I have been associated with journalism for 70 years, going back to 1953 when I began writing sports stories for my hometown paper, The Dryden Observer. There was a small catch to that gig. There was no pay attached.
However, two years later clips of those stories got me a paying job as sports editor of The Trail Daily Times in B.C.. From there came stints at The Calgary Albertan, The Regina Leader-Post and The Edmonton Journal before I accepted a transfer to The Sault Star as editor in 1975 and remained until I retired in 1993.
I had the good years, when newspapers were still the main source of news for most people. My, how things have changed.
Upon retirement, I used to enjoy a drink while reading The Sault Star before dinner. Initially I would finish the drink long before I had finished the paper. Now I have finished the paper having hardly started on my drink.
Once king in the news and advertising business, the daily newspaper is slowly fading from the scene, especially in smaller centres. The Sault Star dropped its Monday edition several years ago and now publishes only on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
Because of this drop in popularity the newspaper industry, which had stood on its own for so long, has had to go to government for help.
It got some through the Online News Act, Bill C-18, but I see it as a band-aid at best, providing help to only the largest newspapers and I am not sure it will be enough to keep all of them afloat.
The Act is designed to force tech companies such as Google and Facebook to negotiate compensation deals with news organizations for posting or linking to their work.
Apparently Facebook and Google have already signed partnerships with some news organizations, including The Globe and Mail, to pay for the right to use their news articles, even though it has been announced that Canadian news will disappear from their sites with the advent of Bill C-18, which is expected to come into effect by the end of the year.
The Parliamentary Budget Office, an independent body that provides economic and financial analysis to MPs and senators, reported that the bill would give the Canadian news industry a cash injection of around $329-million.
On the surface that looks like a lot of money but I can’t see any of it trickling down to news outlets, newspapers, broadcast or digital, in smaller markets.
Google and Facebook for years have essentially filched news from Canadian news organizations, getting for free the news that these outlets paid to gather.
I believe it is high time they paid up.
But I can’t see them paying for news that comes out of smaller centres, Sault Ste. Marie being one of them? Not on your life. And that’s the rub.
It led to a battle before the Senate committee hearings into Bill C-18 between those who will benefit financially from it and those who will not, who in fact claim they will be hurt by it in that the tech companies’ platforms will no longer point readers toward their sites.
I feel for the digital companies but I believe they will survive/ They may lose a few readers but probably half the hits they are getting through Facebook and Google will be hits from people who have become regular visitors to their sites anyway.
My fear is for the newspapers in small communities, who will not get any help through Bill C-18 because they really won’t have much, if anything, the tech giants would want to buy.
And where those in digital have very little cost in getting their news to readers, the papers are saddled with a much-higher cost of production. Along with labour costs, they have to pay out for ink and paper, as well as distribution over land rather than air waves or Internet as is the case with digital.
I think many Canadian newspapers blew it years ago when they didn’t jump on the digital bandwagon, coming up with clean, crisp websites rather than the imbecilic cluttered pages they did design.
Their ad sales people should have been flogging two for the price of one, ads that would appear in print and digital. I thought it should have been a winning formula but it never seemed to take hold.
And then cell phones really put the nail in the newspaper coffin.
Readers had all the news they would ever want right at their fingertips, some coming for free, others through subscriptions.
I subscribe to the National Post, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. They are all available on my phone or computer at home.
The news columns of The Sault Star and the digital websites First Local News and SooToday are available on the web at no cost.
Michael Friscolanti, editor-in-chief of Village Media, which includes SooToday, in an opinion piece said Facebook and Google steer a lot of readers their way and their vow to abandon the Canadian news business means “a lot fewer people will see our reporting, which will threaten our ability to continue that reporting.”
I can’t see it.
Digital is here to stay. Most of these sites became operational before they had any association with the tech giants and they will continue on, with or without that association.
As for the survival of newspapers, I am not so sure. I think in many smaller centres that rather than the trend being toward dailies, it will be toward weeklies with accompanying websites.
Actually, I never thought I would see the day that the watchdog of government would be looking to government for survival. And won’t that affect its status as a watchdog? After all, it is hard to believe it will bite the hand that is now helping feed it.
