Canadian Heritage committee  It comes back to creating an environment that replicates the old idea of the community newspaper. You had a family that owned a family community newspaper; they would live in a small town or city, they would run it, and they would do it more for the love of telling people what's

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, typically the name we use for that is “sponsored content”. You see a lot of it. Even in larger newspapers like The Globe and Mail, you'll often see sections that are really written by the advertiser or for the advertisers. There is a lot of controversy over that. Our newspap

Canadian Heritage committee  A lot of publications feel they have no choice, but really there are no standards about how this material should be identified, whether it's clearly an ad or clearly journalism. A lot of times there's confusion. It's a very murky area right now, and it could use some clearing up.

Canadian Heritage committee  He's willing to invest, so let's make the rules better for people like him so that he who cares about those communities can invest in them.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think the biggest question is taxation, which we both seem to be talking about today. The Income Tax Act was put together for a world of TV, radio, and newspapers, not for an era in which we have digital media. There are a number of areas. Mr. Lord mentioned one. I mentioned

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, that's a complicated area, I realize. The biggest problem we have is the fair dealing provisions, which essentially mean that once we put it out there, we've lost control of it and we don't get anything back for it. If people were reusing our material for commercial gain in

Canadian Heritage committee  In some cases they're freelancing and in some cases they work for the publication, but in all cases they are the creators of the content. Singers can go on the radio or TV and sing and do anything they want with the content they have created. Newspaper journalists are in a simila

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. The newspapers aren't simply printed things anymore. Newspapers are news organizations. We encouraged our reporters to go into digital, and we insisted, in many cases. Many of them would have loved to stay in print and to be able to have long lunches and file by four o'clock

Canadian Heritage committee  Large media companies aren't the best at owning newspapers, especially in small communities. One of the reasons my company, FP Newspapers, has been a success is that we're managers of the company. We have a few community newspapers, we have a couple of daily newspapers, we care a

Canadian Heritage committee  We have so many newspapers. We have a paid digital environment, so we ask people to subscribe to our digital service, or we do something that most newspapers don't do: we actually sell articles by the article. We have what we call a micropayment system. If you wanted to read just

Canadian Heritage committee  I can certainly tell you we don't make the money we used to make. However, I think it's a question of where the line is going. If the line is steady and you can get a steady state in a sustainable environment, that's great. Unfortunately we've seen ads going like this, falling of

Canadian Heritage committee  No, I think the days of the big bad ugly newspaper company monopolizing media are long gone. I don't know why we would worry about tiny little newspaper companies, because they are tiny compared with big digital media companies. Just to give you an example, Postmedia is now val

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, I think there are some very good online news sites that have grown up as new models. I'll point to one that I'm sure you've heard of, which is allNovaScotia.com in Halifax. It is a paid subscription service that provides local news. They don't give anything away. You pay on

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. I am Bob Cox, chairperson of the Canadian Newspaper Association. With me is John Hinds, executive director of the association. We are appearing on behalf of Newspapers Canada, which represents over 850 daily and community