Canadian news publishers must face reality — or die
Jim Sheppard is a former executive editor of globeandmail.com. He also held senior newsroom management positions at washingtonpost.com and ABCNEWS.com
Peter Menzies, the former publisher and editor-in-chief of The Calgary Herald, made some great points recently in an article on The Line, entitled “Even when publishers were getting rich, news itself never made money.”
It should be read by every serious journalist who is lamenting the decline of our business and by every politician planning on forking over taxpayers’ money to whining newspaper publishers trying to keep their dying legacy platforms alive by blaming Facebook and Google for their plight (a false narrative), rather than embracing the future, which everyone knows is digital.
Only digital is going to save journalism in Canada, and journalism jobs in Canada.
Menzies writes: “Canadian publishers, supported by increasingly overwrought statements from federal Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, are desperate for cash to sustain the remnant husks of their once mighty fortresses. To do so, they are promoting the miserable argument that ‘web giants’ are making money by using and profiting from the news their organizations produce/reproduce and, mostly, give away for free.”
It’s great to hear someone with inside knowledge tell the truth about this issue. Yes, Facebook and Google should pay for the news that others produce. But what little they are going to pay will never solve the massive issues facing print in Canada.
There are many points of Menzies’ article with which I disagree, and I’ve seen some interesting criticism of it online.
But the key point he is making is one I’ve raised previously and should be obvious to everyone.
The fact that Google, Facebook and other digital giants have siphoned off the vast majority of advertising dollars around the world is NOT because it publishes news written and edited by others.
To synthesize his argument, Menzies is saying that the “golden age” of newspapers – when they were the only game in town and immensely profitable -- was actually about a century ago.
Decline set in at least half a century ago (not recently as the publishers would have you believe) with radio, then television, then 24-hour cable TV, then specialty channels such as sports and entertainment. Then . . . drum roll please . . . the Internet, which killed the last golden goose — classified ads.
These “new” media ate into the giant profits of newspaper owners not because they did “news” better but because they delivered ads better directly to the people who wanted them, in the way they wanted them. The Internet is just the most prominent example of that. Remember the world before search engines and online shopping? You don’t really want to go back there.
The vast majority of people who use Facebook and Google do NOT go there for news. They go there for community, to see what their friends are saying and – most importantly to me – remembering birthdays and other major life events.
Let me be clear, Facebook, Google and the other digital giants most definitely should pay for the news they literally steal from publishers and broadcasters. Everyone should support that. Period. No question about it.
But I argued recently that either taxing the digital giants or making a deal with them for some small payment will never, ever secure enough money to save legacy media, which CBC chief executive Catherine Tait recently likened to “dinosaurs on a melting ice cap.”
Menzies puts it this way:
Even if . . . the publishers grab a few more nickels from Facebook and Google, the best most of them can hope for is that they last a couple more years — and those at the expense of innovators.”
The innovators, of course, are those like The New York Times and The Washington Post, which have successfully reinvented themselves as media companies that offer print, digital, interactivity, and audio-visual combined as their primary journalistic offering, not just print-print-print as so many Canadian publishers sadly insist on doing with only some slap-dash digital stuff added. (I make a small exception for The Toronto Star, whose new owners are at least talking about expanding the newsroom, hiring more journalists, focusing on digital, and finding new sources of revenue.)
Those U.S. innovators have vastly increased the size of their newsrooms, hired more journalists, expanded coverage and . . . been rewarded with a huge increase in digital subscriptions, which has turned them from money-losers a decade ago to big-time money-makers today.
Sadly, Canadian publishers refuse to follow suit. They stubbornly hew to the past, figuratively building bigger snow shelters on that melting ice cap. There’s only one possible ending to that approach – an icy death.
It will be sad to watch, especially for someone like me who has been in journalism for more than 50 years and who still gets two newspapers delivered to his home every day.
But it’s inevitable if the publishers don’t abandon their hopeless laser focus on scrounging nickels from Facebook and Google, and decide instead to spend the money necessary to move to the digital world as fast as possible, saving journalism and journalism jobs in Canada in the process.
I’ll let Menzies have the last word.
“I do know that neither news nor journalism will go away even if Canada’s newspapers do. If they do, it will be a sad day, but all things must pass. There are already plenty of digital platforms and broadcasters ready to curate and deliver the news of the day accurately and for free over the air and online.”
