Turmoil reflects larger reality
When this newspaper and the entire Saltwire network was granted creditor protection a few weeks ago, a fellow ancient scribe asked what
I was going to write in my presumed “last column,” suggesting that I should beat up on management for having messed up.
He was referring to my previous column; so here we are, two weeks later and still going. If that sounds iffy, it’s about as much certainty as you get in the media world these days. Is there hope for calmer seas?
I’ve been plowing through the big picture, of which Nova Scotia and all of Atlantic Canada are, as usual, a tiny but not different part.
First the gloom. The digital warriors are saying, with the usual tech bravado, that print will disappear completely within three to 10 years, arguing that the with-it generation has never had a newspaper in its hands and doesn’t want one. The figures are grim: a third of all newspapers, dailies and weeklies, have disappeared in North America in the last 20 years, along with journalism jobs in the tens of thousands.
Some 6,000 newspapers remain but they’re closing at a rate of two to three a week, mostly weeklies. And many of them are considered “ghost newsrooms” with no full-time journalists, just the odd freelancer and stuff from here and there. There’s talk of “news deserts,” vast smalltown and rural areas with no local news at all.
But there’s pushback. According to myriad studies and surveys in North America and Europe and beyond, there’s more public trust in print (even if the “print” is a newspaper website) than in the digital stuff as people become overwhelmed by the news-asbaloney cacophony. Also, advertisers are finding that print ads are taken more seriously than ephemeral digital ones.
People are also still more willing to pay for print than digital. And according to Scientific American, it’s easier to remember information from paper than a screen — screens are bad for the eyes, and so on.
Meanwhile, there’s actually a bit of new growth. In the U.S., a half-dozen new papers — or at least newsroom-based websites — have sprung up on a non-profit basis funded initially by philanthropists. The Baltimore Banner, rising in a difficult place and with 80 newsroom staff, is considered the main one. Meanwhile, new publications are rising among communities of colour.
Is there reason to believe that a certain sobering is imminent, even a reckoning for news as infotainment and outright deception, with artificial intelligence hovering as a new tool of deceit? Can the role of editor and producer — which is largely to keep falsehood in check — take some flesh away from the lunacy?
Let’s take a step back. It’s not just newspapers (in their print and digital forms) that are under the gun. Witness large-scale layoffs recently at CTV and other Bell Media holdings, including 45 radio stations that were dumped. Mainline TV networks everywhere are under the gun, with streaming video having bypassed straight TV watching.
The rise of TV in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s is what first undercut the domination of newspapers. With me, it was the Montreal Star, where I mainly started out, that went under in 1976. My journalistic life afterwards was marked by a constant stream of print publications shutting down. Sometimes I’d get the phone call while I was halfway through a piece for them, as happened with the 4th Estate weekly and Atlantic Insight magazine. And now we’re here.
As for the current situation, like most I can’t imagine a Nova Scotia without a Chronicle Herald, so I presume that the courts and the money guys will work something out. Hopefully, the same can be said for The Cape Breton Post, The Charlottetown Guardian and The St. John’s Telegram, which are also part of Saltwire.
As for the weeklies, that becomes more tricky. One of the points made by the journalism professors is that the world has never been better served by news from afar. What’s lacking is local news.
As I contemplate my local Saltwire weekly, the Tricounty Vanguard, a shadow of its former self with its office shut, I realize why. The community it serves is itself a shadow of its former self, with most aspects of its life having their centre elsewhere. I note only residual interest in the local political, social and business dynamic.
As for having messed up, when Saltwire was formed and took over 14 weeklies along with the other properties a few years ago, it did seem to me like a move of hope over calculation — the hope being that there was still enough of a Maritime and Newfoundland pride in these institutions to keep them going.
But apparently not (similar backfires are being reported in the U.S., where large newspapers took over a bunch of smaller titles and they blew up).
Calmer seas indeed. Don’t count on it. This is a bit like climate change and the larger reality generally (media edition), in which the fix depends on us.