The Construction of News in Canada’s Francophone Minority Communities: Source Contributions and Journalistic Initiative at L’Acadie Nouvelle

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-803-0_5How to use a DOI?

Keywords

news construction; journalist-source relationship; Francophone minority context

Abstract

This article examines how news is constructed in Canada’s Francophone minority communities through the negotiation between sources’ proposals and journalists’ initiatives, using the daily L’Acadie Nouvelle as a case. Drawing on a mixed-methods, grounded-theory approach, we conducted a two-week newsroom immersion (3–16 November 2025), collecting the full universe of 445 informational inputs (emails, press releases, advisories, calls, messages, in-person tips) and mapping them to 149 published articles, complemented by interviews and non-participant observation. Quantitative coding shows a highly routinized supply: 93% of inputs arrived through routine channels and 98% by email, dominated by press releases (78% of routine inputs) and institutional actors (47%). Yet only 10% of proposals generated at least one story, indicating strong editorial filtering and limited “churnalism.” Informal tips, though rare (7%), converted at triple the rate of routine submissions. Tracing article origins reveals a near balance between source-driven and journalist-driven production: 43% of published items stemmed from source suggestions (30% direct submissions plus 13% content identified via digital monitoring), while 45% originated in journalistic initiative (excluding agency copy). Selection patterns favored community-anchored voices: citizen, municipal, and community-organization inputs achieved the highest conversion rates, while private-company pitches were least likely to pass the filter. Rejections were mainly justified by low public interest, weak local relevance, misfit with the editorial mandate, promotional tone, or time constraints. Overall, findings highlight enduring journalistic autonomy in a resource-constrained minority context, alongside a growing “in-between” space where journalists proactively surface public-relations content circulating online and translate it into locally meaningful news.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Annie Desjardins
AU  - Jason Luckerhoff
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/16
TI  - The Construction of News in Canada’s Francophone Minority Communities: Source Contributions and Journalistic Initiative at L’Acadie Nouvelle
BT  - Proceedings of the VI International Conference on Communication and Applied Technologies 2026 (ICOMTA 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 37
EP  - 48
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-803-0_5
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-803-0_5
ID  - Desjardins2026
ER  -