In truth, people living in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Ottawa—actually in every media market in the country—have been subjected to such insufferably middlebrow journalism for so long now that it’s tempting to ask who even cares if Postmedia eventually goes under. Well, the prime minister for one, who tweeted after hearing the company’s January announcement that “Journalists are vital to our democracy. . . I’m saddened to hear of the cuts at #postmedia today and my thoughts are with the affected.”31 The affected, of course, being not just journalists but all of us. “Centralized news gathering and opinions, including in local news, do not add to the national debate that helps build a functioning democracy,” said Unifor president Jerry Dias. “With each quieted voice, our democracy suffers.”32 Not so fast, says Kelly Toughill, director of the school of journalism at Nova Scotia’s University of King’s College, who questions how important newspapers are to democracy when there’s so much good content online. “Journalism matters, but the future of newspaper companies should not be confused with the future of journalism,” Toughill writes. “The demise of newspapers breaks my heart—but it won’t break democracy.”33 Chantal Hébert begs to differ, writing in the Toronto Star about La Presse’s almost complete move to digital, save a Saturday print edition, that “the jury is out as to what toll, if any, the shift [to digital] will take on the quality and breadth of [Quebec’s] public conversation.”34
Just think for a moment about what just happened in the preceding passage: informed Canadians debating the importance of newspapers to democracy, a debate waged—democratically—on the editorial pages of newspapers. In a Facebook world, where the most that is demanded of readers is that they “like,” “love,” say “haha” or “wow,” be “sad” or “angry,” and/or share or comment on a story (and keep it under 20 words or folks will scroll down), it is fair enough to be anxious about the quality and breadth of the public conversation, if it can be considered a conversation at all. That’s what’s in danger of going missing in Canada if newspapers become extinct.
And then, days later, on January 25, 2016, this: “The Guelph Mercury, one of the oldest newspapers in the country, is the latest casualty of a wave of austerity that has swept through Canadian newsrooms this winter.”35 The paper, whose publishing history dates back to Canada’s Confederation, published its last print edition four days later. Out on the West Coast, the Nanaimo Daily News went dark the same day.36
“I’m pretty startled by how quickly things have declined,” Dwayne Winseck told the Globe.37 He should know, not only being a Carleton University professor of journalism but a lead researcher for the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project. “Perhaps the most dramatic tale of doom and gloom in the network media economy comes from the experience of newspapers,” Winseck wrote, even before the latest round of cuts and closures. “Newspaper revenues drifted downward slowly between 2 000 and 2008, but have shrunk immensely since from $5.8 billion to $3.7 billion—a plunge of one-third in half a decade.” Of all media in Canada that his study encompasses, newspapers are “the most clear cut case of a medium in decline.”38
The irony here is that concentration and consolidation have always been seen—at least by owners, and by negligent competition watchdogs—as a justifiable sine qua non for media profitability, a bulwark against the vagaries of competition in diminishing markets, a keystone support for keeping the newspaper industry from imploding altogether, taking media diversity down the drain with it. So regulators have tended to approve mega mergers, believing that Canada, with its relatively small, dispersed population, needs to offer corporate media clear pathways to efficiencies so as to retain capacity to do significant journalism—or just survive.39 In return, as part of the bargain, merging media giants promise to develop and subsidize vital, original Canadian content. However, bottom-line pressures inevitably win out. Today’s reality is that concentration and consolidation are simply exacerbating the industry’s lack of profitability (Postmedia being essentially now just a debt-service agency for an offshore hedge fund), driving out what little quality journalism is left, but even more damagingly, serving as a huge barrier to the sort of vibrant, variegated media innovation ecosystem, most of it digital, that has begun to flourish elsewhere. Or as John Stackhouse describes it in his book Mass Disruption, it is a case of an “innovator’s dilemma, the creative deadweight of an old business that not only wouldn’t die but kept showing enough signs of life to prevent anyone from trying to break it.”40
Our so-called “legacy media”—newspapers in particular, but broadcasters, too—are committing a kind of economic and editorial seppuku: they have lost the will to invest in the sort of journalism we used to take for granted, which guts their credibility (and audience), which erodes their revenues, which leads to cutbacks in journalism quality. . . and so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say. Our legacy media today are too busy servicing debt to adequately serve their public, although to be fair this isn’t just a Canadian problem. “Predicting a turnaround in newspapers’ fortunes is a loser’s bet”41 wrote the New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, in a column fretting about the threatened state of local investigative reporting. Sullivan said that “with newspaper profits hit hard by the sharp decline in print advertising, and with newsroom staffs withered after endless rounds of cost-cutting layoffs, local investigative journalism is threatened.” She cited the American Society of News Editors as saying newspaper staffs in the US have declined by 40 per cent since 2003, thereby “leaving crucial beats vacant and public meetings without coverage . . . Of course, local newspapers aren’t the only places doing local investigative journalism. More and more, nonprofit news organizations, digital start-ups, university-based centers and public radio stations are beginning to fill the gap—sometimes in partnerships. But they probably won’t fully take hold while newspapers, even in their shrunken state, remain the dominant media players in local markets [emphasis added].”
And there we balance, uncomfortably—our legacy media teetering on the edge of oblivion, and what few upstarts there are tottering along on insufficient capital, their access to revenues blocked by the wounded giants of yore. In “Postmedia-land,” former National Post and now Walrus editor Jonathan Kay says, “The business model has evaporated. . . Newspapers aren’t dead: A generation from now, I believe, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will still be publishing paper editions. And Toronto likely will have a paper, too—likely a single merged upscale product arising from the consolidation of the National Post, Toronto Star, and Globe and Mail. But the era of the medium-sized, medium-quality daily is in its final act . . . [a] shrinking newspaper industry means there will be fewer resources available for holding government and business to account—especially when it comes to the big, complicated investigative stories that just can’t be done by local broadcast media, or clickbait-oriented web sites.”42
Say goodbye to those Gazettes and Heralds and Citizens and Leader-Posts, those StarPhoenixes, those Suns and Stars because, Kay says, “the coming media landscape is U-shaped. Which is to say, there will be plenty of mass-produced, ad-financed low-quality content