Canadian Heritage committee  You're certainly not alone in wrestling with issues of culture. There are many ways to deal with the cultural issues. Concentration isn't necessary to have good promotion of national culture and national news and information flow, but it's one way to do it, and it has done it.

Canadian Heritage committee  There are those basics. I was in a small English village last fall. I was asking people about how they find out what's going on in the town and how they communicate with the mayor when they need to chat. They said they go to the local pub. Life is very much that way. One of the issues is that we often think about the Internet as something where we have to rely on fixed lines and broadband services, but actually, the Internet as an information source is being jumped over by mobile Internet services coming through the wireless networks that have gotten very good.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think you have to make a distinction between journalism and information. Journalism involves techniques and practices for dealing with information in order to be able to verify it and ensure that it is accurate and fairly presented. Those are techniques that you have. There are journalists in the digital world working every day who are doing exactly those things.

Canadian Heritage committee  I've said “where it's online journalism”, and clearly, online journalism can be every bit as good as off-line. It has nothing to do with the platform it's distributed on. It has to do with what practices went into creating the stories that are put out in a digital world. There's very good online journalism.

Canadian Heritage committee  Horizontal integration is an economic term used in competition policy when you are buying units of the same kind of thing. If you own a newspaper in one city, you'll buy another newspaper in another city, and another, and another. That would be a horizontal integration. Vertical integration is seen most particularly in broadcasting, when you own a production company that makes a program, you also own a channel, and you also own the cable system on which it is distributed.

Canadian Heritage committee  The problem for Canada is that it's extremely high on vertical integration and very high on horizontal integration.

Canadian Heritage committee  What we're moving into is an age in which people get information in very different ways than they used to. We used to get up in the morning or come home in the evening from work, sit down with our newspaper, and work through all 34 or 56 pages of whatever was there. I still do it every morning; I fight my wife for the papers.

Canadian Heritage committee  Schools are a particularly interesting institution in any community, because the first thing they have is facilities, and they also have digital infrastructure, and those are two critical things to begin with. For instance, if you have education in journalism in the schools, they can be used to start covering the local community.

Canadian Heritage committee  Diversity of voices is always an issue. The gender issue is not going to be as strong in the future as it has been in the past, primarily because of who is in journalism schools today. Quite frankly, the majority of students in most journalism schools today are women, so that's shifting along the way.

Canadian Heritage committee  I've seen tax credits doing that. I've seen start-up loan funds being used to do that. The Netherlands has been very creative in the use of media loan funds to start up minority and other media to try to deal with some of the diversity issues and to deal with existing newspapers or broadcasters who want to increase their ability to deal with those communities.

Canadian Heritage committee  I'd say start-up funding, and there are different ways to think about it. Part of it is start-up training, specifically for people who are going to do local journalism. The other is setting up mechanisms they can use, off-the-shelf kinds of technologies, to run locally. That could be done through a grant or funding that would be available to anybody anywhere in Canada, for instance, and maybe even sold abroad.

Canadian Heritage committee  It's that discrimination that becomes the real problem. Certainly, they can set their prices, and they are price-setters at the moment. The price is about 30% of everything that moves through and then on advertising about 70%. It is a huge issue. It is somewhat of a misnomer, however, to say that these major players in the digital environment took all the advertising out of newspapers.

Canadian Heritage committee  —because the product is no longer needed. That's what has really hurt them. That's what has really hurt the major advertising.

Canadian Heritage committee  The first thing is, don't try to import a model that you see someplace else. Every country is so different in culture and politics and in what can be effective that you have to fashion your own. What works best is that you make it easier for people to start new enterprises in news, and you make it so that existing enterprises can better transition to the digital news.

Canadian Heritage committee  The ones that are being used most now are tax credits. They have specific descriptions of the kind of work those journalists have to do. They won't allow them to cover national sports, necessarily, or to cover food beats or something like that. They want them covering government or community services or something of that sort.