More than half the newsroom at Radio NL in Kamloops, B.C., has been let go as the station moves to a music format.Sarah Smellie/The Canadian Press
This week, Canada’s news desert grew a little bit more, with yet another community joining the hundreds where local journalism has gone extinct, or is at least on the endangered list.
For decades, Radio NL has been a powerful voice for the citizens of Kamloops, B.C., covering the courts, city hall and local emergencies. But that voice has grown dimmer, with Radio NL’s owner announcing that the station will move to a music format, and four out of seven journalists will be laid off. That loss comes on top of the closing of the last print newsroom in Kamloops last year, and the shutdown of the city’s daily newspaper a decade ago.
Kamloops is not yet a desert. Radio NL will still cover some news, and the digital news operation Castanet has a small newsroom in the city as well. There are traditional broadcasters: private TV station CFJC and the CBC. But there is no doubt that the supply of journalism – of reporting grounded in truth – is drying up there, and across Canada.
At the same time, that news desert is made all the more arid by the data deserts that are too common in Canada: vital information that governments refuse to share with the public, including journalists. Both kinds of deserts diminish democracy, leaving citizens in the dark about what federal, provincial and local governments are up to.
The withering of journalism in Kamloops would be of concern at any time, but it’s particularly and bitterly ironic coming just ahead of World News Day, on Sept. 28. This year’s motto for the global campaign for fact-based journalism: Choose Truth.
Those choices are dwindling in Canada, particularly in smaller cities and towns. The Local News Research Project has documented the disappearance of 519 local news outlets across the country from 2008 to April of this year. Nearly three-fifths of those closings were in communities with fewer than 50,000 residents. Close to half were in communities with fewer than 20,000 residents.
In those communities, there are fewer eyes – and sometimes none – on local councils, police, sports and artistic events. The decisions that people in power make are scrutinized less, if at all. The ties that bind together a community are celebrated less, if ever.
April Lindgren, the project’s leader and a professor of journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University, says she prefers the term “news poverty” since most of the communities have access to some kind of news. Indeed, national and international news organizations have a role to play.
But they cannot replace a local newsroom that not only covers a community, but is part of it. The miasma of social media is no substitute, either, for reporters and editors dedicated to the pursuit – if not always successful – of the truth.
The problems are obvious enough, the solutions less so. Certainly, Ottawa has made mistakes. Ottawa’s Online News Act was intended to assist the news industry, but it backfired, with Facebook eliminating news from Canadians’ feeds. The disappearance of Facebook as a channel for reaching readers hurt all newsrooms, but local outlets with limited marketing budgets felt a disproportionate impact.
Some of the pain has been self-inflicted, with short-sighted decisions to shrink newsrooms as revenue softened, with the resulting decline in content sparking further losses. Finding a business model that allows for a consistent level of quality journalism is clearly part of any sustainable future. (Outlets such as Castanet, reporting news online in the Okanagan since 2000 and in Kamloops since 2020, are cause for hope.)
Prof. Lindgren says that a changed role for the CBC could be part of the answer, suggesting that the broadcaster could move to a model where it provides its taxpayer-subsidized content for free to any Canadian newsroom. The CBC would stop being a competitor with struggling local newsrooms and become a source of support.
But fundamentally, any enduring solution to rolling back news deserts rests with Canadians. Ultimately, an independent press needs the backing of readers – an audience. That means that citizens have to appreciate the value of journalism, and be willing to pay for it.
A newsroom backed only by government is vulnerable both to official influence and to public suspicion. A newsroom backed by readers is able to incur, and to resist, the ire of officialdom. A newsroom backed by readers is the surest cure for misinformation – and the sharpest-eyed watchdog.