If you have ever sought out the access to information or privacy news stories in the current Canadian news cycle in one spot, we know there are some barriers. We’re working to address some of those.
Our goal is to walk the talk, if we redistribute or publish news stories, we want to recognize the value of this work by the outlet and the writer. To achieve this, we’ve rebuilt our news page to include news monitoring. Our first content stream is from Canadian Press (CP), we publish their stories focused on our mandate areas, keeping them in one spot in front of a paywall for everyone to access. At this stage we aim to upload all relevant CP content and have that snapshot current on Monday mornings. The result going back to December 2022 is:
For us, an important part of this work is ensuring regular review by our contributing librarians and archivists on the search methodologies, categories and tags to have groupings that work. One of the significant content areas from CP means access to Local Journalism Initiative (LJI) stories in these areas.
There is of course room for improvement and expansion. General user experience, search, a weekly email roundup, and other functionality in addition to access to other sources we can contract with are just of few of the areas we are looking at.
That’s why we have introduced our own News Monitoring subscription. If you have the means and see value in this service, we encourage you to become either a monthly or annual subscriber. We commit to ensuring every subscription dollar goes towards supporting and expanding this service.
A special note to reporters, journalists, and outlets.
If you are writing stories with “request for information”, “access to information”, “freedom of information”, “breach of privacy”, “personal information”, “privacy data”, “privacy breach”, “data breach”, or report on relevant regulators we look forward to highlighting that work through this mechanism.
If you are an outlet that has a separate subscription news feed that we can publish from based on defined search criteria in our mandate areas, we look forward to hearing from you and seeing how we can integrate those stories into this service.
FIPA’s news monitor subscribers, donors and funders help make these available to everyone rather than behind a paywall. We appreciate every contribution because it makes a difference.
