Independent news is more than worth what we’re paying for
My grandfather was an iceman. In the days before refrigeration, he delivered blocks of ice for people to put in their iceboxes to keep food cold. My father, for a time, bagged groceries at a supermarket before somebody decided that the cashier could do it. I tell my children about these longgone jobs and it’s as if these are tales from the Stone Age.
Now I wonder if the next generation will soon be hearing stories about people like me. “There were once people,” it will be recounted, “who went looking for things happening in the world that was important for others to know, and then they revealed what they found. They were called journalists.”
The latest dagger aimed at the heart of journalism is the swap of 41newspapers between Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, and Postmedia, the parent of the National Post. When sports teams make a trade they cherish the player they brought in. In this case, almost all the newspapers have been killed, or will soon be killed by their new owners. About 300 people will lose their jobs. Welcome to the realities of Canadian journalism in 2017. It would be easy to frame the suits at Torstar and Postmedia as the bad guys. You could portray them as ruthlessly focused on the bottom line. Ending a hundred and fifty years of tradition and local service in the case of the Barrie Examiner, means nothing. Leaving small cities with pretty much no local source of news by shutting down Northumberland Today, is simply a matter of cold calculation.
But the real villains aren’t “out there.” The real villains are those who aren’t willing to pay for news.
Free news is everywhere. So it’s understandable that people are reluctant to pay for it. If I were inundated with free doughnuts all day and all night, I wouldn’t be visiting my local Tim Hortons with loonies and toonies in hand.
But if someone were giving me free doughnuts, I think I’d be smart enough to ask where they came from before I wolfed them down.
No one seems to be asking that crucial question when it comes to free news. Where did it come from? Forget the lunatic fringe websites where they post interviews with time travellers just back from the year 2987. Most of us know that isn’t news.
But what about what Google and Facebook deliver? Those mammoth enterprises are many things, but they are not news organizations. Between them they have not one journalist on the payroll. They are happy to look through the work of real news organizations and send some good stories to your smartphone. But they don’t create the original stories.
Consider some recent examples of what we wouldn’t know without journalism.
We wouldn’t know about the scourge of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. We wouldn’t know about a married Canadian senator having sex with a teenager. We wouldn’t know about the questionable tactics of some personal-injury lawyers and some real estate agents. We wouldn’t know about Canadians who avoid paying some taxes by hiding money offshore. We wouldn’t even know that Canada Post drivers often blocked bike lanes without a second thought.
Google and Facebook may have passed those stories on to you, but they didn’t uncover them. And yet they reap the financial rewards. Those who deliver the product are thriving. Those who create the product are dying. That can’t go on indefinitely.
It’s no accident that the first amendment to the American constitution forbids Congress from passing any law that abridges the freedom of the press. And it’s no accident that section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms lists freedom of the press as “fundamental.” It’s because ordinary citizens need a reliable check on the power of the state. And there’s no more reliable check than vigorous, healthy — even zealous — news organizations.
When a government puts out a news release, or a premier delivers a speech, or a candidate for office makes a promise, we don’t need Google or Facebook to just pass on their words. We need journalists to add context, explain motives, and yes, separate fact from wishful thinking (or worse).
News costs money. For a very long time, advertising paid for news. Readers contributed a bit of revenue to news operations, but advertisers did the heavy lifting. That model is dead. Advertisers have fled to Facebook and Google. So readers have to pick up the slack. It’s to our shame that newspapers are allowed to die.
Imagine what people would pay for independent news in North Korea, or Cuba, or Syria. Don’t wait until it’s gone here to miss it. We can live without icemen and grocery baggers. We can’t live without journalists. Mark Bulgutch is a former senior executive producer of CBC News and teaches journalism at Ryerson University. His latest book is That’s Why I’m a Journalist.