not the practitioners of journalism—lazy, drunk, or otherwise—who are the real villains in this piece. There is no shying away from the fact that it is the owners and publishers who have bankrupted and/or destroyed the value of Canada’s great media companies, and they’ve been getting away with it for decades. That, as much as anything, begins to explain how utterly dreadful Canadian media have become. Ben Bagdikian once wrote, “Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s St. Matthew Passion on a ukulele.”7 Well, the average Canadian newspaper is an instrument that has been stripped so bare that trying to be even a second-rate reporter in this country is like being asked to play Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” on a washboard. You have to wonder if it’s even worth trying.
Should anything be done to rescue Canadian media from themselves? The question seems to hit home especially hard when it comes to newspapers, because even though they are very much fading from view as the journalistic vehicle of choice in today’s sea of zeros and ones, there remains a belief—maybe just among the Vinyl Cafe demographic and former newspaper reporters like me, who remember what a good paper can do—that newspapers have a weight and authority that other media cannot match and never will. They have a “fixity,” as one study of print- and computer-based reading describes it, that even good news websites can’t match. “The printed page was, to the study group, a cultural object.”8 In Vancouver, which now bills itself as an international city—or certainly it sells its houses at international prices—it wouldn’t be the worst thing to have a good newspaper to wake up to every morning. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Our daily “cultural objects,” the Vancouver Sun and the Province, are less like lanterns illuminating the modern world and more like lava lamps fitted with 20-watt bulbs.
Rider on the storm
SO, WITH MY way largely unlit by any bright lights in domestic mainstream media, in 2015 I embarked on a voyage of discovery about the state of Canadian media that quickly became, with apologies to author Ronald Wright, what one might call A Short History of Regress. No longer an industry insider, my time outside of mainstream journalism has given me a more multi-faceted view of the media than being a lifer would ever have allowed, but it carries its limitations. I do not consider myself an industry expert and I’m certainly not an academic, but my detour through the world of conservation, community development, policy advocacy, philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, organizational development, and plowing the fields of social innovation in search of social impact—well, that’s not a bad base from which to try to make sense of what’s happened to Canadian media.
This is a big industry in a big country and it’s not realistic to think that one can get one’s arms around it all, so I followed my nose. I was referred to people somewhat opportunistically, I was biased more towards newspapers than television and broadcasting, and I just glanced at magazines. I visited one J-school, not lots. I leaned more towards content than technology. My inquiries focused mostly on English-language models, at home and abroad.
What follows is not just a battlefield casualty report, but a search for solutions. I entered the fray in part with an eye to how philanthropic foundations or mission-focused investors might contribute innovation funding in the media space, as many do in the US. So I spent a good amount of time viewing what I learned through that lens, as opposed to just what is or isn’t working in journalism per se.
And finally, who I sought out, who I left out, and the conclusions I drew were informed by my values and my beliefs about what the role of media should be. This includes my discontent with the media status quo and my history of personal advocacy for social change, particularly with respect to environmental and indigenous issues in Canada and abroad. Thus my analysis is inseparable from a basic set of assumptions arising from my experience and personal passions, including the following beliefs:
•Robust, independent, and fearless journalism is essential to the proper, engaged, pluralistic, accountable, and transparent functioning of our democracy. Or, to quote from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, news and information are “as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets, good schools, and public health.”9
•Canadian philanthropy is delinquent in its almost total absence of support for good journalism, abdicating what should be a leadership role in enabling widespread and effective dissemination of progressive thought in a country that spent a decade being beaten black and Tory blue by Stephen Harper.
•Progressive organizations and forces have been losing the battle for narrative, and the lack of diverse and independent media constricts the passages through which it is possible to argue for positive social change and policy reform.
•While one would like to think that all journalism is, by definition, public-interest journalism, the fact is that most of it is not, and public-interest journalism has suffered most of all from a combination of spending cuts and the ensuing declines in content and competence in our mainstream media.
•Our ability to help shape a culture of innovation, and to advance transformative change in Canada, is hobbled by the narrowness of a national conversation that is constantly circumscribed by economic and political forces that are the antithesis of a transparent, engaged, and fully functioning democracy.
•It is especially urgent for Canadians to continue and indeed to expand upon the conversation with Aboriginal communities that was started—but by no means finished—by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
•With the accelerating urbanization of Canada, rural communities—and especially Aboriginal reserve communities—are hardest hit by the service declines in our media.
•A new, Reconciliation-centric narrative for Canada is unlikely to emerge with anything like the moral and intellectual force that the times demand without a media landscape that reflects the diversity, creativity, and cultural complexity of the country, and the many demands of and on its citizenry.
•Existing media tools for disseminating knowledge and practice—particularly in areas of policy reform, and even more when spotlighting social complexity, poor service delivery, and outright dysfunction—are mostly ill suited to the task.
•Our major newspapers, in particular, are in thrall to big business—energy industries most of all, but also developers, finance industries, and other natural-resource players—sectors that, ironically, are becoming less and less reliable as sources of revenue for media.
To this latter point, it is worth thinking about the extent to which Canada’s historically heavy economic dependence on our natural resources has been mirrored by an over-reliance on an unnaturally small pool of large media players. The price of oil plummets and large swaths of the country become economically unviable. Ad revenue drops and the same goes for newsrooms. As go the tar sands, so goes Postmedia. Just as our energy economy has been slow to diversify into more sustainable fuels, the feet of clay of our media economy, especially that of our newspapers, has been ownership concentration.
When I set out in search of what ails Canadian media, I actually didn’t expect to discover the degree to which media ownership concentration still beggars belief. It is a very real reason why not just newspapers but all our media are in such disarray. Good journalism tends to break out when there is competition, and there just isn’t much of that when everyone’s batting for the same team.
And then along comes the Internet and the bottom falls out of your business, and as a newspaper editor you spend the next decade, even longer, steering at an iceberg and (perhaps not unreasonably, given climate change) hoping it will melt before you get there. Except it hasn’t, and there’s no turning back. Nor should we, because much as I love newspapers and I will try to find a way to read one every
