For those directly involved in the news business, there has been much speculation and guessing of what is needed to keep not only newspapers, but the media in general, afloat and healthy in Canada in the internet age.
It’s become fairly obvious, at least to me, that online ad revenue isn’t going to cut it. After watching newspapers close around the province, including in cities I used to work in, after almost nine years in the industry, I fell victim to the chopping block. The Burnaby NOW’s sister paper, The Tri-Cities NOW, was shuttered by our parent company, Glacier Media Group.
I was fortunate to land on my feet here in Burnaby and have felt grateful ever since.
But the situation got me seriously thinking about the industry I care about and still hope to be employed in until I’m ready to retire, in a few decades.
How do we keep newspapers, radio and TV news stations healthy and strong and performing the all-important task of informing the public and keeping our democracy honest? How do we achieve that without hard-working journalists and media organizations selling their souls to advertisers for paid content, blurring a line that most don’t want crossed?
To me, the answer starts at the root of the problem. It’s clear, no matter the model, people aren’t interested in paying for news. And advertisers are looking to social media giants like Facebook as alternatives to get their message out over the printed word or traditional TV spot. The internet is genuinely killing the news business model.
So, if we’re going to save traditional media, the internet is the answer. Why not make service providers charge a small levy on every customer’s monthly internet bill?
Perhaps a loonie or two on each bill would go into an arm’s-length fund or organization that distributes the money to media companies across the country. You can put all kinds of fun restrictions on the money, like making sure the dollars go toward news gathering sources, more reporters, or projects that are in the public interest, not into a CEO’s wallet.
You can even come up with a fancy name like the “Canadian Media Please-Save-Us Fund.”
I kid, of course. But a couple hundred million dollars annually would probably help keep more than a few news organizations around the country afloat and doing the good work they do.
People still want the news and are more than happy to go online to get the story of the day. So Canadians, by way of their monthly internet fees, are actually paying
for their news, but it’s going directly to the service provider and not the organizations paying people to do the work.
I see it as an issue of fairness, and public interest.
But ultimately, this sort of levy isn’t going to be voluntary and would require the government to step up and make it law. And we know how hard it is for politicians to propose anything that could be spun as a tax or handout to private industry.
Having a disappearing news media might seem like an attractive proposition to some politicians, but I’d urge them and anyone else to consider what the future of our country might look like if the trend continues.
Jeremy Deutsch is a reporter with the Burnaby NOW.
