Canada's legacy media has a bigger problem than lack of revenue.
The old news is dead. Long live the new news | The Hub | Harrison Lowman:
December 15, 2023 - "Today, much of the Canadian journalism industry has burned to the ground. Last week, even the CBC, which received $1.3 billion from the federal government in 2022, announced it would be eliminating 800 positions. According to Statistics Canada, in 2011 there were 13,280 journalists working in this country. Today there could be as few as 8,000, most of whom have watched in horror as almost $5 billion in revenue has disappeared in about a dozen years.
"Journalists today face a public that is far less interested in what we have to say. Reuters and the University of Oxford now report that the number of Canadians who say they are 'very or extremely interested in the news' has dropped by more than 20 percent in just six years, now sitting at 43 percent.... Eight percent fewer Canadians are using the internet to follow the news compared to last year. Nine percent less are turning on their TVs to watch us.
:When they do tune in, fewer and fewer trust what they are hearing. In 2018, 58 percent of Canadians said they 'trust the news most of the time'. Today, that number is 40 percent.... According to Statistics Canada, only 31 percent of Canadians, have 'a good or great deal of confidence in Canadian media\. This falls to 14 percent for off-reserve Indigenous people and 23 percent among 25 to 34-year-olds. I say this as an astonished 32-year-old.
"Many journalists will have you believe the blame should be placed at the feet of our readers, viewers, and listeners.... In fact, we may be the only industry that consistently blames the consumer for its ills.... We continue to act like we are holier than thou, that we know best..... We often write with a paternalistic and preachy tone. We nudge people towards thinking a certain way about an issue or have them believe a debate is settled when it is not. We refuse to let audiences draw their own conclusions. We turn news into stories and then into morality tales. We refuse to check our biases before picking up our notepads. We claim the very idea of objectivity is 'flawed'.... Beyond our cash flow problem, we have an attitude problem that is contributing to our demise.
"Part of the problem is that we — the Canadian mainstream media — have lost touch with a great many Canadians who do not see their lives reflected in our work. Many of us journalists had affluent upbringings, are white, university-educated, aren’t religious, and live in large cities (myself included). Many of us work in television newsrooms where the only people who probably voted Conservative in the last decade are those behind the cameras, and perhaps the janitorial staff who clean up after us. We use academic language that is a barrier to entry before readers have even reached a paywall.
"Our editors bury pitches about controversial debates — but debates that Canadians are already eagerly having around the dinner table. How can we say we have an open dialogue with the Canadian public when major mainstream outlets are disabling comment sections on their content? Even after three decades of the internet, journalism has become a one-way street. How have some viewers responded? They’ve switched us off."
Read more: https://thehub.ca/2023-12-15/harrison-lowman-the-old-news-is-dead-long-live-the-new-news/
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