It's not looking very good right now. I don't think it is. I live in a small, rural community in Canada called Salt Spring Island, and we're very blessed to still have a local paper. It makes a huge difference to the way the community understands and relates to each other.
There needs to be a very serious study on whether some level of public support is needed, but we need to take that problem head-on as a single, coherent problem. Some of my concern is how news has been supported to date. There are a lot of small, piecemeal and quite complicated programs all adding up to a pretty significant level of funding that doesn't necessarily go where it's needed and doesn't necessarily close the news gap, but is very non-transparent to ordinary Canadians.
So many people in our country are starting to worry that the news is fundamentally beholden to the federal government or to tech platforms, and we need to make it extremely clear that's not the case through a single system that anyone can audit for themselves.