Journalism must find new ways to survive in the digital era
Jim Sheppard is a former executive editor of globeandmail.com. He also held senior newsroom management positions at washingtonpost.com and ABCNEWS.com
I’m often asked this question after I do another in my series of blog posts about the stupidity of major traditional media owners in Canada, who know they are dying but who refuse to recognize that the future of journalism in Canada is digital:
“But what we should we do? There’s no easy answer. We are too afraid of the unknown to act.”
Of course, there isn’t an easy answer. But increasingly, there are signs that individuals or small groups are finding solutions to which Big Media is turning a blind eye.
If there were an easy answer, everyone would be doing it because, as CBC chief executive Catherine Tait said recently, the traditional media (print and broadcast) are in danger of becoming “dinosaurs on a melting ice cap.”
Their traditional sources of revenue have cratered. They are committed to heavy infrastructure and delivery costs that are no longer sustainable.
Their fate, if they don’t act soon and decisively, is clear – the ever-faster death of more media outlets across Canada with the corresponding loss of journalism jobs. That also poses a threat to the kind of rational national debate needed to solve the country’s burning issues.
There are actually multiple answers to the question of what media owners should do.
Continuing their idiotic policies of keeping their expensive, outdated infrastructure while slashing and hacking journalism jobs is NOT the answer.
I’ve written earlier about how The New York Times and The Washington Post turned themselves from money-losing, life-threatened newspapers into big profit-making enterprises by investing heavily in digital products and hiring hundreds of journalists to work on them.
Some major print brands in Canada, seeing that COVID has crushed their advertising revenue, have at least started in the direction of emphasizing subscriptions, mainly digital. But that’s dangerously close to being too little, too late.
For the most part, Big Media in Canada are freezing on the melting ice cap, hoping that Ottawa can send a rescue helicopter in the form of handouts or some kind of tax on Google and Facebook. They ignore the fact that they are dinosaurs who weigh too much to be lifted by a helicopter.
In a similar way to when the dinosaurs died and new, smaller, more adaptable life forms became dominant, there’s a growing trend to smaller, specialized, successful digital journalistic entities. I applaud that.
According to this excellent article from Macleans magazine, San Grewal recently launched the Brampton-focused digital news site The Pointer. Within two weeks, he had reached his first-year goal for paid subscribers. His long-term target is 15,000 and, while he isn’t there yet, Grewal notes that a mere 1,000 people paying $10 a month would let a news startup pull in $120,000 annually.
In the Macleans article, he is quoted as saying that In Peel Region, where Brampton is located, there are more than one million potential customers.
“People start to notice pretty quickly: Wow, no one’s covering city hall, our education system, the policing situation, like these guys are.”
Grewal has expanded to cover neighbouring Mississauga and hopes to keep going.
There are some other high-profile success stories in this vein, such as The Narwhal and Canadaland, which rely on digital subscribers, and which are prospering by focusing on areas not covered well by Big Media.
In the same vein, I also heartily applaud indiegraf.com, a company whose sole aim is to make it easy to launch digital news outlets.
Its goal is to create a network of news entrepreneurs by offering tech, growth and revenue support so those new sites can focus on their primary goal – journalism that serves its readers.
The Macleans article sums up the trend this way: “While traditional newspapers and private broadcasters continue their long spirals of ad-revenue decline and newsroom shrinkage, the good-news stories from the media world tend to be independent (and mostly online) outlets that have sprung up in the last few years.”
So while there is no one-size-fits-all solution, there are ways to save journalism in Canada – digital ways.
One can only hope that the major media owners in the country see the light sooner rather than later.
In the meantime, here’s hoping for success for the new, innovative, small players who are filling the gaps left behind by major media cutbacks.
