Evidence of meeting #26 for Canadian Heritage in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was digital.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Darrell Samson Liberal Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS
That is my question. Was the CBC aware of that investment?
Director, CHAU-TV, Télé Inter-Rives Ltée
It knew about it. Of course, we told those in charge that additional funding would be coming from the federal government, but that did not tip the balance in our favour by any means. Our revenues were almost completely cut.
Liberal
Darrell Samson Liberal Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS
So there is no strategy to try to improve the situation. As to the CBC, the agreement has ended.
Director, CHAU-TV, Télé Inter-Rives Ltée
In the coming months, there will some major changes in the CBC's senior management. The current president will be replaced. The vice-president of the French-language network will soon be retiring. We promise to take this up again with the corporation once the new management is in place.
Liberal
Darrell Samson Liberal Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS
So you have to move quickly.
Ms. Smith, you said that to revive the industry, policy innovation was required. Talk to me about policy innovation from your angle. You're coming from an interesting journalism approach. Can you expand on that?
Director, Publishing and Advertising, The Tyee
We're not policy experts. We put our heads down every day and try to keep it running, so I'll be pretty broad.
I think we need to look at different types of government funding and where this can be expanded to help models like ours. The periodical fund does some, but it could be expanded. We could also remove ministerial control from grant decisions at the periodical fund.
We applied once in the first year that it was open to online-only publications like ours. Senior bureaucrats recommended our grant, but the minister killed it. I think it's important to look at that type of funding. It wasn't for content. It was for a business project to help us reach better financial sustainability. Still, it was killed, and it took us nine months to find out. There's a lot that could be improved in those mechanisms.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you, Ms. Hoar. I'm sorry, I'm going to give Mr. Nantel a chance to ask another question, and then we'll have to wrap this up. Thank you.
NDP
Pierre Nantel NDP Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Ms. Hoar, I will let you finish what you were saying.
Director, Publishing and Advertising, The Tyee
That's all I'll say about the periodical fund. I think there's a lot of potential there. I'll add that organizations like ours are caught between a lot of different definitions of media, many of which are antiquated.
We have separate streams of funding and different policy tools for newspapers, for TV, for broadcast, for magazines, and for books, but there's no real definition of an organization like ours. We're neither a magazine nor a newspaper. We don't have a defined sector, a lobby, policy experts, or special lawyers.
It's a very new field, and I think that maybe some of our thinking and some of the government policy and funding are a bit antiquated. Even TV stations are no longer just TV stations; they're also websites.
NDP
Pierre Nantel NDP Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC
Ms. Hoar, may I ask you, since you wrote that other countries are more advanced in your type of hybrid organization, to what country would you refer us to examine this new model?
Director, Publishing and Advertising, The Tyee
That's a good question. Again, I'm not an expert. I don't have tons of examples. Even if you just look south to the U.S., there's so much more innovation and there's so much more private capital going into media experiments. You have an organization like ProPublica, for example, which is like what we do at the Tyee Solutions Society, but way beyond. You have smaller for-profit online entities such as The Texas Tribune, which are accessing all sorts of different capital and making a big difference in their state.
In Europe, you have new models like De Correspondent, which are entirely reader-funded, but in Europe, the EU has fought really hard with Facebook and Google around taxes and tax evasion. For Google in particular, they've worked really hard to get Google to commit to a huge fund called the Google “Digital News Initiative”.
Director, Publishing and Advertising, The Tyee
It's a 150-million-euro fund that online media innovators can access to grow their businesses. We have nothing like that in Canada.
NDP
Pierre Nantel NDP Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC
We're very late on various reactions that we could have to this new environment we live in.
Mr. Harvey, I would like to talk about the recent CRTC decision which provided some flexibility in allocating the 5% that cable distributors have to give local and community stations. That must be good news for you.
Did the community television stations in your region react to that decision? Are there any community television stations in your markets?
Director, CHAU-TV, Télé Inter-Rives Ltée
There are some, but there has been no reaction to that recently. However, CACTUS, an association representing community TV stations in Canada, expressed its disappointment with the decision.
We must keep in mind one thing about community television stations. Between 2001 and 2008, the revenue of cable and satellite companies has gone up significantly. That made a difference of $60 million or $75 million. In my view, they are not lacking funding.
NDP
Pierre Nantel NDP Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC
The purpose of the study is to examine the access to local news of people in the regions. Is it fair to say that you are sort of like the local section of national newspapers?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Mr. Nantel, I'm very sorry. This is all very interesting and everyone seems engaged, but I think we have to end the session now.
I want to thank the witnesses for coming, and I want to thank everyone for bringing up some very new ideas.
We will break for a minute until we start the second hour.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Come to order, please. Thank you.
We have our witness for the second part of the meeting: Dr. Robert Picard, professor, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, by video conference from Boston, Massachusetts.
Welcome to the committee, Dr. Picard. As you know, we are looking at the issue of access across Canada to local news, Canadian content, experiences, stories, etc., regardless of where you live. What has media consolidation done positively or negatively to impact on that? Looking at all the platforms, how are we going to look at what digital will bring us?
I understand that you've written an excellent book about this. I'm going to ask you to take 10 minutes to give us your presentation, and then we will open it up to questions from the committee.
Thank you very much.
Dr. Robert Picard Professor, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, As an Individual
Honourable Chairwoman and members of the committee, it's a pleasure to be able to assist you today with your inquiry on issues of local communities and the news that they need.
I want to share some ideas gained from four decades of dealing with the issues of media economics, competition, pluralism, and the information needs of communities. I've submitted a brief, which I know you have, but I want to highlight a few points and ideas before taking any questions that you wish to focus upon.
The challenges of local news provision are not unique to Canada, but their effects on local, provincial, and federal governments are specific in Canada. Further, the structure and economics of local news in Canada present some particular challenges that you're going to have to address if you're trying to improve the current situation.
Canada's local news provision is built on a backbone of local, daily, and community newspapers. There are, of course, some CBC services that provide assistance as well. Unfortunately, their effectiveness at meeting local community news and informational needs has been diminished by reduced resources and by a concentration of ownership, which have led to the creation of an homogenized content from across the country.
The costs of traditional news production and distribution are making it very difficult for many media to survive in the forms they had in the past. Of course, these are being compounded by digital developments and, more importantly, changes in audience behaviour that are making it very difficult to provide news in the way it was traditionally provided. Digital media are very much increasing the potential to address local informational needs because they have significant cost advantages due to their reduced production and distribution costs.
The committee should be thinking of how you can harness those opportunities, and that should be an important part of any effort to address deficiencies in local news provision.
As I indicated in my brief, particular efforts should be made to support digital news start-ups and young enterprises in digital news, because these are going to be increasingly important in the years to come.
Measures to shore up existing news providers aren't going to solve the problem, however. In the long run, they will fail because the challenges they face are more than just revenue based. They have unfavourable cost structures, and that is being compounded by the ways the public now receives and exchanges information and local news.
That said, some short-term and mid-term measures to support existing providers may be appropriate. These include efforts to help companies transform themselves digitally and to support some specific journalistic functions at the local level that are not being met well today. But any measures to support legacy media should be designed to produce change in the way those providers operate or to alter their cost structures, not merely to replace lost resources. Otherwise, this will not, in the long run, improve the conditions in local news.
Broadcasters also need to be part of the solution. This can be done with increased requirements for providing local news and with incentives and support to improve local news provision and information. It should not be something that is just for community radio or public radio, but for commercial as well.
Ttax and charities laws also need to be considered in Canada, particularly to support the development of not-for-profit local news providers, which are increasingly important in many countries. Canada's current provisions are among the least supportive in the Commonwealth and in the Anglo world for not-for-profit journalism. Significant attention should be paid to what opportunities exist there.
There are no simple solutions to the challenges you're addressing, because we're in an age of transformation in the way that information is created and distributed. Any resolution you seek will need to be multi-faceted and actually resolve the challenges facing news and information provision, and it must be filled with the kind of wisdom and effort that only you can bring to it.
Thank you.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you very much. That was a very succinct presentation. It allows us more time for interaction.
We will begin. For the question and answer period, there's a first round in which members get to ask a question and engage with you for about seven minutes. Those seven minutes include the questions and the answers. Hopefully, we will have time for a second round..
I will begin with Mr. O'Regan for the Liberals.
Liberal
Seamus O'Regan Liberal St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Dr. Picard, for your succinct presentation, but also for the written presentation you provided the committee ahead of time.
I think it's worth noting for the record that we've just heard from The Tyee, out of British Columbia. They have already put their presentation as the headline on their website, thetyee.ca. They've reacted immediately to ongoing events. I think that actually says quite a bit.
You have studied in Scandinavia and in France, not just in Paris but specifically in the regions. It's good that you're here. You speak directly about the Canadian experience in your presentation. I'm always anxious to start talking about solutions, because I think that the problems themselves have been fairly well described by others. This seems to be something that you could speak to quite well.
When we talk about other jurisdictions, can you tell us what some of the more interesting and, most important, effective solutions are that you've seen when it comes to supporting local news by state, regional, or national governments?
Professor, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, As an Individual
Those that seem to be most effective are actually helping local news providers that are currently there to make the digital transformation and to understand how to do that and make that work. The second effort is to help support other start-ups in the community that will do that, particularly if there is not an effective local community news source in that community.
With Canada having so many communities that aren't served even by weekly newspapers or local radio, getting news sources started up by local community groups, by schools, and by others, is very important. We've seen efforts being made to do that in a number of countries. That seems to be bringing back new means of communication, particularly in smaller communities.
Liberal
Seamus O'Regan Liberal St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL
You mentioned—and in fact Robyn Smith of The Tyee brought it up—the idea of breaking up big corporate media. You question whether that's even relevant now in the digital age. Could you expand on that a little?
Professor, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, As an Individual
I think the time for dealing with breaking up the big corporation media is past. It should have stopped before it ever got to where it is today.
Breaking them up today will not help local news very much, because what they are doing already is to combine their local news operations, move activities out of communities, and have very small local staffs. You can break them up, but they're all going to operate in that same way. Instead of having just a couple of players, you're going to have a few large players doing much the same thing.
The key is to provide ways for new types of entrants to come in. One problem that has occurred, particularly in the news media in Canada, is that they have really been protected from competition for too long, and that's part of the problem. They're providing the bare minimum of local news that they can get away with now, and unless you have competition at the local level, you will not solve that problem.
Breaking up the current ownership will not create competition at the local level. It will just change who is the commercial owner at the local level.