This article originally appeared in the Line.
By Peter Menzies, March 18, 2024
It was less than five years ago that Andrew Coyne was bemoaning the speed with which the newspaper industry was selling its soul. These words were published in the National Post on July 19, 2019.
“‘Before long,’ I gloomily predicted in November of last year when the government first unveiled its plans to bail out the newspaper industry, ‘we will be back for more.’ I had thought two, maybe three years — after we had gotten used to taking money from the people we write about and had discovered that, far from solving our problems, it had only encouraged us to put off dealing with them.
“I had not imagined our sense of entitlement would already have grown so bloated that we would be sticking out our hands for more even before we had pocketed the first dollar.”
Earlier this month, a once proud, fiercely independent industry had its begging bowls — which are growing in size — topped up by Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge. And it still hasn’t taken a single significant step towards solving its problems.
The Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), originally launched as a temporary program paying the salaries of reporters at selected outlets, was intended to provide $10 million a year for five years while the industry adjusted to the realities of the digital age. No obvious adjustments have been made, although the fund has embedded both dependence and the outrageous sense of entitlement Coyne and a few others predicted.
The LJI will now last until at least 2027 and will pay out just under $20 million annually. While she was at it, St-Onge plucked another $90 million from the Ottawa money tree and sent it to the CBC to make up for a similarly-sized decline in advertising revenues which just may have been linked — I’m going out on a limb here — to declining viewership.
All this, of course, is on top of the extension and doubling of the Journalism Labour Tax Credit. Initially launched, like the LJI, as a temporary five-year stop gap valued at $119 million annually, it is now worth twice that and there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the co-dependency is fully entrenched.
More is coming.
It was very obvious at its November hearing that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is receptive to pleas from wealthy telcos like Bell and Rogers and will be creating a news subsidy fund, assumedly by demanding loot from streamers like Netflix and even, if they can figure out a way, Meta. I’m guessing it’ll be about $100 million.
Then there’s the $100 million Google is coughing up thanks to the Online News Act. The CRTC will be holding consultations later this year to decide what sort of code of conduct it will impose on recipients. No doubt equity-seeking groups will be mentioned.
Once that comes through, a swift back-of-a-cocktail-napkin calculation adds up to close to $500 million annually to (not counting CBC) news media thanks to Justin Trudeau’s government.
Not satisfied, industry lobbyists are — as Coyne feared — back for more.
A couple of weeks ago, Brent Jolly of the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) and Paul Deegan of News Media Canada penned an op-ed calling on provincial governments to join the party.
“The federal government has adopted a suite of policies designed to support quality public service journalism,” they wrote. “Now is the time for provincial governments to do the same.”
Only a few years ago, the very idea of a journalist being dependent on a politician for his or her existence was considered beyond abominable. And yet, with lightning speed, the news industry (with laudable and notable exceptions) has made its peace with that, and now appears to be entirely content with the new status quo. Not only has it successfully put off dealing with its problems, the only evidence of innovation now involves developing new lobbying strategies.
Readership, as independent business journalist Mario Toneguzzi recently pointed out, is tanking. Weekday paid circulation at subsidized titles like the Calgary Herald and Calgary Sun is now a sickening 18,379 and 9,908 respectively in a city of 1.5 million people. A quarter-century ago, when I was publisher of the Herald, the city only had two-thirds that many people, but we still had circulation of anywhere from 125,000 a day up to closer to 150,000 on Friday — the day we had the TV Guide issue. (The Sun, if memory serves, had circulation of about 70,000, up to 100,000 on Sundays.)
So, if the trends of the past five years continue, by 2030 almost 100 per cent of legacy newsroom salaries will be paid by, as Coyne put it, “the people we write about” and almost no one will be bothering to buy what is written.
We can debate the extent to which feeding on the government’s teat influences the honesty of journalism in today’s Canada. What seems inescapable, though, is the extent to which so many of the sucklings continue to display a shocking disinterest in serving the reader in the manner every study shows they want to be served — objectively.
As legendary Saskatchewan broadcaster John Gormley recently told the House of Commons Heritage Committee, legacy media’s problems are not due to lack of government funding but are related to failure to adapt to technological change and because “it bet on a modernized definition of journalism that backfired and lost audiences.”
Indeed. The view persists in newsrooms that none of its problems are related to the manner in which it conducts its business. This theology was also preached to the Heritage Committee when the CAJ’s Jolly smugly insisted that without government-funded legacy media all that would remain is “YouTubers and TikTokkers” while Marla Boltman of the Friends of Canadian Media brushed off the idea of consulting the public regarding public policies for journalism.
The public’s view, she told the committee, should be taken with a “grain of salt.”
It’s unlikely comments of that nature — blowing off both those innovative and principled enough to refuse the cash and those who have lost trust in those who do — will lead to anything other than industrial hospice care and morbidity.
As Tara Henley, host of the Lean Out podcast, put it to the same committee, “Without trust we have no audience. Without an audience we have no revenue. Without revenue we have no path forward.”
“Canadian media does need to be saved, that is very true,” said Henley. “My message is simple. The government cannot save us. We have to save ourselves.”
Which puts us right back where we started five lost years ago.
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, past vice-chair of the CRTC and a former newspaper publisher.
