Journalism is still basic to our lives, especially now
Dear readers, I don’t want Canadian journalism to vanish into the ether and neither do you. Protecting it is in everyone’s interest, yours and, admittedly, mine.
The Star is asking readers to register, which means signing up for free for full access online. Yes, at some point you’ll be asked to pay for a subscription but not yet.
Expecting free online journalism is something that snuck up on all of us. We used to buy it without question. Journalism was basic to our lives, like bath towels and the CBC. And snow shovelling. And horrible egg salad sandwiches. The only thing we expected for free was water, and then they bottled it.
Times changed. The expectation of free journalism is wrecking a business being crunched and crushed by the disappearance of paid advertising. This comes at the worst possible time.
News is booming. There’s fire, flood and pestilence, Trump Trump Trump, whoever the Americans are bombing today, your mortgage, your savings, big crimes, little crimes, who Putin has poisoned, what species are dying, what Prime Minister Trudeau said, the Conservative split, low sperm counts, international migrants, water shortages, quarrels minor and major, taxation, private affluence, public squalor, Space Force, child abuse revelations, women and men fighting for women’s rights, the return of hats, horror in Yemen, and so on, endlessly.
I read news all day and it feels like running in a swimming pool.
There’s always Premier Doug Ford’s personal propaganda channel, Ontario News One, in which a fake reporter — she studied journalism at Seneca College, more’s the pity — offers only clubhouse political advertising.
But for actual reporting of stories, the kind where people and political parties freely disagree, you’ll go elsewhere.
I admire great journalism but there are some stories that stay in your mind forever. In 2017, Star investigative reporter Brendan Kennedy looked into the death of a fragile Ontario woman in jail. What happened to Teresa Gratton?
Kennedy did the most delicate thing. He meticulously traced and painted a woman’s life that progressed downwards in small steps: her husband’s back injury, her anxiety, credit card debt, a disagreement over cheques, opioid dependency, eviction, shoplifting for food and clothing, jail, a transfer to a distant jail, where, abandoned by her doctors and guards, she began an appalling withdrawal from prescribed opioids. She died alone.
Everyone’s life can go wrong in baby steps. It starts out with one unfortunate thing, then another, and another. Suddenly you’re in freefall.
Kennedy’s story was important to me because it taught me how everyone can fall, the poor, the rich and the simply unlucky. If this story didn’t stick with you, others have, I’m sure. They appeared in competing newspapers, too, and they’re all worth reading and paying for.
I recall a novelist, a smart good person, complaining about the Globe and Mail paywall blocking her from reading a column about publishing. She said it was annoying and rude, and the Guardian (free) was so much better, politely asking for donations.
But she herself does not write for free. She lives on what readers pay for her novels. So why expect journalists to write for free?
Newspaper companies provide the structure on which journalism is built. They pay for technology, offices, Brendan Kennedys and their editors, a water fountain, lawyers, sales staff, data analysis, a code of ethics, a public editor to build reader trust, hourly information distribution, and a system where reporters can write damaging things about powerful institutions and know they have big-league backup.
The Star is asking readers to register, so it knows who its readers are, their neighbourhoods, and what they like to read.
And for readers who don’t like bits of the Star, including my column — congratulations if you’ve read this far — here’s a hack.
Register or subscribe and then read what you like. Don’t read what you dislike. The Star’s keeping track, as am I.
So you can, in the polite passive-aggressive way that’s very Canadian, vote me down. Including when I write about drunken Scots like Sir John A. Macdonald. I’m part-Scottish, I’m tough and I can take it.
And then, in this new once-again-profitable world of journalism, let’s all get along famously.
The Star is asking readers to register to know who its readers are, their neighbourhoods, and what they like to read