The missing ink
Newspapers have been the traditional lifeblood of society — building and informing community. What happens if they disappear?
If your local newspaper went out of business, would you still get the news you need? Most of us — 86 per cent of Canadians — believe we would.
That’s an astonishing number. It’s a deeply worrying one.
Perhaps we feel we’re swimming in news because it comes from all directions and sources, even when we aren’t looking for it: from friends, strangers and news outlets, passing on links and likes. In the constant influx, we’re less likely to notice who is providing it, and that local reporting may be an ever-smaller stream in a flow of repackaged stories.
When we find a story through social media or an online search, more than half the time we aren’t aware of its origin — who reported and wrote it. We just know we got to it through Facebook or Google, according to a survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which issues an annual report on digital news.
This unawareness of where news comes from may explain Canadians’ complacent belief that they would continue to be well-informed if their local paper folded, says Bruce Anderson of Abacus Data, which produced the poll with these findings in early June.
The state of the news industry, battered by the digital revolution, is a big story this year. Two in-depth reports, one by the Public Policy Forum and the other from the House of Commons heritage committee, detailed the effects of falling advertising revenues and subsequent job losses.
Both reports suggest some form of government financial aid to help the news media adapt to yet-unknown new business models. The call has been taken up by an industry association, News Media Canada, which in June asked the federal government to provide $350 million a year to support coverage of civic news during the transition. The main goal, says council chair Bob Cox, who is also publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, is to preserve newsroom jobs as companies cut costs.
The reports and appeals don’t address a second challenge of the digital revolution: that while news organizations struggle with business models, communities and institutions are learning to produce and distribute information without going through the traditional media gatekeepers.
A new ecosystem is evolving, and it’s changing the way we think about news: what it is, who creates it, who gets to tell the story. This has been the focus of the 2016-’17 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy.
But it’s very difficult to imagine a strong information ecosystem — to imagine a well-informed society — that doesn’t have strong professional journalism at its core.
Newspapers have long been the main supplier in any community’s news system. They do the most sustained reporting on the widest range of topics, from daily coverage of government and social beats such as health and justice to occasional investigations that uncover dangerous or corrupt practices.
What happens when these sources of information dry up? What might happen if a paper like, say, the Winnipeg Free Press shuts down? What would the people of Winnipeg know about their city and what their governments were up to?
No one should worry about losing the Free Press any time soon, though it is facing the same challenges as all newspapers. It has local owners committed to its survival to the extent that they’ve taken no dividends since 2015; any profits have been reinvested.
Its employees are also committed, agreeing to an 8-per-cent pay cut if revenues fall below a certain level in the next two years (in return for a company promise of no layoffs).
But its newsroom has gone from 100 employees in the summer of 2010 to 67 this July. Many Canadian newsrooms have been cut more drastically.
At the Free Press, ingenuity is filling some of the gaps. When the company decided to outsource the layout and editing of its print pages to Torontobased Pagemasters North America, for example — most Canadian papers have outsourced this work — some copy editors became writers. Other employees took on hybrid jobs: Someone may edit for the first four hours of a shift and then switch to writing; a page designer may post stories to the web and help tweak layouts when necessary. When the newsroom became too small to support more than one full-time editorial writer/editor, the Free Press came up with an “adjunct editorial board” that still fully discusses issues important to the community. Six writers in different departments participate in a weekly ideas meeting, take turns writing editorials and each day give feedback on the paper’s editorial stand.
The Free Press has two reporters at the provincial legislature and one in Ottawa, an increasingly rare position among local papers. It also publishes stories on amateur as well as professional sports, book reviews written locally and a Saturday section of in-depth stories.
Civic journalism, says publisher Cox, is journalism that informs communities about themselves.
“Local sports coverage informs the community about itself, and local theatre coverage informs the community about itself,” he says. “Even though they’re not public institutions, they’re certainly coverage of the things that are core to a community and to a healthy community.”
So what would the people of Winnipeg have been missing on Thursday, July 13 — a day chosen at random — if the Free Press weren’t around?
Several women who saw a Free Press story online about a man who grabbed a female jogger wouldn’t have come forward with their own experiences that might involve the same assailant.
Winnipeggers would have missed a story about the impact of a government cut in outpatient physiotherapy services.
They wouldn’t have learned how a forest-fire centre based in Winnipeg organizes relief crews from around the world.
The burial of a Ghanaian woman who died trying to cross the border into Canada in late May would have gone unreported; so would the loss of trees in a local wetland, cut down by a developer.
In all, the Winnipeg Free Press produced 40 local stories written by staff and freelancers on July 13:
Local and government news: 16 stories and four briefs Local business: three stories Local sports: seven stories (one freelance) and one brief Local arts: two stories Weekly auto section: four local stories (one staff, three freelance)
Columns: three local freelance columns on health, personal finance and lifestyles
Opinion: one staff editorial, three local opinion pieces 24 staff photos This was one day. Over 365 days, year in and year out, this is journalism that documents the community: in big events and small, policy and humaninterest articles, stories that make us fear and stories that connect us.
How informed would the city be without it?
“Local sports coverage informs the community about itself, and local theatre coverage informs the community about itself.” BOB COX PUBLISHER OF THE WINNIPEG FREE PRESS