The continuing decline of the traditional media landscape
By Mark Bonokoski
The newspaper industry, seemingly forever the epicentre of the world’s news gatherers, survived the upstart of radio in the 1920s and the television era of the 1950s, but fell flat on its face when confronting the competition of the Internet.
The Internet has all but delivered a coup de grace on the newspaper business — leading to shrinking budgets, shrinking staff counts, a shrinking number of existing newspapers, and the shrinking number of actual newspaper pages.
As proof that survival may not be in the cards, there are hardly enough pages in today’s daily print newspaper to line the bottom of a birdcage or to wrap a decent fish.
If a local newspaper went on strike back in its heyday, for example, local radio panicked. Its main news source was suddenly dry. It could no longer “rip and read.”
This was the reality of those times.
And now the worst news of today? Legacy journalists are no longer trusted or respected because government bailouts have tainted their reputations.
Journalists and politicians do not meld nicely.
“The Internet has created a world of unlimited choice and been a gift to consumers and innovators,” said the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s (MLI) Peter Menzies, once a Canadian newspaper executive.
“But Canada’s news industry providers have suffered losses of audience engagement and advertising revenue.”
As Menzies put it, “Canada is on the cusp of making most of its journalists permanently dependent on the federal government. This is evolving directly through tax relief and subsidy funds and indirectly through offshore tech companies compelled by legislation.
“While this may permit some of the legacy news organizations to continue to survive financially, this new connection to politicians is eroding public trust in both government and news organizations.”