Canadian Heritage committee  In emphasizing the local news and paper, I think we must not lose sight of the fact that something has to be in writing to be verifiable in the long term. We've heard today the term “post-truth”. We've also heard the term “fake news”. You add to that sometimes sloppy newsgatherin

Canadian Heritage committee  —the websites, big cable TV, and so on would largely collapse.

Canadian Heritage committee  If the CBC is going to be allowed to skim off advertising dollars in the so-called web market, that is totally unfair. They're into our territory or into other...even the people who don't have a newspaper but who have a website, a news aggregator. I think that's totally unfair.

Canadian Heritage committee  Could I just add that I agree with—

Canadian Heritage committee  Some problems lie with the newspapers themselves. I alluded to that earlier. That is, they have become less relevant to people. You have to have people on the ground to have the local stories. All the news aggregators, all the websites, the CBC, and everything else get a lot of

Canadian Heritage committee  None.

Canadian Heritage committee  The Neepawa Press, as I said, was started in 1896. By 2009 or 2010 the private owners—and there had been several over the years—decided to sell to a company called Glacier Communications, which owned dozens and dozens of publications, mostly in western Canada. They wanted to buy

Canadian Heritage committee  We know what they're doing, and they don't.

Canadian Heritage committee  What are we doing? We are very local. Just to give you a couple of examples, if somebody comes through the door from the Rotary Club and says they'd like a deal on the ads for the Rotary Club auction, we say that's fine, it's 50%. It's a charitable organization, so it's 50%. Th

Canadian Heritage committee  Anyway, generally the community abandoned them because the community was not being served. They didn't have a publisher; they just had an office manager. They didn't have the local input. In the places where they do have the local input or a locally based person with locally bas

Canadian Heritage committee  Just to follow up on the earlier question, at the time we took over the other newspaper we had eight staff, and theirs was down to three. I'm talking about boots on the ground; I'm talking about a local commitment. Certainly I would have made more money if I had cut back to three

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you. I'm Ken Waddell from Neepawa, Manitoba. It's a town of about 4,500 people, serving an area of about 10,000 people. I've been involved in the newspaper business and publishing for nearly 50 years, but full time since 1989, when we started the Neepawa Banner from scrat