Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Toronto-based local news site The Green Line doesn’t just want to inform its audience; it aspires to improve their lives.
The Green Line describes its mission as investigating “the way Torontonians live to report on solutions, actions, and resources that help you become happier in our city.” Launched in April 2022 and named for a local train line, its primary output is a news product pioneered (and trademarked!) by founder Anita Li: an “action journey” that combines traditional reporting, community events, and solutions and action.
Each “action journey” consists of four parts, rolled out weekly throughout the month: an explainer, feature, event, and solutions. A package on “meaningful community,” for instance, begins with an explainer, “Lonely and Priced Out: Why Finding Community Costs More than Ever.” Most places to commune in Toronto, Green Line freelance feature writer Jay Cockburn observes in the explainer, ask you to “pay or pray.” So, for his feature, part two of the “action journey,” he tries the latter, attending church and documenting his reflections as “Confessions of a Godless Church-Goer: Can I Find Community without Belief?”
Later this month, The Green Line will host a community meal and story circle at a local church, built around the theme “finding your people in Toronto.” Following the event, it’ll publish the final step in the “action journey,” a piece exploring potential solutions to the challenge of building local community, crowdsourced from conversations at the event.
Li, a journalism consultant and the journalism innovator-in-residence at Toronto Metropolitan University and formerly an editor for Complex and Mashable, has built a model for local news that’s tailored to connect with millennials and Gen Z in both form and substance. It’s designed to feel accessible and has ambitions to play a role not just in informing us, but making our lives better. (Li is 37; most of her team range from their early 20s to early 30s, she said.) Li’s work in Canada is one attempt to create a news product for a generation that is increasingly disconnected from the concept and category of traditional news.
About two and a half years since launch, The Green Line is profitable, largely thanks to an array of partnerships that make up its “backbone” by multiplying its reach and diversifying its revenue.
Li first began to imagine the project that would become The Green Line during the lonely summer of 2020, when she had more money and time at her disposal than usual. Reflecting on how the anxiety news induced was motivating people to turn away altogether, she zeroed in on how “the thing that makes me feel the best about any situation is when I do something about it.”
By the time she launched The Green Line in April 2022, Li was also focused on the importance of a “connecting point for people,” either virtually or in person, which helped shape her decision to include an event step within her “action journey.” The event, she thought, could feed into the solution step, with crowdsourced solutions from convening people to reckon with problems. To date, The Green Line has published “action journeys” focused on everything from pedestrian safety, to the local housing crisis, to the mayoral by-election, to masculinity in Toronto. (In 2023, The Green Line received the Local Independent Online News Publishers’ award for Product of the Year for the Small Revenue Tier, or publishers earning between $50,000 and $500,000 in annual revenue.)
Li sees The Green Line as having three core audiences: Underserved Torontonians, “culture vultures,” and a third, smaller audience of “action-oriented young urbanites.” Almost three quarters of her audience identify as Gen Zers or millennials, according to her 2023 impact report released this month.
In the early days of The Green Line, Li approached one of her favorite comedians in the city, Danish Anwar, who would create TikToks for The Green Line about life in Toronto, including topics like affordability and the absurdities of high rent. “It’s sardonic humor in a way that’s not…punching down,” she said. “We’re in this together. It’s hard to live in your 20s and 30s in this city.”
Li thinks about comedy as a key top-funnel tool in The Green Line’s “attention journey.” That structure, she says, emulates the good parts of falling down an internet “rabbit hole,” feeding curiosity about challenging issues by pulling the reader deeper. A community member might start by seeing a funny video, or opinion piece, or behind-the-scenes windows into reporting or behind-camera bloopers of The Green Line team on social media. If pulled in, they might move to the next level of service journalism — such as a guide to co-housing, a cost-of-living calculator, or a Q&A with someone who successfully fought a rent hike turned into a checklist for someone to take those actions themselves. Finally, the reader arrives at digging into deeper features and investigative journalism.
Li initially envisioned The Green Line as a social-first publication; before launching the website, she began building a following on Instagram with social-first layouts and videos. “We did tailor our journalism to that platform,” Li said.
In the summer of 2023, Canada passed the Online News Act, also known as Bill C-18, which was intended to force tech companies like Meta and Google to pay publishers to feature their content. Rather than pay up, Meta banned news from its platforms in Canada.
Li declined to share newsletter subscriber and membership numbers for The Green Line. “[We] obviously want a sizable enough audience” to have real impact and build financial support, she said. “Growth does matter to us, but not to the same degree as when I was at [a] venture-capital backed digital publication that only looked at pageviews.” She pointed to comments at the end of The Green Line’s impact report as qualitative indicators she’s proud of, which she said help demonstrate “how we’re different and how valuable, concretely, our journalism is to people’s lives.” In 2025, Li wants The Green Line to increase its publication to 10 “action journeys” within one year (this year, it’s published six). She hopes ramping up publication will grow membership, too.
To Li, The Green Line’s emphasis on in-person community engagement through events protects it somewhat from Meta’s news ban. (The Green Line reported 15,706 event attendees in 2023, though 15,000 of these were through a partnership with the Nuit Blanche art festival.) “It’s slower to build audience through events, through in-person promotions like postering…through our network of partners,” she said. But “those audience[s] tends to be much more loyal and much more engaged.”
In May, The Green Line opened a temporary brick-and-mortar presence as a newsroom and community engagement outpost in downtown Toronto. It partnered with the Scadding Court Community Centre, which owns and operates a market that turns shipping containers into affordable retail space for entrepreneurs. After a run from May to September in a shipping container, The Green Line is reopening a permanent outpost in the community center lobby this week.
For all the investment in in-person community engagement and relationships, Li isn’t giving up on Meta altogether. She considered abandoning Instagram completely but decided “it’s just impossible to overlook the importance of that platform for my audience.” By year’s end, she expects The Green Line to launch a new Instagram account, “TGL Helps,” that will focus on community-based services, instead of news — using the malleability of the definition of news to The Green Line’s advantage.1
Li sees this as a way to get around a Meta ban. “If we’re creating tools that help people concretely, based on crowdsourced information from the audiences we serve,” she explained, “that, to me, cannot really be banned by Meta, because it’s not journalism. We’re just building products that are useful for people to use.”
The Green Line will double down on videos — YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok — in 2025. Li said explainers like this video about what to do after getting an eviction notice are becoming more of a focus for The Green Line — content with evergreen value rather than one-off news stories.
People “are turning away from the idea of big-J journalism and news,” Li said. Even her parents — whose news habits during her childhood, including reading the paper, watching nightly broadcasts, and listening to the radio, cultivated her own obsession with news — “are turning away.”
Social media aside, civic partners are critical to The Green Line’s strategy.
Li called The Green Line’s partnership with CityNews Toronto one of its most important. Li spearheads a biweekly community show co-produced by CityNews Toronto and The Green Line, and CityNews re-airs some Green Line segments. That partnership, she said, has amplified brand recognition. (The show averaged around 144,000 viewers in 2023.) Though traditional broadcasting reaches an older audience, she said, this is a way for her news to reach younger audiences living with their parents, and CityNews broadcasts are aired at restaurants and bars across the city.
Otherwise, The Green Line partners with other mission-aligned grassroots organizations that “have similar concerns about the city in terms of livability.” Last month’s “action journey” focused on a youth basketball pipeline, and The Green Line teamed up with Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. For an earlier “action journey” in March, The Green Line partnered with a tenants’ association, an evictions group, and a land trust group.
The Green Line is profitable. From 2022 to 2023, the organization increased revenue by 125%, Li said. In order from largest to smallest, The Green Line’s revenue streams include partner revenue (such as with CityNews — six-month contracts provide funding for Li to hire one full-time or two part-time staffers to produce the community show — and Yahoo, which pays to republish Green Line stories); corporate grants and government grants; foundation funding (such as from the Toronto and Inspirit Foundations); membership (offered at three tiers: CAD $10, $15, or $25 per month); events (some are ticketed, some are free); and money from merchandise, awards, and sponsorships. Li also personally contributed almost CAD $35,000 to The Green Line in its early days, to build its landing page and website.
The Green Line currently has about a dozen paid staffers — mostly part-time, two full-time, two paid fellows, and two interns working for school credit — and works with several freelancers.
One of the largest government grants The Green Line has received came from the Main Street Innovation Fund, which supports local businesses. To qualify for that funding, Li pitched an “action journey” to a downtown Toronto business improvement area focused on food insecurity.
The philanthropy-for-news landscape in Canada can’t cover the publication’s needs, Li said. “There’s definitely a weaker foundation and investment ecosystem in Canada” than in the U.S., Li said. Because of this, from her perspective, “Canadian outlets are scrappier than [those in] the U.S.”
Li aspires to be a successful “old-school local business” akin to the local breakfast place in her neighborhood called Maha’s. While it doesn’t have the scale to serve everyone in Toronto, it always has an hours-long wait thanks to customer loyalty and deep connections with the community (Li knows Maha, her children, and the people who work at the restaurant), and can afford to close for a month every December so the family can return home to Egypt. Li contrasted The Green Line’s Maha’s-style local model — attentive to its mission, personalized relationships with its audience, and the quality of life of its team — with her time in “venture-backed digital media” like Mashable and Complex Media. The community-based model, to her, has far better potential for sustainability in every sense.
Maha’s “contribute[s] to the community. People love them, and it took time to get to this point, but [they’re] extremely sustainable. And they’re not trying to become, like, McDonald’s,” she said. That, to her, is what a viable business looks like.
For The Green Line, “we’re not going to have skyrocketing growth…but that’s not what I’m trying to go for,” she said. “I feel like the most reliable source of audience is through community engagement, through building in-person partnerships. It’s a lot more reliable and sustainable and rock-solid in the long term.”
