Bell Media layoffs prove we do indeed need to talk — about media

Fresh off another round of Bell Media “revitalizing ” its operations by canning hundreds of journalists and technicians, it's time we had another talk about the media in Canada. (Full disclosure: my partner works for CTV News, part of the Bell Media empire.)

Let's kick off our little pep talk with a harsh truth: Not many people in this country value the news. Not the advertisers (who have gone digital), not consumers (who prefer to get their news for free via conspiracy-laden sinkholes such as Facebook), and not even the owners of media companies. That Bell Media's parent company, BCE, chose to fund healthy share dividends in the midst of a pandemic while simultaneously swinging the axe in the newsroom when accurate news should be of premium importance tells you how important news is in the overall BCE scheme of things. It's shareholders first, last and always.

To be fair, the sports radio stations Bell Media canned had toilet ratings. But cutting newsrooms like CJAD in Montreal and Newstalk1010 in Toronto and then stretching sister newsrooms over the hole? For a company that loves to bleat about mental health, Bell sure loves to inflict mental distress on their own.

And while this might just be evolution in all of its brutal glory, it doesn't mean we should welcome the rolling extinction of news. Canada's media landscape is already threadbare; scraping it further risks yawning gaps in the coverage that is meant to hold the powerful to account. If big corporates won't tolerate the news being a loss leader, then what hope is there? Then again, BCE might prefer if no one were around to hold it to account. The same goes for governments.

A dearth of reputable news is already the situation in many small Canadians towns, and is increasingly the state in most big cities, too. To wit, the paper in your hand (thank you) is now produced out of a “revitalized” (read: slimmer) joint newsroom with the Ottawa Sun. The current path of stripping and squeezing doesn't have much further to go before it's one person choosing Shutterstock images and rearranging wire copy from third parties. What are the chances that person will also be able to read complex financial documents or doorstep a politician?

This isn't to absolve media organizations of their atrocious handling of the internet revolution. It's hard to convince people you're essential if you don't value your own work. Sharing news content for free in the early days of the web needed to be quickly backed up by some form of monetization strategy, lest everyone grow accustomed to getting the milk for free. Even if more organizations are now charging, it's not clear digital subscriptions will ever be able to fund a newsroom.

It's a dire situation and the desperation felt by some news organizations is making them lash out at the wrong targets. To wit, the Toronto Star and Postmedia papers recently published a blank front page to protest the creep of big tech onto their patch. But is limiting the ability of Google to connect people with your content really the correct approach? News flash: Print isn't ever coming back. The game now is to monetize your content, including serving ads off your site.

Prioritizing what content news organizations should produce is a good place to start. Not playing by social media's rules would help, too. We don't need more clickbait articles about leaders and their beards. We need more quality journalism about how the leader with that beard is exercising his power. The once-many parliamentary press gallery is now few. Why should it be left to a plucky upstart such as Blacklock's Reporter to find scoops in Parliament's recesses?

It's also time to bet local. Instead of taxpayers funding the woke wars and petty grievances within the CBC, or funding its digital crushing of local papers, I would rather some of that money go toward establishing local digital news operations in underserved markets.

Because if you want to talk about mental anguish, it's called being governed by people who don't fear the reaper called journalism. Let's do some serious talking about how to fix it.