CITY HALL MAKING NEWS
Plays down talk of ‘propaganda’
City staff say they ’ll ask each other the “tough questions” as Edmonton boosts internal news production.
Local officials are quick to say this will not be a $6.3-million propaganda office. But industry watcher April Lindgren says she’s skeptical that a government employee would actually ask uncomfortable questions of the boss, or publish something unflattering.
“Good intentions don’t make journalism. What makes journalism is news that’s produced by somebody who doesn’t have an interest or a relationship with the news sources, so right away, there’s a problem when you have city employees writing about their city masters,” said Lindgren, a professor of journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto.
It’s understandable governments are finding ways to disseminate information on their own, Lindgren said, but it is problematic and confusing when that information is packaged to look like journalism.
According to the proposed operating budget for 2019-2022, the city’s communications branch plans to reduce its efforts to secure “earned media,” meaning efforts to get local news outlets to publish stories about the city.
Instead, the focus will be developing a “greater capacity and skills base” for the city to produce its own stories, and to disseminate them through social media, a blog and other city publications.
Communications branch manager Mary Sturgeon said there’s no plan to make city officials less available to media, and that while producing its own stories, staffers will be asking colleagues “tough questions.”
“It can’t be a propaganda office. I have no desire to be in a propaganda office,” said Sturgeon.
Catrin Owen, deputy city manager of communications and engagement, said the plan is to “complement our relationship with the traditional media with our own outreach to a million Edmontonians in the ways we know they want to be talked to as well.”
Lindgren leads a long-running project that tracks the number of news outlet start ups and closures nationwide. The project’s latest report shows that between 2008 and Oct. 1, 2018, 260 Canadian news outlets closed down, while 93 launched.
Edmonton media is not immune to the trend: in recent years several local news outlets have closed or merged. The latest casualty is Vue, the city’s alternative weekly newspaper, which will publish its final issue on Thursday.
This year, the city’s communications branch has 83.5 full-time equivalent employees.
By 2022, it proposes to have 80.7 employees, maintaining a similar annual budget to its current spending of $6.3 million.
A report by the city auditor showed that Edmonton also spent $4 million on communications consulting between 2013 and 2017.
The city is publishing its own news with tools such as Transforming Edmonton, a website communications staff have been using off and on for years. They ramped up publication this past summer.
The site is separate from the city’s regular website and has its own logo.
City employees are listed as the authors and not identified as staff until the bottom of the page.
The proposed budgets for all city services and projects will be debated by council beginning Wednesday.
This month, the federal government announced a series of tax credits to help media organizations pay reporters producing original content, and for Canadians buying online news subscriptions.
The credits are expected to be worth $45 million in 2019-20, ramping up to $165 million annually in 2023-24.
Details and eligibility are being finalized by an independent panel of journalists.
In Edmonton, local news coverage has been critical of many city programs, including the delayed Metro LRT line, construction headaches for neighbours beside infill sites, and harassment complaints between city workers.
The city auditor has also issued reports critical of certain city operations. His office operates independent of the rest of the city bureaucracy reporting directly to council.