One of the great things about taking a week off and going someplace completely different is coming back with fresh eyes. Immersing myself in the brilliant paintings of Georgia O’Keefe at the museum in Sante Fe dedicated to her work may not transform my world — well, maybe a little. I do have a lovely painting of a large, bright lily in my bathroom now.
More importantly, it’s a chance to look from a new vantage point or peer through a different lens, and looking through a new lens at community journalism is what was being discussed on CBC radio the other day.
David Beers, founder of the online media The Tyee, and Edward Greenspon, a well-known journalist and president of a public policy forum that recently published a report on news in the digital age, were talking about the federal government’s recent pledge to commit $50 million over five years to help fund local, community journalism.
The first question posed to the pair was, will it make a difference? The answer — no. Greenspon noted the money could pay for, perhaps, 12 new journalists per province/territory, which would be nice, but the problems run much deeper.
For perspective, $50 million is “two per cent of Postmedia’s projected print and online ad revenues this year,” Beers noted.
And then there are questions of government control. I’m confident strategies could be devised to ensure journalistic independence, but there’s always the spectre of state sanctioned news, as well as the question: why should taxpayers be supporting private companies?
Beers and Greenspon agree that policy changes may be more effective. Policies, for example, that create tax incentives for stakeholders and citizens to fund local journalism through philanthropy.
However, the one point that seems to have been glossed over was the fact Google earned $2.6 billion last year from Canadian advertising alone, according to Greenspon. And “Facebook raked in $9.16 billion in ad revenue in the second quarter of 2017,” according to Adweek, an advertising trade publication. I’m not sure how much of that was Canadian, but you can bet it was more than $10 million a year.
Yet neither Google nor Facebook contribute a cent to Canadian news content. That might not be a problem except for the fact a growing number of survey respondents say Facebook and Google is where they get the majority of their news.
At the Richmond News, we’re busy building up our online presence. A key component of this is posting to Facebook as that is the portal through which many come to our website. The problem is that a large number only read us on Facebook. Again, that would be fine if we got some of the revenue for providing all that content. But alas...
Government funding is helpful, as are charitable donations, but the big money is in the platforms.
A policy that would ensure local journalism got even a thin slice of those social media advertising dollars, given the amount of news content we provide, seems only fair.
For sure the medium matters, but so does the message.
