reinvesting in the local economy” through the program, and training community members with potentially employable skills (note-taking, attentive listening, fact-checking) and added experience, easing future searches for employment opportunities. Trained, active documenters were paid contributors to The Green Line. One staff member was adamant that documenters had to be given financial compensation for their work, citing drawbacks in the journalism industry, where it has long been common practice not to pay interns (cf. Bosley et al., 2023).

The Green Line justified the hyperlocal focus as a response to the crisis in journalism and equity-driven considerations, which were echoed through their criticism of mainstream media’s failure to fulfill its mission of providing civic information in communities. Failing business models and newsroom layoffs were cited as the cause for public meetings being absent from media coverage, especially meetings for less widely known subcommittees. This way, The Green Line also positioned itself strategically as a publication offering original coverage of underreported public meetings. Moreover, staff envisioned collaboration with non-journalists residing in Kensington-Chinatown as a solution to insufficient mainstream coverage, as well as a more ethical option: all staff members agreed that the strength of documenters is their insider status and knowledge as community members, while, traditionally, journalists are often outsiders to the communities they report on:

A lot of the time, a lot of the people who go to these meetings or who cover these stories are largely people who are not from the community. People who are outside the community, who are parachuting into an area that they don’t really know very well. (Staff C, February 2025)

Interviewed documenters also recognized their strength as community members, such as their ability to tap into their existing community and professional networks and relationships, to gain a more nuanced understanding of issues and access sources that may provide additional context. Stemming from participants’ descriptions, ideally, a documenter originates from an underrepresented group, elevates marginalized voices, and is supported by their local connections and networks.

The emphasis on the local is further reinforced by an equity lens that shapes how staff perceive Kensington-Chinatown. For instance, a member of staff pointed to the paradox of the community: while it is the heart of Toronto, surrounded by wealth and the headquarters of news organizations, it is socially marginalized and underserved by the media, which, in their view, reinforces the need for Documenters:

[Inhabitants] tend to have less access to resources, they have less access to power structures and, as a result, it’s even more urgent for a place like this to be well served by the media, so they know how to advocate for themselves. (Staff A, May 2024)

Equity concerns extended to recruitment. Discussing documenters’ recruitment, a staff member wondered about their identities, such as their “socio-economic privileges” and “community background,” as a key consideration for selection and how it may influence what participants would bring to the project. In fact, intentionality in The Green Line’s engagement with members of the community who might be underrepresented in media and society at large may explain why recruitment did not occur through a wider call-out, but through referrals from community groups and existing relationships. Documenters was therefore situated in a context sensitive to power inequalities and the role of the media in either alleviating or perpetuating them.

Overall, program participants and staff share the view that physical and emotional closeness to place, identity, and community issues should not, in theory, warrant detachment, as is often the case in professional journalism, where practitioners are expected to remove themselves from the stories they cover (DiManno, 2017). Staff did not theoretically consider proximity as an obstacle to documenters’ ability to report on public meetings, as, for instance, it was agreed that documenters could report on meetings of community groups they are involved in, but would not actively take part in discussions and decision-making to avoid perceptions of conflict of interest. This posture nonetheless faced limitations in practice when staff and documenters actively negotiated journalistic standards, especially impartiality, which may have ultimately impacted documenters’ ability to upend wider power relations in the journalistic field. As such, community members felt that they could not always mobilize their insider status and lived experiences to their full potential.

Sharing power in the process of co-creating civic information

For journalists involved in Documenters, the project was sought as a way to flatten traditional hierarchies between journalists and community members, reconstructing relationships on a more horizontal basis. Contrasting with the often-extractive journalist-source relationship, power in the production cycle was renegotiated at various stages: trained documenters would pitch meetings to cover, take on the task of gathering information at public meetings, and shape information for final distribution. For an interviewed staff member, The Green Line’s implementation of Documenters represented an additional step in the media organization’s approach to community-oriented journalism, going beyond having community members give inputs on what to cover, for instance during listening circles, which is part of its Action Journey editorial model, but by letting some take a more prominent role in crafting information, or  “take the reins.”

However, power-sharing evolved within the parameters that the news organization’s community-focused editorial framework allowed. For instance, meeting selection was described as a mix between the personal choice of the documenters (out of affinity with the topics of the meeting) and editorial considerations: the hyperlocal focus of the program meant meetings with more “localness” potential were favoured. The Green Line’s editorial framework, known as the five pillars of livability (housing, health, jobs, food, and transit), also helped orient public meetings whose coverage could have seemed more coherent with the ongoing themes of publication. These same pillars of livability were established and refined over time by The Green Line through consultations with communities and audience members. Amid these many different factors, The Green Line and documenters therefore had to actively negotiate over meetings’ assignments, in addition to simply being available to attend a meeting. Editing is the second part of the co-production process that was less prone to handing out power to documenters. A staff member described how, compared to earlier phases of the production cycle, it became harder to share power, because notes had to meet quality standards to be publishable. Nonetheless, to ease this process, staff stressed how the editing process required substantial back-and-forth communication with the documenters to ensure they understood the modifications to their notes and had an active role in editing. The challenge was accustoming documenters to the newsroom’s workflow, publication rhythm, and deadlines, while still acknowledging they were not professionally trained and their notes were not thought of as a journalistic product. The Green Line tried to demystify the journalistic process, adapting it to the notes format by using a template for note-taking. Navigating co-production required adaptation on both sides, so that journalists and documenters could understand each other’s expectations and work collaboratively. Interviewed documenters felt that this was demanding, particularly the tight deadlines and pace of the work. Staff members expressed their responsibility to ease that process.

The negotiation of journalistic standards: impartiality and “objectivity”

Ultimately, the friction between the organization’s editorial framework and the reality of having non-professionals co-produce civic information crystallized around the question of how journalistic standards of impartiality and objectivity might be revisited in this participatory setting. For The Green Line, working with non-professionals prompted ongoing reflection on how established editorial and journalistic standards might coexist with forms of citizen participation. This reflection was particularly concrete around the question of whether documenters could voice their opinion in their notes.

Both documenters and The Green Line staff rejected the notion of an absolute and detached objectivity, but not in the same way. For documenters, objectivity was seen as contradicting the nature of their work, based on their personal connections with Kensington-Chinatown. For one participant, being a documenter “helps give a more personal experience rather than just like an objective, journalistic kind of impartial, non-emotional experience” (Documenter 2, February 2025) when covering public meetings. For staff, the issue was more nuanced. The Green Line justified not including opinions in the notes because it is not part of usual publications, but they stressed that the goal is not to erase documenters’ backgrounds. Instead, they would integrate their lived experiences into the notes while maintaining factual integrity. A  journalist at The Green Line noted that while journalists can care deeply about the communities they cover, the connection between the writer and the topic feels more “pronounced” when the writer is a community member.

Therefore, during the editing process, staff tried to reconcile diverging views about objectivity by proposing a middle-ground solution. Staff guided documenters in shifting from expressing opinions to describing their lived experiences, therefore encapsulating documenters’ work within the journalistic ethos of impartiality, while still capturing an individual’s subjective perspective on their community. Staff helped documenters reformulate their notes in a more neutral style and relied on fact-checking processes to ensure accuracy. Lived experiences were included in a section at the end of the notes, and clearly labelled using headings that evolved through time, from “what’s our Documenter’s perspective,” to “what does our Documenter have to say,” and, by February 2025, “on-the-ground observations from our Documenters.” Over the 28 sets of notes published during the pilot phase, 13 included mentions of lived experiences. Among them, five were written using the first person singular pronoun “I,” with documenters drawing on their personal experiences related to their profession, volunteering, or from people they know, to expand topics discussed at public meetings. In seven notes, this section was less personal, only adding research that served informational and contextual roles. At times, there were crossovers between personal storytelling and added information from external sources.

Lived experiences were sometimes reported in the third person, as if the documenter had been interviewed. More rarely, this section turned into a question from the documenter, to which more information was provided as an answer. To be included, lived experiences had to reference a specific, factual event that happened to documenters or others in the neighbourhood, at a particular place and time, and avoid any “blanket” statements. This came out of numerous attempts at integrating lived experiences in the notes, which staff members described as a learning experience on their side that was worth it despite the complexity of this endeavour. One of the important points of this test and trial was their capacity to communicate the distinction between opinion and lived experience to documenters. Overall, it was clear from the interviews with staff that they did not want documenters to be “objective” in the traditional meaning of the term. Their on-the-ground observations and lived experience of Kensington-Chinatown were described as invaluable:

They bring a lot of reflections or observations that maybe I would have missed as a journalist who maybe doesn’t have as intimate a knowledge of particular neighbourhoods, and that makes the reporting so much better. (Staff B, November 2024)

For staff members, documenters’ opinions themselves were not illegitimate, but were used to spark conversation into the root causes, or lived experiences, behind opinions. One staff member compared this approach to the necessity of facts and research in op-ed writing. However, one interviewed documenter explained that initial expectations of the mandate, focused on documenting public meetings, seemed at odds with subsequent requests to incorporate lived experiences in their notes, which suggests a need to clarify expectations about what types of contributions were authorized in the program. More broadly, for documenters, the boundary between the concepts of “perspective,” “lived experience,” and “opinion” may have been blurry, making it difficult to align expectations on both sides. Early training materials referred to “perspective” as what documenters could bring to their observations of public meetings. This framing was later revised in favour of “lived experience,” emphasizing a shift toward more grounded, fact-based accounts rooted in documenters’ experiences.

In contrast, one interviewed documenter explicitly challenged the institutional tone imposed on the notes and proposed reclaiming a more involved approach by changing the format to foreground, for instance, a “private individual who’s fighting something,” “celebrating people’s biographies,” or covering a rent strike. This approach was described as “basically doing the opposite of dry quoting councillors…but letting people talk from their experience” (Documenter 1, February 2025). Questioning the usefulness of only documenting public meetings, this documenter saw more potential in amplifying community voices directly through interviews, such as streeters, deemed to have potentially more impact for the community. Overall, these suggestions highlight a tension between the role of documenters as neutral observers and that of community advocates or mobilizers, and reframe the program in a way that more closely resembles citizen or advocacy journalism. Documenters also expressed their desire for a more authentic expression of their views. This wish was also directed at the format and tone of the notes, which were described as too “dry,” impersonal, and unfit to properly align with their voice. Later in the program, The Green Line took a step toward having documenters work on other formats, such as the Changemaker Interview, focused on spotlighting local actors involved in solving an issue, a format which also included recollections of lived experiences and links to previous documenting work (Miya & Newman, 2025).

Discussion

Through this research, we aimed to understand Documenters’ potential impact to inform future program design and practices and assist in building theory on public participation in journalism. We conducted a three-pronged, grounded-theory approach inspired by Corbin and Strauss’ (2015) method, based on seven semi-structured interviews with three staff members at The Green Line and two documenters. We articulated our main theme, titled Between ideals and reality: contrasting the hopes and practicalities of Documenters, in two axes. Part 1 focused on how impact was formulated by staff and documenters, and the obstacles faced within the launched project. Part 2 investigates the negotiation of journalistic standards occurring during the co-production process. Our discussion revolves around two areas of interest, accompanied by recommendations for Documenters sites.

Aligning Documenters’ scope with local governance structures and existing audiences for increased impact

Documenters at The Green Line framed the project’s potential impact as an information conduit leading to action in the community. In some ways, public meeting notes answer the needs for more “user-friendly news for potential participants” in democracy that Herbert J. Gans (1998) called for, in reaction to the shortcomings of the journalistic theory of democracy, which assumes an automatic link between an informed citizenry and political participation, without making explicit the type of news necessary to achieve such participation. This sustained attention to policies rather than politics, namely the inner workings of governmental machinery, also provides an alternative to elections-focused political news (Gans, 1998, p. 10). In addition to the published notes, The Green Line staff emphasized the importance of Documenters’ training, sharing tools and skills with community members, and a collaborative production process. This emphasis on renewed process and equipping community members broadens the implications for journalism that supports everyday democratic life, illustrates an emerging educator role for the media, and contributes to democratizing journalism (Holliday, 2019).

Despite potential for impact, the Documenters site’s hyperlocal focus seemed challenging to operationalize during the pilot phase, which raises the question of its alignment with The Green Line’s existing audiences, resources, and governance structures in Toronto. The hyperlocal scope of the site may have been too narrow to fit within the municipal public meetings structure, as opposed, for instance, to a city with relatively smaller levels of local governance, such as Montreal’s 19 boroughs. For comparison, Toronto has four community councils, which are the smallest unit of governance in the city. The appropriate coverage focus may vary depending on each community’s governance and decision-making structures. In the United States, where Documenters.org has grown rapidly, it appears that the 31 sites tend to have a wider focus than in Toronto, encompassing entire cities or even counties. Moreover, The Green Line staff wondered how meeting notes would tailor to its existing audiences, Millennials and Gen-Z people dispersed across Toronto, who may not naturally gravitate toward hyperlocal coverage tied to a single neighbourhood. Investing resources in a narrowly defined geographic area, therefore, risks further fragmenting an already dispersed audience. This may explain why subsequent phases of the project expanded the site’s focus to include more areas of the city, such as Etobicoke and Parkdale, while maintaining a strong presence in Kensington-Chinatown. The choice to cover meetings and bylaws related to city-wide concerns, such as the housing crisis and residential developments, further reflects an effort to engage a broader audience on issues that resonate beyond specific neighbourhoods.

Another dimension of alignment concerns the nature of decision-making in local governance. Representative democracy can be regarded as a structural limitation to Documenters’ capacity to foster participation in public decision-making. Within the parameters of representative democracy, documenters are neutral observers of decision-making unfolding under their eyes during public meetings. Despite The Green Line’s hopes that documenters’ notes would mobilize from the bottom up through community-led initiatives, the potential for change is constrained when decisions have already been taken. Action also depends on whether individuals believe their participation can influence outcomes. This could explain why The Green Line may have progressively given more attention to meetings where decisions were still open for debate, such as public consultations, five of which were covered during the pilot phase. These meeting notes explicitly included calls to action, such as “how to chime in” on specific proposals and contact information for relevant city officials.

Documenters and the evolution of journalistic “objectivity:” guardrails and opportunities for the inclusion of lived experience

The findings suggest that Documenters reflects and contributes to ongoing debates about the evolution of objectivity in journalistic practice, which, in this case, is being reconsidered in a hybrid citizen-professional space. Program participants did not align with the ideal of objectivity that Schudson (1978; 2001) described in American journalism. Both staff and interviewed documenters saw objectivity as outdated and not in line with the nature of their work. In addition to their factual recollection of public meetings, staff invited participants to share lived experiences, going away from the ideal of objectivity, which has been criticized as a mechanism of exclusion for its presentation of dominant perspectives (white, male, and cisgender) as facts, while relegating marginalized viewpoints to the realm of opinion and bias (Callison & Young, 2020). In response to criticisms of objectivity, scholars have proposed alternative models to still commit to rigour, while acknowledging the importance of standpoint and context. In Durham’s (1998) strong objectivity, the positionality of observers and the observed must be taken into account to produce more accurate knowledge. Marginalized perspectives are not seen as a threat to objectivity, but a condition for it.

In The Green Line’s approach, we can see how staff recruited documenters with intentionality, inviting residents of Kensington-Chinatown to give space for standpoints undervalued in mainstream journalism. Training individuals who have lived experience within a community allows for a unique perspective to be mobilized: they recognize the many facets of living within their neighbourhood, its people, issues, history, and sense of place (Gutsche & Hess, 2019). As a result, documenters’ place-knowledge (McAdam & Hess, 2024) is likely to enrich their understanding of what is being said at public meetings and how that impacts their livelihood (Lacivita, 2025). This stance goes away from the ideal of detachment and disinvolvement that characterizes traditional journalistic objectivity. However, opening the door to non-professionals raised questions for staff, such as how to balance the expression of subjective knowledge with the imperative for factual information. Staff explained how lived experiences had to be grounded in factual evidence and be expressed with impartiality to be integrated into published notes. Here, we might see how these parameters are more closely aligned with Stephen Ward’s (2010) pragmatic objectivity, which seeks a “more moderate” approach than strong objectivity (Konieczna & Santa Maria, 2023, p. 1842). It asserts that, while facts exist and constrain belief, most journalistic knowledge is interpretive, which necessitates empirical verification, coherence and diversity checks, and transparency.

In Toronto, we felt ambivalence in witnessing the documenters understand the professional rationale requiring their impartiality while simultaneously expressing a desire for a greater personal involvement and a more authentic voice. Active negotiation occurred over acceptable journalistic practices. As early as in the design phase, The Green Line and the Concordia University team set boundaries around what Documenters is, boundaries that community members may have attempted to shift in a direction that would have allowed for more personal, or even opinionated, self-expression. This boundary work, which is an active process by various actors to define and delineate the legitimate contours of journalism (Carlson & Lewis, 2019), underscores the polysemic and malleable meaning of Documenters, which was reinterpreted by those involved in the project.

The inclusion of lived experiences highlights authenticity and simultaneously acts as evidence of issues affecting the community (Robinson et al., 2025). The way The Green Line experimented with including a specific section about documenters’ lived experiences in the notes warrants closer attention, especially as it does not seem to be a systematic practice across Documenters sites, although including such lived experiences has been described as one of the purposes of the program (Lacivita, 2025). Documenters’ sites might benefit from collaboratively establishing a roadmap, maybe taking a community-centred approach that includes other stakeholders (Wenzel, 2020), as a way to collectively set the boundaries of acceptable practices and standards around lived experience. It could include a framework about what “objectivity” means in this context, aligning with Durham’s (1998) strong objectivity, Ward’s (2010) pragmatic objectivity, or other approaches, which could give clarity on how to include personal expression in the notes and what is off-limits.

Conclusion

Our study looked at how one Toronto newsroom experimented with the Documenters model, underscoring its impact on both staff and community members involved, as well as what remains to be achieved. Seven interviews with staff members at The Green Line and one focus group with two active documenters were analyzed through a three-pronged, grounded theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2015). Although we are of the view that we did not achieve the theoretical integration step of grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2015, p. 193), we believe we managed to leverage insights that merit sustained attention in future studies looking at journalistic collaborations and the co-production of news and information.

Our main theme, Between ideals and reality: contrasting the hopes and practicalities of Documenters, unfolded in two parts. The aspirations and limits of impact discussed how participants articulated impact at the community and individual levels. For documenters, involvement fostered civic learning, greater familiarity with public meetings, and a stronger sense of connection in their community. They shifted from general political awareness to a practical grasp of how local government functions in their environment. For staff, Documenters deepened existing community-oriented journalistic practices and expanded engagement practices with non-professionals. Hoped-for impact on the wider community, focused on increased civic participation, government accountability, and community empowerment, remained largely aspirational and was difficult to assess. The Green Line framed Documenters as a capacity-building initiative that could support community organizing, but clear boundaries were maintained between informing and direct advocacy. In Navigating co-production and the negotiation of journalistic standards, we dived into the practical tensions involved in co-producing civic information within a professional newsroom. Documenters was envisioned as a space where power could be restructured around more horizontal relationships. It challenged traditional notions of objectivity by involving people who are directly affected by the issues being documented. The hyperlocal focus on Kensington-Chinatown and the recruitment of local residents as paid contributors privileged insider knowledge and positioned lived experience as an asset. This finding suggests that Documenters reflects and contributes to ongoing debates about how objectivity is evolving and being redefined in journalistic practice (Santa Maria & Konieczna, 2023). However, its implementation required negotiation over journalistic standards and editorial frameworks. Staff and documenters rejected a fully detached notion of objectivity, but diverged in how subjectivity, particularly opinions, should appear in published notes. The Green Line sought to integrate documenters’ lived experiences without crossing into opinion or advocacy, to retain factual integrity, while documenters expressed a desire for more authentic expression.

Overall, our findings invite cautious optimism. Documenters may not fully transform journalism, but it pushes boundaries and encourages scholars and practitioners to rethink how local news and information can be more firmly grounded in communities. Attention to Documenters, and more broadly to participatory, engaged, and community-centred journalisms, is crucial at a moment when artificial intelligence is integrated into journalistic practices (European Broadcasting Union, 2025, p. 31-44), and AI-generated summaries of public meetings are increasingly available (Deck, 2025; Spencer, 2025; Thomson, 2025). Ensuring a physical human presence in the meeting room is tightly related to Documenters’ original mission, focused on equipping, community engagement, and reclaiming democratic spaces, as Eve Lacivita, Director of Product at City Bureau, underlines: “We believe democracy isn’t just about information; it’s about participation. We are committed to keeping people present in the spaces where decisions affecting their lives and communities are made. That’s why our Documenters program exists” (Lacivita, 2025, para. 3).

This people-centred approach is similarly stressed by Joshua P. Darr (2026), who argues that AI in journalism should be oriented toward civic empowerment, local representation, and political accountability, rather than reproducing traditional journalistic formats and routines. From this perspective, participatory models like Documenters have the potential to shape how AI is designed for local journalism. Drawing on his comparison of “DocGPT,” a chatbot trained on a corpus of Documenters’ notes, with ChatGPT, Darr shows that DocGPT produced more actionable, policy-relevant, and context-sensitive information by relying on “the notes and observations of non-journalist residents attending city government meetings to provide the sort of ‘insider knowledge’ about informal norms that is especially useful for residents unfamiliar with local policies” (Darr, 2026, para. 48).

This study remains exploratory due to its short timeframe and limited dataset. By the end of our study and after, the program transformed substantially, notably by shifting its dissemination strategy to video summaries of documenters’ notes (Lytle, 2025). New documenters were trained and joined the program. Therefore, our findings do not reflect the full picture of this evolving Documenters site. Expectations around the potential impact of Documenters proved to be a significant aspect of the interviews we conducted. Nevertheless, we encountered limitations in our ability to assess this reported impact. The research design and methods mostly captured the program’s impact in discursive and aspirational terms. This limitation, similarly encountered by Nickels and colleagues in Cleveland (2024), invites future research to answer “the question of whether this perception of impact is an idealization” of Documenters’ work, “or substantiated, when measured through other outcomes” (2024, p. 19).

Future research on Documenters Canada may include more interviews with those involved in the program and widen the scope to encompass perspectives from the local information ecosystem, such as residents, other stakeholders in community groups, libraries, or even elected officials and public servants, therefore attempting to capture the public perceptions of Documenters Canada. Case studies revolving around specific topics or notes could enlighten the impact, or the lack thereof, that Documenters had on local debates, public awareness, and decision-making. The span of the research could be widened to include insights from participants prior to joining the program, during, and after, ensuring better tracking of impact over time. Finally, adding a comparative outlook seems to be a promising avenue for nuancing our understanding of Documenters across Canada, especially as the network has grown to Montreal in September 2025 (Brassard-Lecours & Hébert-Bernier, 2025) and Crowsnest Pass, Alberta, in 2026. These new sites offer opportunities to examine the variations in urban and rural contexts, politics, and forms of collaborations between media organizations and community groups that might influence Documenters’ outcomes.

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Clément Lechat holds a Master’s in digital innovation in journalism studies from Concordia University. He previously served as research assistant and network lead for Documenters Canada, from 2024 to 2026, supporting site launches in Toronto, Montreal, and southern Alberta. His research has explored participatory and collaborative journalistic practices in local news contexts, as well as voice, accents, and belonging in the media.

Sara Mizannojehdehi holds a Master’s in digital innovation in journalism studies from Concordia University. She previously served as a research assistant for Documenters Canada, and is a freelance illustrator and writer. Her independent research interests lie in exploring a sense of place through local journalism, using illustrative methods in mainstream news coverage, and  trauma-informed approaches to reportage.

 Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr. Magda Konieczna, who supervised this research project.

 Disclaimer
This special issue’s editors, Magda Konieczna and Gabriela Perdomo, are both affiliated with Documenters Canada, and Dr. Konieczna has worked with and supervised this paper’s co-authors in the past.  Neither Dr. Konieczna nor Dr. Perdomo participated in the journal’s review and approval process for this submission.

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^[1]   For clarity, “Documenters” is capitalized when referring to the organization or concept, while “documenter(s)” is non-capitalized when referring to the people documenting public meetings.

^[2]   “Research shows that the ‘new’ relationships between these two entities have only very sporadically resulted in a lasting strengthening of dialogue, or even in a co-construction of information. Beyond the ideals often upheld by the profession, but even more so by actors in the digital industry, participatory editorial processes have often struggled to enable the coexistence of publics and journalists whose intentions, practices, frames of thought, and values are rarely compatible. Participation is subject to framing, even to forms of control on the part of journalists, who are reluctant to relinquish certain of their prerogatives.”