LA Times Guild journalists rally in front of City Hall to protest against layoffs and changes to job seniority protections during a walkout of the Los Angeles Times newspaper at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles on Jan. 19.PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images
Black Press Ltd., the owner of 150 daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and websites covering almost exclusively Western Canada, announced last month it had entered creditor protection.
The company also disclosed it had entered into a sales agreement with Canso, Deans Knight Capital Management Ltd. and Carpenter Media Group.
It’s still unclear what this means for the future of the publications it owns. In its news release, the company said the agreement will put the future of the organization on a stronger footing. They always say that. The bottom line, however, is that creditor protection is never a good thing.
And the bottom, bottom line is that a restructuring of some sort is coming, with cuts and closures and layoffs of one form or another seemingly inevitable. More local news disappearing.
The diminishment of the media world is not news. It’s been happening for decades now. But fresh contractions here and in the U.S. are more than concerning. I say this as someone who, perhaps naively, believes in the vital role that a strong, independent media plays in democracies (and non-democracies) around the globe.
In recent months, the bad news has been almost non-stop. It’s felt like there hasn’t been an outlet spared the owner’s sword. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, the Baltimore Sun, The San Diego Union-Tribune, the list goes on – all the victims of layoffs and other forms of cost-cutting. Iconic magazines such as Sports Illustrated and Time also announced significant staff cuts as well.
Is the media simply doomed?
No one knows for sure, of course. But what’s clear is that there is no discernible path to a thriving media industry. The search for a sustainable business model has yet to produce anything resembling a viable plan. Solutions we thought were there have vanished. Media sugar daddies have not been the answer.
As New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen recently wrote on X, the “rich guy business plan” rarely works. “The rescuer typically underestimates how hard it is to find money in news and keep quality reasonably high,” he wrote. See Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post, among others. As Mr. Rosen notes, when the futility of a workable business model becomes evident, support for the investment by said rich guy begins to wane. It then becomes only a matter of time before the business is sold to some hedge fund waiting to slash costs and wring every last bit of profit out of the company before eventually selling it for scraps.
It’s now clear that the advertising world doesn’t need conventional media to reach target audiences. There are so many other, cheaper ways to connect with prospective customers. Increasingly, media companies realize that they will survive – or die – based on their ability to sell their journalism on merit and quality alone.
This is an easier model to make work if you’re The New York Times or The Globe and Mail than if you’re the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder.
Governments in Canada and elsewhere have stepped in recently to force tech giants such as Google and Facebook to compensate news organizations for the news links they post to their sites. Although any help is welcome, especially for smaller media outlets, it would not appear to be a long-term solution for what ails us. Local newspapers are still going to go out of business despite the small cheques Google et al are now being forced to cut.
It is increasingly frustrating for many of us to see appeals from people on sites such as X asking The Globe, among others, to remove paywalls on certain stories. What successful companies give their products away for free? And yet, some people expect media companies to do just that.
More and more, there seems to be a class divide when it comes to the news media. There are those (the monied and educated) who can afford subscriptions that give them access to top-quality reporting and those who can’t, driving many in this group to seek their information elsewhere, often in cesspools of misinformation and propaganda. Consequently, there is a growing chasm between those who are informed and those vulnerable to con artists and shysters operating in the vast digital wasteland that is the internet.
This is dangerous.
Around the world, there is a full-on assault on independent journalism underway at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise and people like Donald Trump are threatening the very tenets of democracy.
We are staring into a great abyss, one that has potentially frightening consequences for all of us.