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INTRODUCTION

Requiem mass media

FIGURE 1. Pillars of salt: One year after this cartoon was published, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News closed its doors, two months shy of its 150th birthday. (Rocky Mountain News)

That giant sucking sound

THAT GIANT SUCKING sound you hear? Oh, that’s just the implosion of Canadian media. Shame about that. You’d think someone would have done something. True, there have only been a few telltale signs, things like the ritual slashing of the country’s journalistic workforce and the erasure of billions of dollars of shareholder value from large media companies. There have been spectacularly ill-advised media mergers, especially in broadcasting and newspaper publishing. Media ownership has become so concentrated it’s a wonder your newspaper or television broadcast doesn’t come with a health warning. And then there’s that darned thing called the Internet.

Canadian media industries are collapsing. Newspapers have been particularly hard hit. Once-venerable papers, some as long-lived as Confederation, have closed outright. Those that survive are shadows of their former selves, their newsrooms gutted, their content mostly worthless. All this has happened under the noses of regulators who don’t do their jobs and reporters who mostly don’t do theirs, either—at least if the job of a reporter is to help people make sense of the world, including their own corner of it. In the meantime, the owners and investors—they too have failed us, being far too slow and dull-witted to have seen, let alone responded to, the massive disruptions that the Internet has wrought on media the world over.

We are just now waking up to how badly Canadians have been caught off-guard by the global media revolution, and how much it affects us all. The hollowing out of Canada’s media is bad for democracy, and it runs counter to the claim that in the post–Stephen Harper era, Canada is somehow “back.” Actually, we have become a media backwater, and it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

For me, a former newspaper journalist, what is happening to Canada’s newspaper industry feels personal, which might partly explain why my distress at the parlous state of Canadian newspapers veers towards the intemperate. I feel like we are being robbed blind, mugged by the oligarchs, and fed a diet of content you wouldn’t serve in a hospital during a power outage.

I worked in newspapers for about a dozen years in all, both in my native Australia and here in Canada, and I loved the work. My first newspaper was a triweekly called the Whyalla News. Whyalla was a hard country town in South Australia, stinking hot most of the time, an industrial outpost of mostly immigrant workers who built ships and smelted iron ore. The Whyalla News was an incorrigible civic booster. Once I figured out what a reporter was supposed to do (I never went to college and was hired pretty much off the street on the strength of a somewhat fictional resumé typed by my girlfriend at the time), I had some early scrapes with the editor—me trying to get stories printed that rattled the municipal cage, and him succeeding in watering them down or keeping them out of the paper altogether.

It was an amazing—if sometimes discouraging—learning opportunity for me, and for the owners of the Whyalla News, it was a good business. The company ran a large printing press, mixing outside commercial print jobs with print runs of the News. This was in the days of hot lead, with compositors setting type line by line. When I finished my reporting shift, I would go into the shop. I loved the smell and the clatter of the place, and I was fascinated by the skill and speed with which the compositors would set type. I would stick around to watch the first papers come off the press. I thrilled every time at the realization that I could write something up in the newsroom and soon afterwards, through a complex series of social and technological navigations, everything from front-page stories to sports scores and the shipping news would end up on page after page that people would pay money for. It seemed like the work of alchemists.

I was a cub reporter earning almost nothing. So I couldn’t afford to, but I wrote away to Hatchards, one of the oldest bookstores in the UK, and in exchange for a fantastic amount of money, they sent me the five volumes of Editing and Design by legendary Sunday Times editor Harold Evans. Book 1: Newsman’s English. Book 2: Handling Newspaper Text. Book 3: News Headlines. Book 4: Picture Editing. Book 5: Newspaper Design. I have them still, in their impossibly luxe dust covers. I pored over them then, schooling myself in a kind of no man’s land between the high-mindedness of Evans and the low practice of covering agricultural field days in far-flung Australian country towns. I loved every bit of newspapering, including my shorthand teacher, as it happens. I quickly moved on to a bigger paper in Perth, and after a year there, spent two years covering Parliament in Canberra.

When I moved to Canada and got hired at the Vancouver Sun in the early ’80s, the transition to computers was underway, but the Pacific Press building at 2250 Granville Street was still anchored by a massive printing press. After the paper had gone to bed, but before I did, I would sometimes hang around the back shop watching the paginators do their thing, and just like in Whyalla, I would go down to the press room and watch huge newsprint rolls take their turn at hosting the day’s news. Compared to the quiet clicking of the newsroom, the press room was so muscular, so thunderous. All this to say that when it comes to being sentimental about newspapers, I’ve got form.

When I worked for the Sun, the paper was okay, but just okay. Even then, reporters reminisced about the good old days. The Sun was a mediocre newspaper in the 1980s, but while those days were very far from halcyon, they seem utterly brilliant compared to the pallor of today’s iteration. Then, at least, the Sun was not the utter embarrassment to the city that it is today.

After seven years as an editor and reporter, I quit the Sun to join CBC TV in 1988. That posting deserves its own nostalgic affection, even if those weren’t brilliant times for TV broadcasting either, because my gig was actually pretty good while it lasted. I got to do documentaries about important issues and, in particular, was privileged to travel to the far corners of British Columbia and interview Canadians, especially First Nations people, whose voices were otherwise unheard in our national discourse. It felt then that we were performing a very real and very distinct public service. But after successive funding cutbacks and the installation of one too many boneheaded executive producers, the CBC simply wasn’t fun anymore; I left in 1994 to found an environmental non-profit. But I never lost my affection for journalism and even, in small doses, journalists. More to the point, I have never lost my belief in the importance of journalism in public life.

In those so-so days at the Sun, I came to resent the fact that while we started every print run with blank rolls of newsprint, with a licence to put just about anything we wanted on those pages, we mostly filled the paper with garbage. It seemed like such an abuse, such a waste of everything, the high ideals of journalism lost in second-rate thinking by owners, then as now beholden to special interests and happy to hire mediocre managers who did their bidding.

The blood was already starting to drain out of the Sun when I started there in 1981, the same year the Royal Commission on Newspapers reported on the shocking state of concentration of Canadian newspaper ownership. Like a number of colleagues actively trying to arrest the decline of journalism even then, I joined the Centre for Investigative Journalism, becoming its vice-president for a spell, and I invited Ben Bagdikian—a well-known media critic who among other things helped the Washington Post get hold of and publish the Pentagon Papers—to be a keynote speaker at the CIJ convention in Vancouver in 1986. Three years earlier, he had published a seminal book, The Media Monopoly. Across North America, newspaper ownership concentration was seen as a dangerous blight, and Bagdikian chronicled the disease brilliantly. In the intervening decades, sadly, it has only gotten worse.

Chronicle of a death foretold

CANADA’S SLOW-WITTED AND flat-footed media companies have been on the wrong side of history for almost a generation now, and it is really starting to hurt. For more than half my adult life, I have lived in a great and growing city with two lousy and shrivelling newspapers. Most Canadians aren’t that lucky—either to live in Vancouver, or to have two newspapers, even bad ones, to choose from. Mostly, when it comes to newspapers, Canadians have no choice: they just take what their one local, lousy legacy rag offers up—or, increasingly, they get no newspaper at all. For the 2 0 per cent of Canadians, meanwhile, who don’t live in cities, the pickings are slimmer, and there’s no point arguing about quality because there isn’t any.

Then there’s television. Or in lots of smaller Canadian markets, there’s not, because local original content is too expensive to produce. In larger markets, there is greater variety to be sure, but the television product in this country is mostly so plastic and cosmetic that it’s as if the Mattel toy company bought up our media companies to provide jobs for their product line.

Magazines? Not so much. We lost a Beaver and got a Walrus in exchange, and what’s to like about that? Radio? Mostly noisome bingo callers, unless you are among the legions of Canadians who have had their brains cryogenically suspended in the gelid slush of Stuart McLean’s so-called storytelling in his Vinyl Cafe. Perhaps that’s where to lay the blame for the fact that Canadians have mostly slept through the great unravelling of our national media universe. Dave bastes the turkey while the nation’s media are cooked to a crisp.

But hey, look at us—we don’t all have blue hair and hearing aids. This is Canada, and we have the World Wide Web! Problem is, journalistically at least, we really don’t, because Canada’s media companies have been abject failures in intelligently responding to a digital revolution that began before the turn of this century and has utterly disrupted our media landscape in the decade and a half since.

It is nearing the point that, just as our biosphere is widely thought to be entering a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene—coinciding with a sixth mass extinction of the Earth’s species—our mediasphere is careening towards what might be thought of as a Sixth Estate, with a corresponding die-off of our media diversity—or at least our media dinosaurs.

As a Commonwealth country, Canada has long laboured under the comfortable assumption that our three main estates—the Church and our two houses of Parliament—are counterbalanced by the institutional gravity and probity of our mainstream media, the so-called Fourth Estate. The advent of the Internet ushered in what came to be known as the Fifth Estate.^* The media status quo was quickly overtaken by a less mediated and vastly more disaggregated arena of bloggers and hacktivists, unfettered by the norms of traditional journalism, who have revelled in a new-found freedom to express outlier, often subversive, sometimes cranky or outlandish views—sometimes brilliant work, too—that never would have made it into a mainstream newspaper or broadcast. Social media emerged as an everyman’s latter-day carrier pigeon for releasing whatever thought was top of mind—no matter whose mind or how well-formed a thought. This mostly dumbing down, although some might call it a democratization, of our media has been decried as unhealthy—all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

To some extent, that anxiety is not misplaced. Whether mediated through a Fourth, Fifth, or perhaps now a Sixth Estate—or more radically, not mediated at all—any society that aspires to be taken seriously as a developed, democratic, pluralistic, well-governed, innovative, and creative force in the world—and isn’t that what Canada wants above all, to be a positive force in the world?—needs a journalistic environment that is healthy, exciting, and diverse.

Canada’s is the opposite of that: moribund, flaccid, and as glabrous as Peter Mansbridge’s pate. The blame lies less with the rapid disruptions wrought by new technology and instead with complacent owners, tremulous investors, and inattentive regulators, whose failure to recognize what is happening to media business models has been exacerbated by soft-minded journalists, who have largely missed the story of their own demise. It’s as if Canada’s journalists were assigned to cover a state funeral, and only now are wising up to the fact that the body in the casket is their own.

JOURNALISTS AREN’T EASY to love. They are less trusted than police, schools, banks, and the justice system, and only marginally more trusted than federal Parliament and corporations.¹ But what journalists do is important, and it isn’t just the business of rooting out liars, holding policy-makers accountable, probing the public accounts, championing the underdogs, or hounding the overlords. It is all of those things, but it is more importantly the practice of using stories as a way to help people make sense of their world.

It is not enough to write the first draft of history. The job of journalism is also to recall and reflect on our shared history, to capture or at least help channel the currents of our times, and to help us imagine what sort of society we wish to invent for ourselves and for those who come after us. Yes, debates happen in this country’s legislatures, our rules of conduct are enforced in our courts, and our commerce is carried out, sometimes in public, often in private, and most of the system works for most of the people most of the time. But not always, and not for everybody—which is why our public square needs to include spaces where we can challenge the status quo, encourage dissent, listen at the margins, and champion new ideas, new ways of doing things, new ways of seeing the world, new ways of understanding our place in it. We need new places to share those stories in multiple and evolving ways.

To do all that, good journalism needs a home, many homes actually, but in Canada we’ve failed to keep our media house in order, and our public square is shrinking fast. Canadian journalism is on life-support—not because Canadian reporters don’t know how to do journalism, but because there are so few places to put it anymore. We’ve clung for so long to dinosaur media-business models that while pretty much everyone else in the developed world is driving the journalistic version of a Tesla these days, here we are all crammed into a second-hand Edsel, wondering if we can afford snow tires.

How did things get so bad? Will they get worse? Should we even care anymore? And if so, what should we do about it?

Someone once said that the environment is too important to leave to environmentalists, and the same could be said about journalism. If it is true that as many as ten thousand journalism jobs in Canada have disappeared in less than a decade,² then arguably there aren’t enough journalists around anymore to report themselves missing, and the good ones who have survived thus far are likely to be hopelessly conflicted when it comes to taking proper account of the businesses that generate their paycheques. Veteran reporter Paul Watson has said that Canada’s big media companies, or “legacy media,” have become “old, slow, and lazy” and that Canadian journalists have essentially missed the story, focusing on the changing media landscape as a technology issue, rather than holding their owners, and themselves, to account. “Journalists are very good at putting the heat on other people . . . but they’re very bad at turning the heat on themselves.”³ As such, they have been complicit in their own demise.

With rare exceptions, such as Jesse Brown’s Canadaland podcast and website, there’s a lack of thoughtful reporting on what’s happening in our media. True, media closures (and the occasional opening) are routinely covered in what’s left of our media, and certainly what’s happening to the business produces plenty of hand-wringing at journalism conferences. Then there’s the dutiful quarterly reporting, really a death watch, over Postmedia’s latest losses. Or there’s an occasional splenetic outburst like we heard early in 2016 from the head of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), who scolded television executives for crying poor from the sterns of their luxury yachts or the seats of their private helicopters.⁴ But let’s just say that critiques of Canadian media, when left to Canadian media, don’t exactly brim with honest self-reflection.

When they have been stirred to respond to the crisis unfolding under their very noses, the response has been to plump for a demoralizingly nostalgic and insipid campaign that Unifor, Ryerson University, and a few media companies launched in 2015 called JournalismIS,⁵ which sounds like nothing so much as a drunken reporter about to fall off her stool at the National Press Club of Canada, except you can’t even do that anymore because the press club went bankrupt and shut its doors in 2007. JournalismIS, we are told, “essential to democracy,” “relentless,” “committed to the public interest,” and a “watchdog over the powerful,” and of course in an ideal world that would all be true. But in Canada, it hasn’t been true for a very long time. A more accurate campaign would be called JournalismWAS, and it could take its cue from Monty Python—“I’m not dead!”

Journalists? That’s the same conclave about which Baron Black of Crossharbour once famously said, “We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute ‘commitment’ for insight.”⁶ By that measure, why bother lamenting the loss of a single journalist, let alone an entire division of them? When it comes to journalists, who cares if the breed goes extinct? Those soi-disant “watchdogs over the powerful” have failed to keep a proper watch over their own sacred estates, possibly by confusing what Marshall McLuhan once said about the medium being the message, contorting themselves into a contented belief that mediocrity is a message and a medium both—and journalists are its avatars.

And then along comes the Oscar-winning film Spotlight to remind us that, imperfect as journalists may be, what they do sometimes matters, and sometimes it matters a lot. And Conrad Black should remember that it is the media proprietors, not the practitioners of journalism—lazy, drunk, or otherwise—who are the real villains in this piece. There is no shying away from the fact that it is the owners and publishers who have bankrupted and/or destroyed the value of Canada’s great media companies, and they’ve been getting away with it for decades. That, as much as anything, begins to explain how utterly dreadful Canadian media have become. Ben Bagdikian once wrote, “Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s St. Matthew Passion on a ukulele.”⁷ Well, the average Canadian newspaper is an instrument that has been stripped so bare that trying to be even a second-rate reporter in this country is like being asked to play Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” on a washboard. You have to wonder if it’s even worth trying.

Should anything be done to rescue Canadian media from themselves? The question seems to hit home especially hard when it comes to newspapers, because even though they are very much fading from view as the journalistic vehicle of choice in today’s sea of zeros and ones, there remains a belief—maybe just among the Vinyl Cafe demographic and former newspaper reporters like me, who remember what a good paper can do—that newspapers have a weight and authority that other media cannot match and never will. They have a “fixity,” as one study of print- and computer-based reading describes it, that even good news websites can’t match. “The printed page was, to the study group, a cultural object.”⁸ In Vancouver, which now bills itself as an international city—or certainly it sells its houses at international prices—it wouldn’t be the worst thing to have a good newspaper to wake up to every morning. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Our daily “cultural objects,” the Vancouver Sun and the Province, are less like lanterns illuminating the modern world and more like lava lamps fitted with 20-watt bulbs.

Rider on the storm

SO, WITH MY way largely unlit by any bright lights in domestic mainstream media, in 2015 I embarked on a voyage of discovery about the state of Canadian media that quickly became, with apologies to author Ronald Wright, what one might call A Short History of Regress. No longer an industry insider, my time outside of mainstream journalism has given me a more multi-faceted view of the media than being a lifer would ever have allowed, but it carries its limitations. I do not consider myself an industry expert and I’m certainly not an academic, but my detour through the world of conservation, community development, policy advocacy, philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, organizational development, and plowing the fields of social innovation in search of social impact—well, that’s not a bad base from which to try to make sense of what’s happened to Canadian media.

This is a big industry in a big country and it’s not realistic to think that one can get one’s arms around it all, so I followed my nose. I was referred to people somewhat opportunistically, I was biased more towards newspapers than television and broadcasting, and I just glanced at magazines. I visited one J-school, not lots. I leaned more towards content than technology. My inquiries focused mostly on English-language models, at home and abroad.

What follows is not just a battlefield casualty report, but a search for solutions. I entered the fray in part with an eye to how philanthropic foundations or mission-focused investors might contribute innovation funding in the media space, as many do in the US. So I spent a good amount of time viewing what I learned through that lens, as opposed to just what is or isn’t working in journalism per se.

And finally, who I sought out, who I left out, and the conclusions I drew were informed by my values and my beliefs about what the role of media should be. This includes my discontent with the media status quo and my history of personal advocacy for social change, particularly with respect to environmental and indigenous issues in Canada and abroad. Thus my analysis is inseparable from a basic set of assumptions arising from my experience and personal passions, including the following beliefs:

•Robust, independent, and fearless journalism is essential to the proper, engaged, pluralistic, accountable, and transparent functioning of our democracy. Or, to quote from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, news and information are “as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets, good schools, and public health.”⁹

•Canadian philanthropy is delinquent in its almost total absence of support for good journalism, abdicating what should be a leadership role in enabling widespread and effective dissemination of progressive thought in a country that spent a decade being beaten black and Tory blue by Stephen Harper.

•Progressive organizations and forces have been losing the battle for narrative, and the lack of diverse and independent media constricts the passages through which it is possible to argue for positive social change and policy reform.

•While one would like to think that all journalism is, by definition, public-interest journalism, the fact is that most of it is not, and public-interest journalism has suffered most of all from a combination of spending cuts and the ensuing declines in content and competence in our mainstream media.

•Our ability to help shape a culture of innovation, and to advance transformative change in Canada, is hobbled by the narrowness of a national conversation that is constantly circumscribed by economic and political forces that are the antithesis of a transparent, engaged, and fully functioning democracy.

•It is especially urgent for Canadians to continue and indeed to expand upon the conversation with Aboriginal communities that was started—but by no means finished—by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

•With the accelerating urbanization of Canada, rural communities—and especially Aboriginal reserve communities—are hardest hit by the service declines in our media.

•A new, Reconciliation-centric narrative for Canada is unlikely to emerge with anything like the moral and intellectual force that the times demand without a media landscape that reflects the diversity, creativity, and cultural complexity of the country, and the many demands of and on its citizenry.

•Existing media tools for disseminating knowledge and practice—particularly in areas of policy reform, and even more when spotlighting social complexity, poor service delivery, and outright dysfunction—are mostly ill suited to the task.

•Our major newspapers, in particular, are in thrall to big business—energy industries most of all, but also developers, finance industries, and other natural-resource players—sectors that, ironically, are becoming less and less reliable as sources of revenue for media.

To this latter point, it is worth thinking about the extent to which Canada’s historically heavy economic dependence on our natural resources has been mirrored by an over-reliance on an unnaturally small pool of large media players. The price of oil plummets and large swaths of the country become economically unviable. Ad revenue drops and the same goes for newsrooms. As go the tar sands, so goes Postmedia. Just as our energy economy has been slow to diversify into more sustainable fuels, the feet of clay of our media economy, especially that of our newspapers, has been ownership concentration.

When I set out in search of what ails Canadian media, I actually didn’t expect to discover the degree to which media ownership concentration still beggars belief. It is a very real reason why not just newspapers but all our media are in such disarray. Good journalism tends to break out when there is competition, and there just isn’t much of that when everyone’s batting for the same team.

And then along comes the Internet and the bottom falls out of your business, and as a newspaper editor you spend the next decade, even longer, steering at an iceberg and (perhaps not unreasonably, given climate change) hoping it will melt before you get there. Except it hasn’t, and there’s no turning back. Nor should we, because much as I love newspapers and I will try to find a way to read one every day till I die, many people don’t, and won’t.

So is it time to say goodbye to all that? It would be bad news if there were no news, but does the logic hold that it would be bad news if there were no newspapers, now that they are so seldom synonymous with good journalism? Jim Brown, host of CBC Radio’s The 180, introduced a guest on his show in February 2016 by saying that “according to Paul Watson, a little Darwinism in the media landscape isn’t a bad thing.”¹⁰ Watson was interviewed in the wake of yet another Postmedia contraction in which the company said it planned to merge a number of big-city newsrooms, including those of Vancouver’s Sun and Province, so that one newsroom would produce content for two papers. Watson spent two summers working at the Vancouver Sun in the early 1980s before forging a notable international career covering some of the world’s danger spots (he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for a photograph of an American soldier’s body being pulled through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia). On The 180, he didn’t go so far as to call time on his old newsroom, but Watson said papers like the Sun are part of “an unhealthy system, and readers are saying it’s unhealthy by fleeing in large numbers . . . there’s a trust deficit, and as people find new sources of information they’re learning what the big ones aren’t telling them, and they don’t like that.”

That trust deficit, more than anything, seems to portend a rapid end to most Canadian newspapers. “The media is already well down the list of trusted institutions and cannot afford to sink further,”¹¹ writes Madelaine Drohan, the Economist’s Canada correspondent and 2015 Prime Ministers of Canada fellow at the Public Policy Forum. “Canadians aged 15 to 25 have the least confidence in the media”—they being the coveted millennials who are eventually supposed to take over the country and pay the bills. Without them, my inquiries reveal, like as not there won’t be two newspapers left in Vancouver—or in Calgary, Edmonton, or Ottawa—in just a few short years. In some cities, there might not even be one.

Canadian newspapers are basically dead men walking. It is easy to conclude—although hard to accept—that frankly the sooner we stop throwing good money after bad newspapers, the better. The newspaper era is essentially over, even if the need for good journalism has never been greater. Old, slow, and lazy doesn’t win the race. It’s beyond urgent that we clear the decks and make way for the journalism of tomorrow, because the journalism of today is fast becoming yesterday’s news.

* Not to be confused, in Canada, with The Fifth Estate, a cleverly named and admirably executed CBC documentary television show that is very much a product of mainstream journalism at its best.