The only way to save local news

Old newspapers, not threatened by the Internet.

Metroland Media Group, owner of about 70 newspapers in southern Ontario, recently announced devastating cuts — 60% of its entire workforce and eliminating the print versions of dozens of community newspapers. Metroland is owned by Nordstar, the owner of the Toronto Star. The 605 people who were laid off won’t even get a severance as the company has filed for bankruptcy protection.

There are some people who still believe that a generous benefactor, a good corporate overlord plus a few paywalls are all that are needed to save journalism in Canada. As long as people pay for their news, the Toronto Stars, the Waterloo Records and the Hamilton Spectators of the world will be OK.

And that might save some outlets.The Globe and Mail has seemingly hit the right mix of benevolent ownership and Newspaper-of-Record cred that they can compel enough people to subscribe to the newspaper, and paywall it for everyone else. The paper forecasted that revenues would grow by $30 million in 2023.

But there will always be challenges to the paywall model. Broadcasters like CTV and Global offer their content for free thanks to a different monetisation strategy that is intimately tied to commercial broadcast journalism. This undercuts other outlets’ paywalls. Postmedia, the largest media chain in Canada mostly does not have the articles that appear in their dozens of outlets paywalled. Plus the CBC, though a threatened species, will never be able to place their content behind a paywall as Canadians have already paid for their content.

Even then, cutbacks abound at both commercial, for-profit operators. Postmedia and Nortdstar are talking about merging, concentrating our tiny media ecosystem even further. With more than 10,000 journalism jobs lost in Canada in the past five years, the situation is dire. Canadian news media is in crisis.

There will always be small fixes that are possible —  the allure of starting a new, reader-funded platform or a foundation-funded platform or some mix of the two like the Maple, the Narwhal or others. Or, as I have increasingly done, many journalists are moving their work over to Substack, funded directly by readers.

But none of these solutions combined can make up for the structural loss of local news that Canada has experienced over the past two decades. The only thing that can save local news — the kind of news that no one wants to pay for because it’s slow and probably, the council meetings and mayoral elections and zoning debates – is funding news with a dedicated municipal levy.

A levy imposed on residents in the same way as a utility or property tax is, would create the fiscal stability necessary to fund local news. A levy could be collected by a city or town council and then remitted to a publisher. There would be a political wall built between the regional body and the publisher and the publisher would operate as publishers normally do — indpendently and without (direct) influence over them by politicians.

When I’ve talked about this model to people, I’m often asked where it has worked. What town in Canada has tried it out? The short answer is nowhere. But that’s not entirely true.

This is the model through which the overwhelming majority of campus newspapers are funded. Student newspapers collect money from students through a dedicated levy. The money is often remitted by a local student union or sent directly to the outlet by the institution. The outlet is managed by an independent board who hires a publisher, an editor in chief, and so on. This model creates stable funding for a critical campus service — autonomous student journalism.

And the best campus papers do exactly what the best mainstream media outlets do. They dog university administrators, sniff out corruption and file access to information requests. They also sit through student union council meetings, boards of governors and senate meetings and the boring, sloggy stuff that is at the heart of any news agency’s work.

If you scratch at any town council, it doesn’t take very long to discover things that citizens have a right to know. Sometimes those things are scandalous. Sometimes they threaten the political careers of individuals and sometimes they are criminal. The death of local news allows all of this to thrive and in thriving, we are all far worse off.

Well actually, that isn’t entirely true. We are not all far worse off. There are some people among us for whom this lack of scrutiny suits them quite well. Any one who prefers a lack of scrutiny, whether politicians, business people or local leaders, benefits from the current arrangement. And more, they benefit from the total collapse of local news. They have no interest in protecting it, let alone strengthening it.

We’ve seen the limits of federal money intended to save Canadian journalism. It breeds mistrust and makes media outlets beholden to limited-term grants that the federal government doles out. The model has not saved local news. If anything, it’s turned news agencies into grant-chasers. And it isn’t a sustainable solution: these grants are likely to be wiped out the next time the Conservatives find themselves in power.

And so that leaves us with the levy-based model — the only one that provides the kind of sustainability and stability that must form the foundation of a healthy news industry. It also provides a democratic mechanism for average people to be involved in their local news agency. As a democratic structure, sure, it could also be eliminated by the same people who created it. But the threat of losing the levy should force the outlet to be relevant, popular and necessary, thereby protecting it through popular support. That pressure would help identify local priorities for the kind of news, the mix of news (say, television versus print) and even allow local citizens to run for a position to be part of the publishing board.

There are dozens and dozens of examples of this model in Canada, on campuses as large or larger than many places in Canada with no local news. Their experience can be used to fashion a new basis for local news. The only thing we’re lacking is the political will. Luckily, creating the political will is entirely in our hands.