Illustration by Mandy Espezel

Like every animal on the savannah, the media industry in North America is adapting to the pressures of its environment — increased competition from the Internet, and decreasing advertising revenue — with varying success, depending on the species.

There’s more to the crisis of course, but that’s the broad-strokes Nature Channel explanation.
There are casualties. The CBC recently cut 800 jobs. The Globe and Mail has introduced voluntary layoffs. Canwest’s stock was declared worthless by a BMO anaylist this week, as the company struggles to meet its debt obligations.

Here at home, there have been layoffs at both the Journal and the Sun. Community papers such as the Jasper Booster and the Morinville Redwater Town & Country Examiner have closed. In the United States, both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune have filed for bankrupcy protection. The New York Times plans to cut 100 newsroom jobs this year. And the nearly 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News has folded.

Although it seems like the past year has been full of bad news about the news business, the industry has been under threat for a long time.

Ever since she attended journalism school 10 years ago, Mary Agnes Welch has been hearing about the fall of newspapers at the hands of the Internet. The 35-year-old reporter and president of the Canadian Association of Journalists is now well into her career.

“I’m as baffled as anyone, as a journalist working in the trenches,” she says. Although she sees newspapers like hers evolving to make better use of the Internet and hopes that in-depth investigative journalism will find a home somewhere, she can’t say exactly where the industry is heading.
In this theme issue, SEE Magazine wanted to get as many perspectives on the future of the industry as possible, and in the following pages we offer interviews from the retail shop owners selling newspapers and magazines right up to newspaper and online publishers. In our cover spread, SEE managing editor Jeff Holubitsky brings together local media vets with local to talk about the state of the industry, and news editor Angela Brunschot looks at innovators and solutions to the crisis. 

When talking about the evolution of the media, David Beers, the founder of British Columbia’s lively online news source The Tyee, prefers to think of the media’s role as that of the grass in our evolving information landscape.

“We are entering a world where it’s up to the reader to create their own comprehensive world of journalism by bookmarking various sites and figuring out ways of supporting them,” he says, adding that every outlet and news site is part of a broader media ecology. “Each citizen can graze on what they want. But somehow we have to figure out a way for people to support that media.”

If Beers’ experiences at The Tyee are anything to go by, readers have already made the leap. He recently found himself in a jam when it came to covering to the provincial election. Advertising dollars had dried up. Beers knew he didn’t have the funding to do the issue-based, in-depth journalism that The Tyee prides itself on. So he asked readers for help, and some ideas on what they wanted covered.

And the results were quick. In a matter of hours, The Tyee had raised half their editorial budget for the provincial election. And by the next morning, they’d reached their original target of $5,000.

“We are seeing a wholesale shift in people’s imagination about media,” Beers says. He thinks this episode proves that people have already acknowledged that good journalism isn’t free, and are willing to help organizations cover important issues.

And reader funded and shaped media is certainly not the only adaptation out there. From different business models to government funding, there are plenty of ideas under the microscope right now.

Small And Nimble

Besides their fundraising drive for the provincial election, The Tyee operates according to a very different business model from most other media outlets. When Beers set out to create The Tyee five years ago, he wanted to concentrate on political coverage — an area that doesn’t attract a lot of ads. However, he found a group of what he calls “angel investors” who underwrite the day-to-day running of the site but do not make a profit.

The Tyee also partners with foundations to run public interest articles such as their recent series on affordable housing. The Tides Canada foundation also enabled The Tyee to run a couple of different series on sustainable living.

The big difference between The Tyee and traditional print outlet is that Beers doesn’t have to worry about printing or transportation costs, which means the site doesn’t have to sell as many ads to stay afloat. “We don’t have big overheads, so I don’t have to tell people, ‘No, that won’t make money. Go write a car story,’” Beers says. “The only priority around here is ‘Don’t be boring.’”

But the “small is good” philosophy isn’t embraced by all alternative outlets. Richard Karpel, the executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, points out that the Creative Loafing chain in the United States is going bankrupt because it bought up several other papers, and couldn’t meet its debt obligations.

Setting The Agenda

Mary Agnes Welch, the president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, certainly welcomes any medium that can support solid, community-focused journalism, but she sees a problem with several smaller media outlets covering the news instead of the current “paper of record” approach.

“You could have a blogger doing the wickest investigative piece,” she says, “but if only 200 people click on it, what kind of power does it have? I haven’t got my head around that.”

One or two central news sources have the readership and organizational power to set the news agenda for an entire city. If one daily paper runs an exposé on corruption in city hall, for example, not only is it read by a large percentage of citizens, the story is also generally picked up by every other media outlet in town. The larger organizations have the power to put pressure on city council to clean things up.

Beers doesn’t disagree. “I saw us as value-added, not as a replacement,” he says. “I’m not willing the demise of corporate media. On the contrary! If you look at most of the big stories that have been broken, it’s done by corporate media.”

Still, he’s not a fan of Big Media. He thinks many newspapers tend to have a top-heavy business model, run by editors and publishers so worried about offending anyone that their coverage becomes gray and boring. He’d like to see many of the dailies survive as a community trust or in nonprofit partnerships.

A New Kind Of Writing, Sort Of

There’s an old saying that journalists always save the best stories for the bar. Often, the story of how many hurdles a journalist had to leap over in order to obtain certain information, or just why they were excited about the budget lock-up this year, doesn’t make it into the paper.

“Maybe we’ll stop doing that,” Welch says, “and let people in, with the same level of accuracy and fairness, but let people see more of what we see, without the dry news format.”

She’s also critical of the daily paper’s habit of including irrelevant stories just because they’re the kind of story that papers have always run. Why, she asks, would anyone put stories about yesterday’s weather in a daily paper? Surely there’s something more illuminating to put in that space.

But she’s hopeful. She sees a marriage of sorts between the paper and the Internet. Quick hits like road closures and fires could be posted rapidly on the internet, but people would pick up the newspaper the next day for analysis, better-sourced articles, graphics, and a fuller explanation of the story — sort of like the role magazines currently occupy.

That could mean that the “daily paper” would only come out three times a week, but she’d be willing to see if such a strategy would work.

A New Place For The Alt-Weekly?

What Welch describes is close to the model alternative weeklies like SEE Magazine follow, or at least try to. We don’t come out as often, so we strive to provide the long view on current events. Or we stray completely outside the dominant news cycle to focus on an ongoing issue or an underreported story. And we certainly have more freedom to publish colourful writing and profane quotes.

Karpel says readers are seeking out writing with more “voice” instead of the institutional grayness of the big newspapers. Since perspective has always been a part of the alt-weekly tradition, the model has some advantages. But he follows that up with the grim critique that alt-weeklies are just as far behind the curve when it comes to the Internet as the dailies. And catching up is hard to do because the staff and managers have all known only one way of doing business: a printed publication funded by ads.

And like Beers says, the overhead costs of printing a paper and trucking it around the city makes adjusting to quick changes in the market difficult. That’s why he says The Tyee will never become a print-Internet hybrid, because the website is always an afterthought to the print version.

If alts are going to survive, Karpel says, that model has to change: “To a certain extent, everyone has to learn to do things differently.”

Government Funded

One of the more controversial ideas for rescuing newspapers floated recently is a federal bailout of media companies. But journalists are generally wary of any government funding for large media companies, Welch says. Even if there were no improper directives from the PMO, the public would still be left with an impression of favouritism, and journalists would feel a chill.

“Rather than bailing companies out, maybe what we should be doing is creating a pool of funds that will actually create a new business model,” suggests Marco Adria, a communications professor at the University of Alberta. Authors of books have similar funds. That would ensure that journalists are still able to do their work freely, and retain their jobs. The fund could also depend on donations from the community, just like The Tyee’s election coverage fund.

Beers isn’t a fan of bailouts either. Why should the corporate media have an advantage over everyone else, he asks? They can figure out their business model just like everyone else.

It’s hard for government to support the current newsroom model because of the concerns Welch brought up, but that doesn’t mean the government doesn’t have a role to play. He likes the idea of a grant system like the one currently in place for artists. That would allow individual journalists to pursue stories which a variety of news outlets could publish. He’d also like to see imaginative ways of subsidizing public intellectuals who are both communicators and experts.

Both Welch and Beers support government funding of the CBC, and neither want to see local coverage cut in the face of the Mothercorp’s recently announced 800 layoffs.

Beers goes a bit further: he calls for an increase in funding to the CBC, with the proviso that the government-funded broadcaster engage in a major re-evaluation of its core values and return to the excellent journalism it’s known for.

Whatever the solution, media companies all need to find a new way to finance good journalism.

“I think you know as well as I that journalism is not free,” Beers says. “It doesn’t just come out of the air.”

abrunschot@see.greatwest.ca