If Canadian newspapers are going to survive, some existing players will need to die
It has been five years since the temporary, one-time federal bailout of the newspaper industry was supposed to have put us on track to recovery. It has beenthe Online News Act was supposed to have dragooned Facebook and Google into assuring our survival in the longer term. How is that working out?
As it happens, the Google money will not be controlled by the major newspapers who had been conspicuously lobbying the government for the link tax, on their pages and off. Mischievously, Google insteadFacebook, meanwhile, took a different route. Told it had been “stealing” newspapers’ content – that is, by linking to it – and would have to pay, in effect, a fine each time it did, the platform agreed to stop.
There is a long history, of course, of industries in this country lining up at the government trough. But until recently the newspaper business was not among them. When the Kent Commission, in its 1981 report,subsidizing the press – to encourage it to spend more on newsgathering – the nation’s publishers rose up as one in opposition, on the wholly reasonable grounds that this would compromise their independence, real or perceived.
But where that phenomenon is today confined largely to the CBC – and to the Canadian magazine industry, no less a ward of the state – in the future the whole news business will be of the same mindset: an industry of CBCs. Perhaps some will continue to be disposed not to take the subsidy. But they will be at a competitive disadvantage relative to those who do.
Opinion Andrew Coyne Coyne Industry News Subsidy People Facebook Way Government Nothing Heritage CBC Herald
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