New Media (Including Yours Truly) Changing Ottawa's Political Landscape

OTTAWA - A slightly fuzzy, zoomed-in screen grab from question period took a brewing controversy for Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq, and crystallized it into a tale of callous indifference.

"Leona Aglukkaq reads newspaper, ignores questions about people looking for food in dump," read the headline last month by Press Progress, a social-media focused news organization funded by the Broadbent Institute.

From there the story was touched on by mainstream news organizations, who appeared to miss the fleeting visual during the House of Commons broadcast. Aglukkaq had been fending off criticism that the government's Nutrition North program hasn't helped reduce grocery costs in the territories.

Press Progress is snarky, easy-to-read, unabashedly left-wing and opinionated, and part of a new group of digital media organizations covering politics on Parliament Hill.

Vice, The Tyee, the Vancouver Observer, Blacklock's Reporter, and rabble.ca now have correspondents or small teams in Ottawa. The digital outlets iPolitics and Huffington Post were the first of the new wave.

In the United States, such news sites as Politico, Talking Points Memo, Roll Call and Buzzfeed Politics have been making their mark for years.

The new Canadian players with different funding models are filling in some of the empty chairs in the press gallery left by shrinking traditional media outlets. And they're challenging some of the notions about what political reporting looks like.

In the case of Press Progress, the content could be dismissed by some as NDP partisan advertising. It is run within the Broadbent Institute, an independent, non-partisan think-tank founded by former NDP Leader Ed Broadbent and initially run by a former aide to the late Jack Layton.

Founding editor Sarah Schmidt, a former national reporter with Postmedia News, says there is nothing in the content that is partisan, and accuracy is still a central tenet. The outlet is run independently of the institute.

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New Media (Including Yours Truly) Changing Ottawa's Political Landscape