Journalists from the LA Times Guild gather in front of City Hall to protest layoffs and changes to seniority protections during the Los Angeles Times strike in Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles on January 19.Patrick T. Fallon/Getty Images
Black Press, which operates 150 daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and websites that cover Western Canada almost exclusively, announced last month that it had entered creditor protection.
The company also announced that it has signed distribution agreements with Canso, Deans Knight Capital Management Ltd, and Carpenter Media Group.
It remains to be seen how this will affect the future of publications owned by the company. The company said in a news release that the agreement provides a stronger foundation for the organization’s future. they say that all the time. But the bottom line is that creditor protection is never a good thing.
And the bottom line is that some kind of restructuring is on the horizon, with some form of cutbacks, closures, and layoffs seemingly inevitable. Furthermore, local news is disappearing.
The decline of the media world is not news. It’s been going on for decades. But the new contraction here and in the U.S. is more than a concern. I say this as someone who believes, perhaps naively, that strong, independent media plays an important role in democracies (and non-democracies) around the world.
There has been an almost constant flow of bad news in recent months. It feels like he had no outlet to escape his owner’s sword. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, the Baltimore Sun, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the list goes on, all victims of layoffs and other forms of cost-cutting. is. Popular magazines such as Sports Illustrated and Time have also announced significant layoffs.
Is the media simply doomed?
Of course, no one knows for sure. But what is clear is that there is no clear path to prosperity in the media industry. The search for a sustainable business model has yet to produce anything resembling a viable plan. The solutions we thought we had are gone. Sugar daddies in the media aren’t giving answers.
Most recently as New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. I wrote to X, “rich man’s business plans” rarely work out. “Rescuers usually underestimate how difficult it is to find money in the news and maintain reasonably high quality,” he wrote. See, among others, Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post. As Rosen points out, once the futility of a viable business model becomes clear, support for the wealthy investment begins to wane. And it’s only a matter of time before the business is sold to hedge funds waiting to cut costs and squeeze every last profit out of the company before eventually selling it for scrap.
It is now clear that the advertising industry does not need traditional media to reach its target audience. There are many other cheaper ways to connect with potential customers. Media companies increasingly recognize that they survive or perish depending on their ability to sell journalism on merit and quality alone.
This is a model that works better for reporters at the New York Times and the Globe and Mail than it does for standard freeholders in Cornwall.
Governments in Canada and elsewhere have recently intervened to force big tech companies like Google and Facebook to compensate news organizations for news links they post on their sites. Any help is welcome, especially for smaller media outlets, but it doesn’t seem like a long-term solution to what’s ailing us. Despite Google and others being written small checks, local newspapers will still go out of business.
Many of us are becoming increasingly irritated by the appeals by people at sites like X, especially The Globe, to remove the paywall on certain articles. Do successful companies give away their products for free? Still, some expect media companies to do just that.
There seems to be an increasing class divide when it comes to news media. There are those who can afford the subscription fees that give them access to the highest quality coverage (the rich and educated), and those who cannot, and many in this group choose their information elsewhere, often with misinformation. and a cesspool of propaganda. The result is a widening gulf between those who are informed and those who are vulnerable to scammers and shy people operating in the vast digital wasteland that is the internet.
This is dangerous.
As authoritarianism rises and figures like Donald Trump threaten the very tenets of democracy, an all-out assault on independent journalism is underway around the world.
We are staring into a great abyss, which could have dire consequences for all of us.