No News Is Bad News
Also by Ian Gill
Hiking on the Edge: Canada’s West Coast Trail
Haida Gwaii: Journeys Through the Queen Charlotte Islands
All That We Say Is Ours: Guujaaw and the Reawakening of the Haida Nation
For Heather . . .
. . . always far, forever dear
CONTENTS
Introduction: Requiem mass media
1. No Country for Old Media: Our Shrinking Public Square
2. What’s Happening Across the Pond?
3. What’s Happening Closer to Home?
FOREWORD
WHO IS TELLING Canada’s stories? Does anybody care? Why should we?
A lot of Canadians are looking for answers these days as the nation’s newsrooms rapidly diminish.
With corporate concentration at an all-time high and those few owners challenged by plummeting ad revenues and an obsolete business model, the long-term outlook for traditional media in Canada has never looked so grim.
Print and broadcast media have been shedding journalists over the past decade or so, but the situation was never so stark as it became in 2015, as the debt-laden Postmedia, which already owned most of Canada’s major daily newspapers, borrowed more money to buy up the equally challenged Sun Media chain of more than 170 smaller dailies and weeklies.
By early 2016, despite the massive and uncontested takeover, Postmedia teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Breaking its own vows to keep its newsrooms separate and competitive, the company laid off dozens more journalists (including me, and with more to follow), and merged Sun and Postmedia newsrooms in Edmonton, Ottawa, Vancouver, and Calgary.
Into the middle of this mess cheerfully wandered writer and social entrepreneur Ian Gill, a former print and broadcast journalist at the Vancouver Sun and the CBC, and currently a regular columnist for the Tyee.
Gill set off to explore how other countries—from Italy to the UK to Australia to the US—are coping with the inevitable erosion of mainstream media in this digital age, and what is starting to emerge in its place.
He talked to insiders and innovators, and in this intelligent and highly opinionated critique offers keen insights into today’s media landscape, and better yet, hope for the future.
There are no sacred cows in his lively and engaging analysis, which takes on everyone from the CBC to the Globe and Mail in a breezy style which will make you laugh, wince, and most importantly think.
His assessment rings true, particularly for those who, like me, have lived through the slow, shuddering decline of the Canwest and then the Postmedia/Sun Media empires. But it also goes further than a number of recent books and articles on this topic, specifically seeking out a wide variety of experts on the latest and most promising forms of media.
Other countries, Gill notes, have successfully made a head start with new and economically viable models, even as Canada remains “stuck in a decade-old holding pattern” of aging (and listing) media corporations.
He makes the point that it is clearly time to shake off the status quo, but he also never loses sight of his core principle: that a healthy media makes a healthy democracy.
No News Is Bad News is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand how we got here, where we’re headed, and maybe, just maybe, how we might make things better.
—MARGO GOODHAND
Margo Goodhand is the former editor of the Edmonton Journal and the Winnipeg Free Press, and most recently the author of Above the Fold on TheWalrus.ca, a look at the state of Canada’s newspaper industry.
INTRODUCTION
Requiem mass media
FIGURE 1. Pillars of salt: One year after this cartoon was published, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News closed its doors, two months shy of its 150th birthday. (Rocky Mountain News)
That giant sucking sound
THAT GIANT SUCKING sound you hear? Oh, that’s just the implosion of Canadian media. Shame about that. You’d think someone would have done something. True, there have only been a few telltale signs, things like the ritual slashing of the country’s journalistic workforce and the erasure of billions of dollars of shareholder value from large media companies. There have been spectacularly ill-advised media mergers, especially in broadcasting and newspaper publishing. Media ownership has become so concentrated it’s a wonder your newspaper or television broadcast doesn’t come with a health warning. And then there’s that darned thing called the Internet.
Canadian media industries are collapsing. Newspapers have been particularly hard hit. Once-venerable papers, some as long-lived as Confederation, have closed outright. Those that survive are shadows of their former selves, their newsrooms gutted, their content mostly worthless. All this has happened under the noses of regulators who don’t do their jobs and reporters who mostly don’t do theirs, either—at least if the job of a reporter is to help people make sense of the world, including their own corner of it. In the meantime, the owners and investors—they too have failed us, being far too slow and dull-witted to have seen, let alone responded to, the massive disruptions that the Internet has wrought on media the world over.
We are just now waking up to how badly Canadians have been caught off-guard by the global media revolution, and how much it affects us all. The hollowing out of Canada’s media is bad for democracy, and it runs counter to the claim that in the post–Stephen Harper era, Canada is somehow “back.” Actually, we have become a media backwater, and it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
For me, a former newspaper journalist, what is happening to Canada’s newspaper industry feels personal, which might partly explain why my distress at the parlous state of Canadian newspapers veers towards the intemperate. I feel like we are being robbed blind,