July 13, 2024
The Ontario government has announced it will spend $25 million of its advertising budget on news media outlets certified by the federal QCJO program for original news reporting.
That’s a quarter of the province’s annual $100 million advertising budget for government ministries and major agencies. Because of the QCJO requirement, the new spend will go to paper and online “print” media but exclude television and radio broadcasters (including their news websites).
It wasn’t disclosed how much of an increase the $25 million represents within the province’s existing ad spend on print media. Searching for a proxy comparator, a Globe & Mail story noted that the federal government spends about $1 million —-one per cent— of its $89 million ad budget on print media (and $10 million on television advertising). Illustrating that, here’s a graphic from the 2023 federal report on Ottawa’s ad spend:
Print media’s 2023 share of the federal ad budget is quite different from “pre-Internet” days; the earliest data that I can find on the federal website is for 2002 and reveals that the print media share of federal ad spending was 22%:
News Media Canada lobbied for the new policy and so applauded Ontario’s move upwards to the 25% share of spend. Spokesperson Paul Deegan wrote in a Globe & Mail op ed that there are 4,350 news journalists employed in Ontario.
That number suggests the provincial ad spend is worth $5,747 per journalist but, unlike formal programs such as the QCJO federal aid to journalism and the Online News Act regulations, the distribution of the Ontario ad spend is not rationed per news outlet or journalist.
The Globe also story mentioned that government advertising policies to benefit local journalism exist at the municipal and state levels in the US.
Ontario’s ad spending rules are notoriously soft on partisanship, conceding a wide ambit to self-congratulatory publicity by the incumbent government. Old provincial rules that required government ad campaigns be vetted as non-partisan by the provincial Auditor-General were gutted by former Premier Kathleen Wynne in 2015 and, after repudiating its promise to restore the old rules, Doug Ford’s Conservative regime has grown to love the new ones.
The Ontario Auditor-General’s 2023 report says that most of the government’s advertising — promoting Premier Ford’s health and education expenditures— would not have passed muster under the pre-2015 rules.
My sometimes interlocutor on media policy Peter Menzies harshly criticized Ontario’s new ad spend policy as a threat to the independence of the press. Alas I don’t agree. But Menzies does point out that according to the provincial government the ad spend program “will be reviewed on a quarterly basis to ensure it is having the desired effect of promoting local content and culture and supporting Ontario jobs.”
As he says, that’s a short leash for news organizations who write about the government every day.
There’s nothing stopping the Auditor General from conducting a quarterly accounting of how the $25 million is being divided and whether the Toronto Sun does better than the Toronto Star.
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MediaPolicy last reported on the possible sale of US media conglomerate Paramount on April 4th. I decided against updating you on the bidding ping-pong that followed with multiple bids, rejections and suitors.
Now there may be a final deal that sticks on a bid from the original suitor Skydance Media.
That’s the company run by David Ellison, son of Larry who owns the tech giant Oracle and also the entire Hawaiian island of Lanai (sounds like a Bond movie, wouldn’t you agree?). Did I mention that Ellison pater is the second richest man in America?
The deal has a break up fee of $400 million should Paramount owner Sheri Redstone find a better offer in the next six weeks.
Skydance is spinning the new deal as the reinvention of a storied media company as a “tech hybrid.”
There’s a very readable story in the New York Times that opines, in an overstated way, that Skydance is walking into an industry on the precipice of disruption.
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You’ll have to excuse me, I am not up to commenting on this week’s revelations about Nobel Prize winning author Alice Munro’s late husband Gerry Fremlin molesting her daughter when she was nine years old.
But I recommend Ken Whyte’s excellent Substack column.
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On a brighter note, everyone who loves media needs a good news story now and then. Here’s a heart warming one: the return of local print media to Haidi Gwaii.
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