NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS: CANADA’S MEDIA COLLAPSE — AND WHAT COMES NEXT
By Ian Gill
The story is a by-now familiar one. Print is locked in a death spiral, starved for revenue because of the switch to a “culture of free” online. Newspapers are either cutting back or shutting down entirely. Postmedia and Torstar, to take just two of Canada’s biggest players, engage in public spats arguing over which of them will be going out of business first.
If you don’t know what’s been happening to the news business then you haven’t been following the news. In this new book former journalist Ian Gill isn’t sounding a fresh alarm. We’ve had warnings for decades, going back to the Davey Report and Kent Commission on the concentration of media ownership. Of course more recently things have been getting worse, faster, with disruptions fueled by the digital revolution and the move to alternative advertising avenues, not to mention the fallout from the economic downturn that struck in 2007-2008, but this is still a story that has been covered extensively elsewhere. Just last year an excellent book by Brian Gorman, Crash to Paywall: Canadian Newspapers and the Great Disruption, provided an in-depth look at the situation, with insightful analysis and thoughts about the shape of things to come.
No News Is Bad News doesn’t go into the same detail as Crash to Paywall (which it oddly doesn’t reference), but is instead a breezier, more condensed broadside. While the problem both books address is the same, what’s different is their attribution of blame and their roadmaps for the future.
For Gill most of the blame lies with the news media itself, in particular the old, “legacy” news dinosaurs that have failed to adapt to the new media environment while at the same time cutting off access to revenue for up-and-coming alternative news sources.
To some extent, particularly with regard to the large chains, this criticism is deserved. The idea that newspapers can cut their way to profitability, for example, has clearly been a disaster, and thus far there have been few bold new ideas from the “wounded giants of yore” for monetizing the digital audience.
That said, the current crisis is largely the product of forces over which the news media has little to no control. At its best, you could argue that journalism in Canada today is better than it’s ever been. The problem is that the Internet economy is geared toward producing a handful of big winners at the cost of the destruction of everyone else, and the cream doesn’t always rise to the top. This same dynamic has led to the hollowing out of the middle class generally and the laying waste of entire cultural ecosystems, as described by Scott Timberg in Culture Crash.
Better journalism isn’t going to fix the problem of a vanishing audience, and the question that remains is how quality reporting, which is very much in the public interest, is going to be financed. A lot of Gill’s book is taken up with his interviews with people who have enjoyed some success in alternative (usually non-profit) media start-ups, but there doesn’t seem to be any clear, long-term, scalable business model aside from snagging grants from charitable foundations or subsidies from the government.
Like many a surveyor of the Canadian cultural landscape over the years, what Gill really wants to do is disrupt the status quo. At one time the Internet seemed to be a beacon of hope in this regard, but as we’ve seen it has only led to further consolidation and generally made matters worse. Gill is absolutely right that we need healthy, dynamic news media. The question is whether we want them bad enough.
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Reviews first published in Quill & Quire, November 2016.
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