New report investigates Canada’s media crisis
Newspapers’ sharp decline, shift toward Internet media among the subjects of study
OTTAWA— Canada’s news industry finds itself at a mission-critical crossroads, and needs a helping hand if it is to resume its role as a guardian of democracy, says the author of a major study coming today that is expected to offer a road map of sorts.
The Public Policy Forum study, funded in part by the federal Heritage Department, explores the dramatic decline in the newspaper industry over the past two decades, and how massive layoffs and revenue declines in the professional news business are affecting democracy.
The report comes on the heels of what was just the latest in a series of layoffs by Postmedia, the country’s largest chain of daily-circulation newspapers.
The company issued layoff notices Tuesday to employees at the Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette and Windsor Star after the company failed to reach a 20-per-cent salary reduction target it set last fall.
Other news giants, including the Star and the Globe and Mail, have also cut staffing levels as they struggle with declining print advertising revenue.
Nor are television and radio newsrooms immune: Canada’s national broadcast regulator warned last year that nearly half of the country’s local TV stations could be off the air by 2020 without a revenue boost to pay for local news programming.
The report, written by veteran Canadian journalist Edward Greenspon, is also expected to delve into the rise of “fake news” and offer suggestions for how government policies, as well as taxes and other laws, can be rewritten in response.
Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly ordered the study as part of an overall review of Canada’s media landscape, looking in particular at how it’s being affected by a shift to the Internet.
The report, titled “The Shattered Mirror: News, Democracy and Trust in the Digital Age,” relied on a halfdozen round tables, polling and focus group research in making findings about how Canadians perceive the relationship between the news industry and the country’s democratic institutions.