Independent news publishers chart a path through the local news crisis

October 17, 2024

We are into year seven of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Local News Research project issuing regular reminders of the steady decline of local news outlets and the matching rise of “news poverty” (no news, or less news) in communities across the country.

The most recent report is here. Represented graphically above as a tally of closings and start-ups (not necessarily in the same communities) it presents a disturbing picture of Canadian news poverty.

The Michener Awards Foundation —the public service journalism organization that co-manages its well known annual awards with the Rideau Foundation—  just assembled a meeting of 40 or so independent news publishers and editors in Charlottetown, hoping to survive and chart a path to “innovation and sustainability.”

The first two hours of the conference were the most compelling as news outlets swapped strategies of audience engagement. The common denominator could be summarized as “independent local ownership equals brand trust and community engagement with readers, advertisers and community organizations,” the latter being particularly effective in generating popular local content. 

The keynote speaker was up next: Steve Waldman of the American Rebuild Local News project and the national intern program, Report for America. His elevator pitch was already known to anyone tracking the news poverty crisis. Measuring by polling metrics, citizens living in communities that have lost most or all of their local news outlets are prey for misinformation spread on social media, increased political polarization and alienation. It’s a democratic crisis, not a business crisis. Or as one publisher told the crowd, “this is not a business. This is a public service that I have to run as a business.”

Familiar to Canadians, Waldman’s prescription is a variety of public policy solutions, that is subsidies of one kind or another at the state or federal level. 

One intriguing idea, as yet not floated north of the 49th, is government assistance to local businesses that place ads in local media. An obvious policy companion to the existing federal reader subscription tax credits, this kind of assistance has the merit of being market-facing. Plus, I speculate, it could be catnip to politicians courting small business as a political constituency.

After speaking, Waldman sat down and tried to eat his sandwich while MediaPolicy and others peppered him with questions about the American experience with public policy solutions (he was just as interested in what Canada is doing).

His political reporter’s account of US legislation falling short by a whisker —in US Congress and at the state level— make it clear that bipartisan Republican and Democrat support is indispensable but within reach. 

That political reality offers a segue to our own Canadian politics of saving local news. The publishers at the conference were grimly aware of Pierre Poilievre’s invective against government assistance to media. 

If the likely winner of the next federal election cannot be persuaded to see the wisdom in the current federal program of subsidies tied directly to the employment of news gathering journalists in communities, it’s possible he might be enticed into a re-design that keeps some form of that program and expands the market-facing policy solutions. 

On the other hand it may be necessary to take Poilievre’s nihilism at face value. His hostility to the mainstream media in general and federal aid in particular is, when combined with his prowess in reaching voters directly through social media, a little too close to Donald Trump’s political strategy. 

It may or may not be fair at this point to make a one-to-one comparison of Poilievre to Trump for demonizing the media, but the Canadian populist’s provocative style is on voters’ minds.

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Steve Waldman’s presentation deck includes this slide charting American public policy proposals for funding local news, compared to Canada. The chart would appear to be missing the Big Tech news licensing payments flowing from Canada’s Online News Act:

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