From Carmine Starnino, editor-in-chief:

We didn’t set out to build regional bureaus. We were pushed into it—radicalized, really—by our own reporting, which made it impossible to ignore just how essential local news is to understanding Canada.

In part, it was the immense popularity of hyper-local stories set in places like St. John’s, Thunder Bay, and Prince Edward Island. As an outlet used to thinking in broadly national terms, this took us by surprise. It shouldn’t have. Not if we had been paying attention to the other kind of reporting we were publishing—stories that tracked how the red ink shed by local papers left towns and cities with shrinking coverage, or no coverage at all.

The reporting being cut, however, remained necessary as ever. Local news ensures people have information they can trust, but it also adds a point of view to our shared sense of what it’s like to live in this country. It is a polarization killer.

So we teamed up with The Chawkers Foundation to jump-start six regional bureaus. We launched three desks in 2025, covering the West, the North, and Atlantic Canada. The rest came online this year.

First out of the gate was from our Quebec desk: an investigation by Caitlin Walsh Miller into the province’s Liberal party as it plunged into turmoil after its leader’s resignation. Next was J.R. Patterson, at our Prairies desk, who reported on how mega dairies in North Dakota are driving fears of cross-border manure pollution (yes, we used “Big Stink” in our display).

And just a few days ago, Kunal Chaudhary, our Ontario correspondent, gave us an alarming piece on growing violence in schools. He showed how deepening social distress and chronic underfunding are eroding supports, leaving educators saying “there’s just no time or money to prevent incidents.”

I’m proud of the way all these writers are covering their beats: candidly, but also generously, immersively. Please read their stories, and support us as we keep growing this project. Canada is a big country. We need more reasons to write about it as an act of discovery: an entry into communities beyond our own.