Meta ban has been rough, but Google ban would be worse, say small news outlets, analysts
Federal officials hold the line as C-18 full effect date approaches
"We're losing, and that means the community is losing," said Theresa Blackburn, owner of the River Valley Sun, which covers daily news from Perth-Andover to Nackawic in western New Brunswick online and also prints a monthly paper with a circulation of about 6,000.
The four-year-old publication found itself cut off from readers and viewers in July, when Meta blocked Canadian news on its platforms in response to new federal legislation that was supposed to force big internet companies to pay for the news content they make available.
The transition has gone fairly well since the paper launched its own website four months ago, said Blackburn, but reader engagement has fallen dramatically.
On Facebook, River Valley Sun stories used to get 800,000 likes, shares or comments a month.
On rivervalleysun.ca, there are 60,000 visits a month, but stories can't be shared to Facebook and the paper lacks the resources to allow comments, which would require constant monitoring.
Canadian users seeking Canadian news content have been blocked from viewing it. (Meta)
It's nice having local control, Blackburn said, but the paper isn't able to do as many live reports.
That hurts its bottom line, she said, because it used to get thousands of dollars in revenue from live-streaming events for local businesses and organizations.
It also hurts the journalistic product, said Blackburn, and puts public safety at risk.
"At some point in time someone isn't going to get the information they need to be safe," she said.
Many outlets affected
The Sun is not alone. A group of 20 other news outlets across Canada, including the New Brunswick Media Co-Op, say the Facebook ban has been "a big crisis," affecting how they reach viewers, readers and listeners.
They've formed a new collaborative news platform called Unrigged, hoping to jointly benefit from a critical mass of their pooled material and share the costs of a website.
Meta, on the other hand, has lost little or no audience or advertising since it banned Canadian news, said Chris Waddell of Carleton University's school of journalism, formerly of CBC News and the Globe and Mail.
It's also been spared a lot of trouble dealing with things such as disinformation, misinformation and inflammatory comments, said Waddell.
He's pretty sure that even if Bill C-18 were to be killed, Meta wouldn't bring news back.
The survival of the River Valley Sun this long, through the pandemic and the Meta news ban, goes to show the importance of local news, said Blackburn, but she's not sure how they'll cope with what may be coming next.
The Google logo is seen on a computer in this photo illustration in Washington, DC, on July 10, 2019. (Alastair Pike/AFP/Getty Images)
Google has said it will remove links to news from its products in Canada when the Online News Act entirely takes effect, which will be no later than Dec. 19 — 180 days after it received royal assent.
A member of the company's media relations department, Shay Purdy, told CBC News those plans are still accurate.
Google said in its submission on the draft regulations that the new law is "unworkable" because free linking is the foundation of the open web.
It maintained that as a company it already supports journalism by linking people to Canadian news sites, to the greater benefit of news companies and Canadians than to its own bottom line.
It called the act "deeply discriminatory" because it's the only company being asked to pay — an estimated $172 million annually, a minimum of four per cent of its Canadian revenues, while only two per cent of its searches are for news.
It advocated more flexibility and suggested several amendments to the legislation so that among other things, it would only have to pay for "displaying news content," not for simply linking to it, and video and ad platforms would be excluded.
Google recently reached a deal to pay publishers in Germany the equivalent of about CA $4.8 million a year. They had been seeking more than $600 million.
Chris Waddell is an academic and former journalist specializing in business and finance. (Matthew Usherwood )
The River Valley Sun relies on Google searches for 47 per cent of its website traffic, said Blackburn, and without YouTube or Facebook, she's not sure how they'd get their videos out.
Waddell has no idea if Google is really going to follow suit with a news ban, but he believes the consequences of that would be "a much more dramatic loss for all news organizations in Canada, both big and small."
He places much of the blame for the situation on large, established news organizations, including CBC.
Instead of leveraging the traffic they got from tech platforms, by making their websites more user-friendly and engaging, they cluttered their stories and videos with ads and lobbied government to force Google and Facebook to give them money, he said.
But according to Blayne Haggart, Google and Meta are the parties mostly responsible for what's happening.
Blayne
Haggart is an academic and former journalist and economist whose
research focuses on intellectual property rights and data governance. (Submitted by Blayne Haggart)
Haggart, an associate professor of political science at Brock University, has written some articles about Bill C-18 for the Centre for International Governance Innovation and recently published a book with Natasha Tusikov called The New Knowledge: Information, Data and the Remaking of Global Power.
"It's tantamount to holding the country hostage," he said of existing and threatened news bans.
"It's a coercive use of power designed to bring the Canadian government and a democratic, legitimate legislature to heel," said Haggart.
The tech companies have set themselves up as essential infrastructure for the delivery of information — including news — and want all of the benefits, including ad revenue, without any of the responsibilities, he said.
Haggart isn't sure the government's approach is the best way to promote and safeguard a healthy information ecosystem, but it is a "legitimate" way, he said, having been passed by Parliament with the support of three parties and been implemented successfully in other countries such as Australia, where it has led to the hiring of more journalists.
Google has said the Australian legislation is different because it only applies to designated companies. It also created an incentive for the various parties to reach voluntary agreements, so it hasn't been necessary yet to designate any companies, including Google.
In Canada, the big internet companies aren't being asked for much, said Haggart — basically, to pay into a fund to be overseen by the CRTC and to not unduly discriminate against any particular news outlet by downranking its content, making its stories harder to find.
"That would be an enormous win for Canada and Canadians," he said, whereas a news ban by Google would be a big loss.
"Social media is one thing, but everybody depends on search," said Haggart, noting Google has about 90 per cent of the Canadian search engine market.
"It's basically how people find information."
The silver lining would be if people are driven to other platforms, so Google didn't have such a stranglehold, he said.
"The fact they're able to threaten an entire Canadian industry and Canadians' access to information, which is vital to a democracy, is proof that they have far too much power and have been given far too much leeway for far too long," said Haggart.
Blackburn isn't surprised if big corporations "don't care about the little guy," but she does want and expect the federal government to care.
She was hoping the standoff would be resolved by now and is receptive to the idea of the legislation being softened.
'Constructive discussions' continue
The federal government doesn't seem to be backing down. An emailed statement from the Canadian Heritage Minister's office said it is "open to proposals that make the regulations stronger."
Canadians expect "tech giants" to "pay their fair share for news," it said.
"These tech platforms have to act responsibly and support the news sharing they and Canadians both benefit from," said a statement attributed to Minister Pascale St-Onge.
The minister noted that hundreds of newsrooms and thousands of jobs in journalism have been lost in the last decade across the country.
"This has had a big impact on the capacity of Canadians to get high-quality, fact-based news and information," she said.
The minister's office said it continues to have "constructive discussions with platforms" and it is optimistic the Online News Act will help make news available to Canadians in a sustainable way.
"I believe we share the goal of ensuring quality access to information and news for Canadians," said St-Onge.
Final regulations will be provided "in due time," it said.
The CRTC said the bargaining process for news outlets and the big internet companies to negotiate compensation is only expected to begin late next year or in early 2025.
Blackburn remarked with a sense of irony that the River Valley Sun will have to change from a sole proprietorship to a corporation in order to be eligible for payments.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from Information Morning Fredericton
'What isn't wrong with journalism today?' asks Dalton Camp lecturer
Industry faces a 'crisis of funding,' but that's just the tip of the iceberg
Jordan Gill · CBC News · Posted: Sep 26, 2019 5:02 PM ADT
'We need to think about journalism as part of a basic human right, as part of a civic service.'
CBC Radio · Posted: Jan 23, 2020 6:19 PM AST
"Bell confronts dilemmas the media face in her 2019 Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B. She explores the state of the free press in a world where digital platforms are increasingly controlling society's news narrative."
Bell also has stern words for public media, including the CBC and BBC.
"It still behaves like a competitor to the commercial market. And that isn't really its function anymore."
But she argues the biggest danger is coming from giant and powerful digital platform companies that are scooping up most of the ad revenues and are increasingly in control of the news narrative — both real and fake.
"Since the introduction of the share button on Facebook, which was in 2009, the spread of misinformation has absolutely rocketed, " Bell said. "Fact checkers told me that since 2010, an increasing amount of their work has been to debunk misinformation rather than keep lying politicians in check."
Due to the foolishness and intransigence of federal legislators, we're going to end up in a situation where pretty much everyone (the public, news outlets, and even the tech companies) is worse off than before. Thanks, Liberals.
Polls show Canadians want ceasefire in Gaza, placing Trudeau at a crossroads
Since Oct. 7, nearly 13,000 people have been killed as Israeli bombardment rocks the Gaza Strip
Joy Joshi·Writer, Yahoo News Canada
Tue, November 21, 2023 at 7:29 p.m. AST
Why journalist Emily Bell is calling for a civic media manifesto
'We need to think about journalism as part of a basic human right, as part of a civic service.'
CBC Radio · Posted: Jan 23, 2020 5:19 PM ET |
If journalism is going to survive, preeminent media scholar and journalist Emily Bell argues we need a civic media manifesto and it "should be ambitious and imaginative and radical.' (David Donnelly/CBC)
'How can independent, civic-minded journalism survive in a world dominated by corporate media takeovers and fake news? Acclaimed academic and journalist Emily Bell suggests an ambitious civic media manifesto — a radical rethink to ensure journalism has a future.
"Journalism, I do believe, really does work. But there are many things about it that are broken," she told CBC IDEAS' producer Mary Lynk.
"The business model is broken. The publishing environment is broken. The public's belief in the reporting process and in journalism, unfortunately, is broken. And even, you might argue that the democracy that we are meant to be a part of, the functioning of that, too, is a little bit broken."
Bell confronts dilemmas the media face in her 2019 Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B. She explores the state of the free press in a world where digital platforms are increasingly controlling society's news narrative.
The media scholar helped create Britain's Guardian newspaper website — which has more than 24 million monthly readers around the world — and still contributes as a columnist. She left England 10 years ago to become the founding director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in New York.
In order for journalism to thrive, Bell explains, the mission must come before profit.
"We have to put the kind of energy that we've put in to making money into fixing our civics. So I think we need to think about journalism as part of a basic human right, as part of a civic service," said Bell, a strategist on the state and future of journalism.
"And we need to be really committed."
Rupert Murdoch's 'superpower'
Bell has met media mogul Rupert Murdoch on various occasions. She considers him a fascinating character who she says prefers to operate behind close doors. She also notes he has cozy relationships with many heads of state.
News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has 'a huge monopoly over journalism that we've never seen before,' says Emily Bell. (Josh Reynolds/Associated Press)
"He always talks about how much he hates regulation, but really, his superpower is understanding how to play the regulators and the governments," she told Lynk.
"And...he's very close to all world leaders, and is very close to the current president of the United States. Fox has become a sort of default state media."
Bell also has stern words for public media, including the CBC and BBC.
"It still behaves like a competitor to the commercial market. And that isn't really its function anymore."
"Since the introduction of the share button on Facebook, which was in 2009, the spread of misinformation has absolutely rocketed, " Bell said. "Fact checkers told me that since 2010, an increasing amount of their work has been to debunk misinformation rather than keep lying politicians in check."
Emily Bell argues it's very hard to detect misinformation that has been shared on Facebook. (Toby Melville / Reuters)
It is because journalism is at such a critical crossroad that Bell argues a civic media manifesto is so urgently necessary.
"I've thought about striking similarities between the crisis in our climate and the crisis in our news environment. Although the scale and consequences of both are completely different, they are, I think, related," Bell said.
"Both have been caused by profit placed as a higher priority than civic well-being."
* This episode was produced by Mary Lynk.
43 Comments
Meta ban has been rough, but Google ban would be worse, say small news outlets, analysts
Federal officials hold the line as C-18 full effect date approaches
Canada's newspapers are being plundered by monopoly capitalism
Federal regulators must step up to break the chains
Patricia W. Elliott · For CBC Opinion · Posted: Jan 30, 2023 5:00 AM AST
Emily Bell and everybody else who was in the room that nights knows I attended her lecture while I was running in the election of the 43rd Parliament last fall. Need I have been waiting patiently to see if CBC would publish our conversation immediately after she asked the audience to ask her anything they wished?
https://davidraymondamos3.blogspot.com/2019/09/what-isnt-wrong-with-journalism-today.html
'What isn't wrong with journalism today?' asks Dalton Camp lecturer
Industry faces a 'crisis of funding,' but that's just the tip of the iceberg
14 Comments
Commenting is now closed for this story.
David Raymond Amos
I attended this evening and was the first to ask professor Emily Bell a question Methinks it should prove interesting to see if I am edited out N'esy Pas?
SteveRyan
Between CBC and their pro government slant, and the current government handing out $600 million to selected media outlets, it's difficult to put trust in these companies.
David Raymond Amos
Joe Rootliek
David Raymond Amos
Mac Isaac
Many of the problems with journalism has to do with the cost of producing quality journalism...because of this cost, it's left to the wealthy and/or VERY wealthy to help finance it. The problem originates at that point, because many (emphatically NOT all) of those paying the bills feel they have some sort of "right" to determine "what" that news is; if it suits their viewpoint and , if it doesn't, how they can jury-rig it so that it does. A classic case in point is the Irving chain of newspapers which have handed off all or almost al of their news and editorial writing (it surely cannot still be referred to as journalism!) to the right wing Postmedia network. But the interesting thing is this happened a lot in past decades and even past centuries...yellow journalism is one of the terms coined in another time when free wheeling writers wrote inflammatory (often scurrilous, slanderous) articles about any who disagreed with them and/or their owners! The problem accelerated a great deal in the last 30 years when many national award-winning outlets had to close shop due to high costs.
It comes down to this: a society gets the news, and governments, it deserves. If the public wants better news and news reporting and news editorials, then they must have the guts to demand it. Having or expecting government to correct things only exacerbates the problem; replacing a bad situation with an even worse one. "The one who pays the piper, calls the tune" couldn't be more appropriate!
Jebidoah Shylah
Jebidoah Shylah
Journalists are too politically biased these days to be arbiters of truth. Look at marijuana, now that it's been legalized, we hear nothing negative about it. We're meant to believe that it's all just sunshine and roses and not a negative at all.
David Raymond Amos
Methinks you should watch that old movie Citizen Kane or Network from the seventies or Wag the Dog etc etc etc Sometimes fiction reveals the awful truth of it all However the TRUTH is stranger than fiction N'esy Pas?
David Raymond Amos
Reply to @David Raymond Amos: Ooops I meant journalists "always" were too politically biased
Chuck MacDonald
Fake liberal news just like the cbc is
Jake Devries
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