Journalism instructor launches The Green Line
The Green Line (external link) , a community-oriented news outlet that dedicates itself to helping young and other underserved communities navigate life in the city, officially launched on April 1, 2022.
Creator Anita Li, a School of Journalism instructor, journalist, and media consultant says The Green Line is about media as a pillar of democracy and how journalism is supposed to reflect people’s lived experiences in a way that helps them navigate their lives.
Li says that despite going through the typical journalist pipeline of attending journalism school and working at legacy publications such as The Globe and Mail, CBC, and the Toronto Star, she wanted to follow a different path.
"Although I had a really good education and foundation for being a journalist in this country, I felt oftentimes that my lived experience, especially as somebody who grew up in a suburb that was as diverse as Scarborough, was not consistently reflected,” she says.
She previously worked at The Discourse, a community-focused outlet, that she says made her realize that she wanted to focus on that type of work.
"I decided to go off and start my own thing after working at a lot of startups,” Li says. “I'm a woman of colour, I'm somebody who comes from Scarborough, I authentically understand and know the city Toronto that I grew up in and love, and so I wanted to be able to create something that I would have loved to read growing up, especially in my 20s and teens when the city is overwhelming and you're trying to figure yourself out."
Li says the outlet’s unique characteristic is what she calls an action journey that includes four parts, which is The Green Line’s core editorial and business model.
They first produce an explainer that unpacks systemic problems, which is then followed by
a long-form solutions-oriented interactive feature that reports on existing solutions to that problem. They then host an event that could include the reporter of the long-form story, community and industry leaders, and members of the public to talk through solutions to the problem that are explored in the feature. Lastly, they publish an article that reports on the event that they hosted that crowd-sourced solutions, and reflect those solutions back to the community.
"(People) are then empowered to take action on those problems in a way that actually resonates best with them,” she says.
The Green Line’s most recently published issue, “How MuchMusic Shaped Toronto’s Identity (external link) ,” explores the music channel’s history in the city and how it redefined Toronto’s cultural reputation. At a recent event on March 19, 2022, community members were invited to brainstorm ways to motivate Torontonians to support the city’s local music scene after parent company Bell Media relaunched MuchMusic last year.
Their first project, “Living with COVID in Toronto (external link) ,” published at the beginning of April, covered COVID-19 in the city of Toronto and the ways in which the government and society have been handling it. The explainer looked at what the last two years were like for Toronto. The long-form feature compared the current pandemic to the 1918 Spanish flu and how the city navigated that and what lessons can be learned from it. The following event was what Li described as an intimate gathering in which they facilitated discussions about lived experiences, barriers, and solutions, among other topics.
Li says she’ll know she’s been successful if young and underserved Torontonians go to their site and tell her that they used their resources to help them navigate their life.
She adds that The Green Line has helped her connect with other community members who want to take action on issues that matter to them in their communities. “I feel more empowered and connected to the rest of my city,” she says.
