**Nick Hune-Brown, Executive Editor: **OK, it’s late December, the sun is setting shortly after lunch, every child in the city has a disgusting cold, and my attention is already drifting to how many pounds of butter I need to buy for holiday baking. It’s time for The Local’s annual year-in-review round up! This year we had two snap elections, multiple school boards taken over by the province, the greatest/most crushing sports run in recent years, and big shifts in housing, immigration, and more. Plus, a new transit line finally opened! And people were mad about it! What defined Toronto in 2025 for you?

**Wency Leung, Reporter: **This year was definitely a year of elections! Not only a federal and provincial election, but two by-elections as well—one for a TDSB trustee opening in Don Valley West, and a city councillor position in Scarborough-Rouge Park. With only a 25 percent voter turnout for the latter, though, I suppose there was more interest in the World Series.

**Nick: **The lasting election headline and image for me was: “’It’s Never-Ending’—Another By-Election in Don Valley West.” This poor candidate looks like he’s part of the Shackleton expedition.

**Wency: **An A+ photo from our newest member of The Local, the ever-talented Chloë Ellingson!

**Nick: **Yes, probably the biggest Local news of 2025 was bringing in genius photographer Chloë as our first Visuals Editor!

**Chloë Ellingson, Visuals Editor: **Thanks guys! The decision to run this photo was made before my time on staff, and I can’t express how great it was to see it run. It’s not exactly a typical by-election image, but it speaks to the gravity of this election for those affected. I love how *The Local *focuses on hyper-local municipal matters and backs them up with photos of equal weight (even if slightly unconventional).

**Inori Roy, Associate Editor: **It was also a big year for the other thing we cover as closely as municipal elections—the school board. Wency’s dogged reporting on the TDSB and the provincial takeover has been a mainstay of our storytelling in 2025. Not an easy task to report so regularly on something so untransparent!

Craig Madho, Manager of Operations: It really has been a killer editorial year, and it shows as we approach 1 million reads on our stories! A massive milestone in the history of our small publication.

**Nick: **Quick, somebody write something really inflammatory about the TTC in the next week to push us over the mark.

**Craig: **On the other side, I’d say that my 2025 was filled with thinking about AI and its implications, both for journalism as a whole and our own publication. I think nothing demonstrates that better than Nick’s investigation into “Victoria Goldiee.” It really hits at the core of the issues at the intersection of AI and media.

**Nick: **The only story with its own Slack channel, so I could share updates as a sketchy pitch turned into a much weirder story.

**Craig: **Nothing made my day better than seeing updates come through on that channel. It was like my own personal reality TV show, with hot tea being delivered directly to my computer.

**Carmen Clayton, Business Development Associate: **It also prompted donations and emails from donors in a big way, including this one: “Thank you for proving that, at least in the case of The Local, I can trust what I read.”

**Wency: **Our readers really showed their support all year, starting by donating their $200 tax rebate cheques from the Ford government so that we could dive into the track record of that very same government for our 7 Years of Doug Ford issue. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

**Inori: **The 7 Years of Doug Ford issue, or as I like to think of it, the issue where we tried to make “chair care” part of the public lexicon.

**Nick: **It did not take off, but what a fantastic story by Alison Motluk.

**Inori: **Alison’s reporting on Ontario’s brutally overburdened health care system and the indignities that patients have to go through—out in the open, in hospital hallways—was haunting.

**Wency: **For our federal election coverage, Tai found Elections Canada’s website so confusing and difficult to navigate, he decided to take it upon himself to create our own map of all the candidates running in each GTA riding. That was such a quintessential Local/Tai move; if something isn’t working or doesn’t exist, just build it yourself.

**Tai: **Thanks, Wency. Elections and by-elections are not our favourite subjects to cover because there is usually so much to do in so little time, but it’s our most important work. It’s what our readers value and need to exercise their democratic rights.

**Nick: **Shout out to Inori and the Candidate Tracker team—the only journalists writing fact-checked biographies and platform summaries of every single candidate in Toronto elections.

**Tai: **Having said that, by the late spring, we were just so tired of covering politics that we decided to do something completely different…a whole issue about animals in the city. It never ceases to amaze me how broad a range of topics our journalists are able to cover. In 2025, we put that range into full use, I think.

**Craig: **I am so happy about all the animal stories we did. Between Inori’s worms story and Nick’s story on the horses at Woodbine racetrack, our editorial meetings were always so fascinating.

**Wency: **Inori’s piece on worm harvesting in Ontario was just so, so good. Her enthusiasm for unearthing (haha) the ins and outs of that little-known industry was infectious.

**Inori: **I have to admit, it became an obsession. I can’t believe I actually managed to find someone willing to take me into the field—I’d been rejected a dozen times at that point—and once I was in, it became a part of me. Worm puns 24/7. Anytime I saw a sign in a gas station window out in rural Ontario for bait worms, I felt like I knew the worms. Easily one of my favourite stories I’ve ever gotten to write.

**Tai: **We also need to talk about horses. First of all, there ought to be some repercussions for Nick blowing through every single deadline for the horses story. Secondly, it was well worth it. His 6,000-word piece was our longest of 2025, and when coupled with Chloë’s photos, made for one of the most beautiful and harrowing stories we published this year.

**Nick: **Tai, I already told you I needed that extra time for an important investigation into whether or not there were more bunnies in Toronto.

**Inori: **Nick, are you still getting unsolicited photos of bunny sightings from everyone in your social circle?

**Nick: **Sure am, and the other day, someone asked me to do an investigation into why the squirrels are acting “so weird.”

**Inori: **That whole issue was such a breath of fresh air for the team, it palpably lightened the mood in the newsroom—but without sacrificing our interest in deep reporting and serious issues, like Wency’s meticulously told bird flu story, or Leah Borts-Kuperman’s look at the troubling nature of exotic zoos.

**Nick: **Loved all the animal pieces. Some of the stories I keep thinking about today, though, are from our first issue, on immigration, which tried to capture a moment of shifting sentiment and policy. That seemed like it was going to be the issue of the federal election, then the Trump/elbows up stuff happened, but it’s one of the subjects we’re going to keep thinking about and covering in 2026.

**Wency: **Definitely. That and the ongoing power dynamics between the province and the city. The battle over bike lanes continued this year, speed cameras became a hot-button issue, we still don’t know whether we’ll have school trustee elections in the new year.

**Nick: **Tai and Craig, this is our sixth year doing this. How was this year on the publishing side?

**Tai: **On the publishing side, 2025 has been an incredibly successful year. Amidst all the doom and gloom about the state of journalism in Canada, our readership numbers are way up, we’ve nearly doubled our newsletter subscribers, and more people donated to *The Local *in 2025 than ever before.

**Nick: **Tai, would you say that the people who donate to The Local are better citizens than those who don’t, or just better people in general?

**Tai: **Well, you automatically become a better citizen when you read good journalism. But we do appreciate those who have the ability to support us because that helps make The Local freely accessible to everyone. That’s how our non-profit model of news is supposed to work.

**Craig: **People who DO donate to *The Local *are at least very fashionable in their super cool tote bag that is hand-packaged with love by me and delivered on foot by our friends over at Good Foot Delivery.

**Nick: **OK, lightning round to end things: what’s one thing (a story, a picture, an interview, a reporting snack) that stuck with you from The Local‘s 2025? I’ll cheat immediately with two: that time Craig came back from Japan and brought us all exotic snacks and those shockingly smooth ball-point pens. And this story about how frat houses without enough members have essentially become unregulated landlords. Student journalist Ella MacCormack came to us with the idea, we teamed them up with Wency, and the results are wild.

**Craig: **I’m also going to highlight 7 Years of Doug Ford as something that stuck with me, not just because of how reader support helped make it happen, but because of how much I adored the set of illustrations that were made for that whole package. And I’m not sure if this counts as a reporting snack, but my favourite office snack was the cake that Inori made for my birthday—a pumpkin bundt cake with a brown butter, dulce de leche frosting. She thoughtfully made enough so that I could take some to share with my family and friends. It’s unfortunate that they’re reading this now and finding out I ate the leftovers myself.

**Chloë: **My best reporting food was definitely the momos I ate while photographing for the Scarborough–Rouge Park by-election story! Writer Rebecca Gao also publishes a local food newsletter so I just had to ask her for a recommendation. A story that sticks out as one of our best of the year is our recently published Finch West LRT piece. It was so great to see Inori following up with someone she interviewed during her reporting in the Finch West Issue, and having photographer Duane Cole working on this really made it shine. In addition to being a terrific photographer, Duane is a former resident of Jane and Finch, and that kind of experiential connection always elevates our coverage.

**Inori: **Nick, I gotta shout out yourstory from the federal election about Jamil Jivani, the Conservative candidate (now MP) for Bowmanville—Oshawa North, who also happens to be close friends with U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance. It encapsulates what we do best at The Local—taking a hyperlocal issue and illustrating the ways it reaches far beyond its geographic boundaries, and asks big questions about who we are and where we’re going as a city and a country.

**Wency: **From that same issue, I’d have to say it was Inori’s story on the political courtship of South Asian voters. It’s such a smart, thoroughly researched, and thoughtfully written piece about a vital and diverse population of voters that has historically been regarded as a monolithic voting bloc. Even though the federal election is now behind us, our political leaders can’t afford to ignore the interests of the Indian diaspora in Canada—half of whom, as Inori points out, live in and around Toronto.

**Nick: **Is it weird for us to gather here to publicly praise one another’s writing and baking? No, no it is not. When the stories, and cakes, were as good as they were this year, this is just telling the truth—journalism’s highest calling. Tai, any last words before we head into 2026?

**Tai: **If 2025 was a year of experimentation—in covering provincial and federal politics for the first time, and in wildlife journalism—2026 will see The Local going back to our roots. We’ve got a ton of health care stories in the pipeline for the first half of the year, and on the back half, we’ll get back to covering municipal elections. I can’t say much yet, because we’re still planning and scheming, but expect our local election coverage to expand beyond just Toronto proper. The final thing I’ll say is that The Local is thriving because we have a non-profit model that intrinsically rewards journalism that is good and deep, and serves our communities. A big thank you to everyone who reads, subscribes, and supports our work.