Few
people notice or really care, but there is a daily newspaper crisis in Canada. It
is a crisis that has huge ramifications, now and certainly over time, for our
country and our culture.
The
daily newspaper industry is in fact dying and resuscitation efforts have been
meagre and not well thought out.
The
Canadian Media Guild, representing workers at CBC and the country’s largest
news services, estimates that between 2008 and 2016 more than 16,000 media jobs
disappeared across the country.
Accurate
numbers are difficult to assemble because news media job losses mount every
month. However, it is likely that roughly 10,000 of the 16,000 jobs were lost
at newspapers.
In
the U.S. between 1990 and 2016 the
newspaper publishing industry shrunk by nearly 60 percent, from roughly 458,000
jobs to 183,000 jobs, the U.S. Bureau of Job Statistics reports.
What
we do know for sure is that Canadian daily newspaper titles such as the Orillia
Times and Packet, the Guelph Mercury and the Moose Jaw Times-Herald, which
served significant urban areas for decades, no longer exist.
Last
November the Canadian newspaper industry took a huge hit when Torstar Corp. and
Postmedia Network Inc. traded 41 papers then
closed 36 in places where they compete. The closures, including weeklies and
dailies, eliminated 291 jobs.
This death spiral has prompted a daily newspaper
industry attempt to get the federal government to include help for journalism
in its cultural policy.
The Trudeau government did commission a study of
the problem, which last year resulted in the report titled The Shattered Mirror. It produced a number of good thoughts and
recommendations, which the government has pretty much ignored.
A Commons committee also investigated the failing
industry and made some practical recommendations. Those also have been ignored.
Trudeau and his ministers have done nothing to
help newspaper journalism because they feel that they cannot "bail out industry models that are no longer
viable."
That is an uninformed, unintelligent position.
First, it shows a lack of knowledge about the
importance of daily journalism to a country’s democracy and culture. Secondly,
the industry does not need a financial bailout. It needs fresh, smart thinking
to help it reinvent itself in an age where online companies (Facebook and
Google to name two) are amassing trillions of dollars by killing traditional
industry models.
The newspaper industry desperately needs help
in re-inventing itself. Its own efforts to date have been pathetically slow and
unimaginative.
Just one example is the TorStar launch of Star
Touch, a tablet platform that cost the company $40 million and two years of
re-invention time. Many people in the industry said it was a silly project
destined to fail. It did and was closed down last summer.
Re-invention efforts outside Canada have been
better. Companies like the New York Times, Washington Post and The Guardian in
England have been somewhat successful in their efforts to provide strong online
models that produce journalism that people are willing to buy.
More and more Canadians are getting their non-local
daily news from online dailies in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, London and
Melbourne. That likely is the future - people around the world subscribing to
one or more online dailies located in major world centres.
Community newspapers, like this one, have a
brighter future than the dailies. That is because they focus on hometown news
that people want and need.
As the daily newspaper industry has shrunk,
huge black holes have developed where news coverage no longer is available to the
entire country. Newspapers like the Moose Jaw Times-Herald and the Orillia
Packet and Times shared their news with newspaper and broadcast services that
distributed it nationwide.
The dailies that survive now are mere shadows
of themselves with much reduced news coverage areas, skeleton staffs and
therefore less news to share.
The result is Canadians have fewer news sources
for learning about what is happening in other parts of their country.
Instead of saying “why should we do anything to
help?” the Trudeau government should be asking “what are the ways we might
help?”
That’s the way leadership is supposed to work.
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