Thank you.
I'm a professor of journalism at the Toronto Metropolitan University. Thank you for inviting me here.
I run something called the Local News Research Project. In that capacity, I've been tracking developments in local journalism since about 2008.
I'm not going to list all of the recent announcements that add up to bad news for people counting on local journalism to keep them informed. I think everybody has a pretty good idea of that.
I will say that there's no obvious silver-bullet solution to the challenges that news media in Canada—or anywhere else, for that matter—is facing. News organizations are casting around for alternative business models at a time when people are disengaging from news, when social media outlets are playing a lesser role in referrals to news organizations, when advertising is down and shows little sign of recovery and when Canadians' willingness to pay for digital news has actually been declining. I think this is in large part because what they're being offered is not great, so why would you pay for it?
Like Jen, I'm a bit confused about the nature of the forum. I thought I would focus my comments on the appropriateness of the government providing support for the news sector, how that might play out in a discussion and what should be talked about.
I do think that there is a role for this conversation, if only to help Canadians understand that they are getting less and less access to the news they need to effectively participate in the democratic process, engage with their communities and navigate daily life. The government's own polling last summer showed that more than half—I think about 56%—of people surveyed thought the number of news media outlets has stayed the same over the last 10 years. This changed when participants were presented with some data on how many outlets have closed. When they were armed with that knowledge, 47% of people said it was a matter of some concern.
That data, by the way, came from the Local News Map, which I run. Our most recent report showed that more than 500 local news outlets have closed in the last 15 years. Three-quarters of them were community newspapers. Only half as many have launched over the same period, most of which are, not surprisingly, digital players. I think they're playing a growing and important role in the news landscape—the local news landscape in particular.
Another issue that I think needs to be talked about in the context of what role government has in supporting local news is to ask if government actually has the information it needs to make informed decisions about the policies it's adopting. For instance, we don't really know where there are true news deserts where no local news is available in Canada, despite all of the conversations about that. How is good policy going to be developed out of that if we don't actually know where the needs are the greatest? How can that situation be rectified? I think that's a headache for news organizations.
We also don't know what news organizations exist at the community level across the country. Pick a place on the map. We have no idea what's going on there in terms of the providers of local news. Again, could we create a searchable directory, first of all for the purposes of policy-making, but also, even more importantly in an increasingly complex world, so that local people can go somewhere and find out sources of local news that they can go to directly?
My next suggestion is that whatever form the forum takes, there should be a serious conversation about the role of the CBC at a time when news outlets are closing shop, scaling back services and telling Canadians that they can't afford to cover news in their communities while also satisfying the needs of their shareholders. What will the local landscape look like if the CBC English-language service is defunded in the way that's being proposed by the Conservative Party of Canada? Do we think that for-profit media is going to go on a massive hiring binge in that aftermath to fill in the gaps?
Also, what does cutting millions of dollars from the CBC budget—as is currently under way—mean for local coverage? We have yet to hear that from the CBC.
When I talk about what I mean by an informed discussion about the role of the public broadcaster, I'm talking about a place where we can actually talk about the growing body of academic literature that links strong public media to a bunch of benefits. They've been shown to produce news that's more diverse and has more substance than their commercial counterparts. Public media also tends to produce programming that more broadly serves poorer communities and more disadvantaged populations that for-profit media tend to neglect.
There's research showing that public media and government-subsidized private media are actually no less critical of government than non-subsidized, privately owned media. Have a look at the National Post.