This was the week in news journalism. All bad.

June 17, 2021

Joyce Napier laid off. Let that sink in.

This was not a feel-good week for Canadian news media.

BCE’s announcement of 1300 layoffs, or three per cent of its workforce, across its telecommunications and media businesses shook people up. The Bell Media division will shed approximately 340 jobs.

It wasn’t just the big number, it was also the elimination of CTV’s foreign bureaus and its veteran journalists who are households names. Bell closed six AM radio stations in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and London Ontario which only makes you wonder if FM stations and small town television stations are next in line.

Andrew MacDougall was prompted to write a dirge for the news industry in the Ottawa Citizen, a column I have written in my own head too often.

For those of us who have been dwelling on little else for the last ten years (coinciding with ten years of significant annual losses in local television and the hollowing out of newspaper advertising revenue), these layoffs were just another big bump in a bad road. The only silver lining in this cloud is the bump jolted more people awake.

Yes, it’s Bell’s fault. Bell should always suck it up.

That was the general tenor of social media posts I observed all week: that Bell was whining and blaming its regulatory load. Actually the corporate commentary included very little of that. Here’s CEO Mirko Bibic’s note to staff:

The ‘blame Bell’ distraction even went so far that a Toronto Star story noted that Bell Media made $52 million last year across its profitable specialty news channels CTV News, BNN and CP24. In fact, Bibic reported that CTV’s overall news operation —adding in its 35 local television channels and many radio stations— lost $40 million last year. Those numbers are consistent with published CRTC data.

And we haven’t even begun to talk about Corus’ Global News, the nation’s second largest private television chain at 15 stations across the country. They no longer have the luxury of being owned by a cable parent company with healthy profit margins (although it’s allowed them to make the transition to its StackTV streaming service more quickly). The finances at Global are even worse than CTV and there’s the matter of the CRTC’s unkept promise to review the funding of the $20 million Independent Local News Fund that is meant to support independents like Global.

The timing of Bell’s announcement was cynical of course. It came a day after the Online News Act Bill C-18 was approved with amendments in the Senate. The layoffs also set the table for the CRTC’s regulatory hearings to implement Bill C-11 in which the Commission will consider the regulatory load of all broadcasters. Québecor, Corus and Bell have all applied to the CRTC for relief from CanCon spending obligations even though their licenses have a year to run. Québecor’s ownership especially distinguished themselves by cutting the programming before the CRTC even held a hearing. Stay tuned on that one.

If this wasn’t a sufficiently discouraging situation for news media, this week Reuters published its 11th annual global report on news consumption and trust. The Canadian segment revealed big drops in both consumption and trust.

The overall global trend suggested a strong pivot of Gen Z (those born after the year 2000) to getting their news from social media services (that isn’t reported as occurring yet in the US or Canada). This lead one commentator to conclude that in the long run news organizations won’t control their own distribution platforms at all. That kind of trend sounds familiar —think broadcasting convergence circa 2000— and opens up a under discussed future scenario in which Big Tech companies seek to own the strongest brands in news.

Here’s the Reuters report, the two-page segment on Canada is at page 114. The US summary is at page 108:

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