Unifor National President (left, of course) weighed in on the Google cash controversy
June 22, 2024
It’s never a happy occasion but this week the UK-based annual Reuters Digital News Report was published with both global and Canadian numbers.
Our posts (linked above) are intended to summarize just a few of the reports’ many insights, although I neglected to praise Colette Brin and her colleagues at Laval for their great work on the Canadian drill-down.
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Last weekend I reported on the controversy of Google picking the darling of the alternative press, the Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC), over the establishment coalition Online News Media Collective (ONMC), to be the bargaining agent in distributing the Google $100 million of compensation payments for Canadian news content hyperlinked on its search engine. The term “bargaining agent” might be a misnomer: the regulations to the Online News Act already distribute the compensation based on a headcount of employed journalists.
The controversy was not just that the CJC was created by publishers representing perhaps one per cent of Canadian journalists and news content. Rather it was the surfacing of the mistrust and mutual enmity between Google, mainstream media and the alternative press over the entire legislative process that drove the enactment of Bill C-18 in the first place.
It’s difficult to see Google’s choice (extracted from the federal government) of the unrepresentative CJC as anything but spite for the ONMC’s members having demanded the compensation provided in the bill over Google’s objections.
Some wouldn’t speculate, but I will: whether Google’s strategy of making Canadian newsrooms crawl over broken glass to get their fair due from the Search monopolist is part of its plan to discourage legislators in California and US Congress.
As posted last week in MediaPolicy, the ONMC certainly came out firing after Google handed the CJC board the keys, demanding tight CRTC supervision of the cash distribution. Opinion columns appeared in the National Post and La Presse questioning the representativeness of the CJC.
On Wednesday, Unifor National President Lana Payne was quoted in a Toronto Star news story questioning the business relationships linking a number of CJC board members as a conflict of interest. Payne’s union represents several thousand journalists and media staff.
By Friday, the CJC had posted a “FAQ” in which it described the membership of its board as temporary and promised a permanent elected governance structure that will be inclusive of mainstream media outlets. It also promised to “work closely” with the CRTC “to ensure compliance with the funding formula prescribed in the Act and regulations.”
Tempest calmed, at least for now.
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Last week MediaPolicy posted on the misery of Corus Entertainment and its Global News chain. Just to prove that June is the month from hell for the Canadian broadcaster, the company announced the retirement —“effective immediately”— of long time CEO Doug Murphy.
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