July 11, 2023

It is strange to listen to the discussion around news, advertising, digital media, and corporate monopolies happening right now. I feel it has been happening for as long as I can remember.

Corporate monopoly over news has always been an issue in Canada. And, every new technology is supposed to bring new freedom to journalists supposedly caught under the thumb of these profit-focused, ad-driven behemoths. The result is the same every time: more corporate media centralization.

The current law around funding for media is based around the idea that Google and Meta (two giant ad companies) stole the lunch of smaller "Canadian" corporate ad companies like BCE and Post Media. This line of argument forgets the original criticism of these companies that ads are a terrible way to finance serious news reporting.

And, not just because advertising is an industry that news agencies cannot do very well.

The conversation lives in a period of brief history where corporate news agencies had the monopoly on eyes in the form of newsprint. This history exists in the minds of people over the age of 55.

The internet and digital journalism started in the 1980s, 40 years ago.

The decline in advertising revenue for large corporate "publishers" started in the early 2000s, 20 years ago.

I wrote an article about the decline in news as a "public good" in 2013, 10 years ago. On my blog which has existed since 2003. A blog started by complaining about the capture of the news by corporations and USA imperialism.

This is not a new issue and "solutions" to the issue have been discussed since then. Unfortunately, actually funding the news media seems to be something that the intelligentsia like to talk about, but not do.

There are many solutions around the world and in different parts of the economy where funding is mostly stable and funds and publishing. Some of these models even involve for-profit arms (they should not, of course, but the model is there).

For 20 years in Canada we have talking about non-profit, cooperatives lead by journalists being funded through a combination of public and private sources, where stability is regulated by government. None of these have been promoted in a serious way because the Canadian elite do not actually want to solve the issue. The solution that they are trying to solve is sustained profits. They think that these corporate monsters are entitled to profits that they do not work for and that is why the current bill is about redistributing money from Meta and Google back to BCE and Post Media.

I am no fan of Google or Meta or any large monopoly digital ad company. But, in the world of Capitalism, that's the game you play when you want to make profits, sometimes you lose-out to the other players.

News is a public good. BCE and Post Media are not.

We need to fund news, not ads. And news is provided by workers called journalists. If we find a way to fund journalists as we fund others who work in independent roles for the public good, then we will have solved this problem.

Journalists are smart people, they will figure out the structures they need if we start providing funding. My bet is that it doesn't look like Bell.