Investigating municipal Access to Information via news coverage of Montreal’s housing crisis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study seeks to reveal the role of Access to Information (ATI) and public records in local journalism by conducting a thematic analysis of 107 news media articles about Montreal’s housing crisis, and by examining original and previously released Access to Information request packages. This work highlights how local news media have covered the housing crisis thus far, with a deliberate focus on the sources and angles used, and how they might address the issue differently going forward, with increased focus on using official documents and ATI requests in the coverage. Importantly, this study focuses on Montreal’s municipal ATI system, as previous work in academia has mostly focused on either Canada’s federal ATI system or provincial/territorial systems. This study reveals that, in stories about the housing crisis, local news media have tended to favour the voices of politicians and official statements, while only a few rare outlets sporadically use ATI to deepen their reporting. This study recognizes that tight deadlines in news work and long delays in the municipal ATI system are in part responsible for local journalists’ heavy reliance on political sources and official statements. However, the result of not using ATI as a journalistic source leads to a journalism that remains at the surface level and fails to provide citizens the information they are entitled to, that would allow them to make more informed decisions about municipal policies related to housing and municipal elections. With this important function of local journalism in mind, this study suggests increased use of ATI requests in gaining a deeper understanding of complex issues that directly target citizens.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".