October 15, 2022
Last week the Chicago-based Medill School of Journalism released its annual report on the state of local news.
Its focus this year is on expanding news deserts in suburban and rural areas. I posted about concerns expressed by Canadian publishers that the Online News Act Bill C-18 as drafted excludes smaller weeklies.
Google opposed the Australian version of C-18 last year and will appear before our Heritage Committee on Tuesday.
Google paid for a poll released yesterday by Abacus to explicitly support Google’s C-18 amendments that it has yet to make public. The proposed amendments were not included in the poll questions.
The poll was criticized on Twitter (not just by me) for its argumentative questions.
The Star published an article describing the Abacus survey with the government’s response.
As I posted previously, Google is funding Canadian lobby groups in opposition to the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11 and is also inviting Canadians to sign its online petition against the legislation now in the Senate.
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The leading academic expert on Canadian broadcasting regulation Robert Armstrong published an opinion column in which he called for article 7(7) of Bill C-11 to be dropped: that section allows the federal government to substitute itself at will for the CRTC in devising regulations and orders.
I previously posted about this issue here after it was highlighted by the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications.
An announcement that may have caught your eye that massively impacts the broadcasting industry: Netflix’s anticipated move into advertising-supported streaming video will begin on November 1st when it introduces its $6.99/month service.
A similar move by Disney+ is expected soon.
MediaPolicy.ca 