by Marc Edge
NEW STAR BOOKS
2024/$21.00/240 pp.
News media is broken. Not just the business model, which for decades relied on ads to make publishing newspapers and magazines possible before the internet came along and demolished it, but journalism itself. The decline of local reporting. The rise of access journalism over watchdog investigating. The corporate raids of hallowed news institutions. The creeping influence of public relations on the business. The funding traps laid by foundations that pay for journalism but undermine independence. Today it’s much harder for journalists to do their job holding power to account. It’s a bad news story, but one that might be turned around.
In his eighth and most recent book, Tomorrow’s News: How to Fix Canada’s Media, columnist, author and former journalist Marc Edge offers a program for righting the media ship alongside a story about what went wrong with journalism in the first place. And while “timely” and “important” are overused descriptors of books, to be found in pull quotes on the back of just about any work of non-fiction, this book is genuinely both timely and important.
Tomorrow’s News reads a bit like an extended literature review or series of mini-reports documenting the decline of news media in the last few decades, particularly since the global financial crisis of 2008. Edge covers Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and a few other countries, offering both accounts of what’s gone wrong and analysis of the better and worse programs that countries have adopted to make things right. The book spends more time on problems than solutions, and is more comprehensive in assessing the former than outlining the latter, but in a tight 171-page volume, Edge manages to do both.
The problems are many but one stands out. The internet broke the ad model for newspapers and magazines. Now journalism and the public good it provides are imperilled, especially locally, where hometown papers are closing or at risk of closing en masse. It hasn’t helped that private equity firms and hedge funds have stepped in, consolidated outlets and driven them into the ground.
Solutions carry their own risks, whether public or private, including threats to the independence of reporters. But Edge addresses these risks and comes up with a suite of answers that might not just rebuild the industry but remake Canada’s media for the long term in a digital-first-and-foremost model. He argues that the free market won’t save media, but state subsidies can work if you design and deploy them correctly, including tax funding derived from a variety of sources, particularly from enterprises who’ve benefited from the digital transformation.
Other funding schemes include media tax credits (which Canada has, for now) and a voucher system for individuals to direct funding to outlets of their choosing. As part of this new model, Edge also recommends that subsidies should only go to “hard” news, rather than entertainment or opinion. Additionally he counsels that newspapers and magazines move, in some cases, towards community non-profit ownership, for instance through a co-op model.
The cost of not saving journalism, warns Edge, is “social and political cataclysm.” Subsidies and programs to save media, in contrast, are “not an expense but an investment.” That’s true. Journalism is a public good, essential to democracy and to a market economy where free enterprises left to their own devices are prone to all kinds of behaviour at odds with what’s best for consumers. Accordingly, the sooner we commit to a renewal of news media as a digital-first undertaking outside of the profit model, with a focus on hard, investigative reporting, including local journalism, the better.
David Moscrop is a columnist, a podcaster and the author of Too Dumb for Democracy? (Goose Lane, 2019).
_______________________________________
Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.
Read more: Should Government Fund Media?
