Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 16 - Evidence
HALIFAX, Wednesday, April 20, 2005
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 9:05 a.m. to study the current state of Canadian media industries; emerging trends and developments in these industries; the media's role, rights and responsibilities in Canadian society; and current and appropriate future policies relating thereto.
Senator Joan Fraser (Chairman) in the chair.
[Traduction]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, we are continuing our study of the media and the role the government should play to help the media remain vigorous, independent and diversified in the context of the changes that have caused upheavals in this area in recent years. I am referring in particular to globalization, technological change, convergence and concentration of ownership.
We are still in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and we are visiting all parts of the country. We have already visited other regions of Canada. We have been in Nova Scotia since yesterday, and the day before that, we were in Newfoundland. Tomorrow we will be in New Brunswick.
[Français]
This morning, we are very fortunate to be welcoming Professor Michael Cobden, who is the Maclean Hunter Professor of Journalism at the School of Journalism at the University of King's College.
Thank you very much for joining us, Professor Cobden. The floor is yours.
Mr. Michael Cobden, Maclean Hunter Professor of Journalism, School of Journalism, University of King's College, As an individual: Thank you very much for welcoming me to this important committee. I think I will start just with the central question that you address, respond to it briefly, and then go on to what I really want to say.
Do I believe that public policy needs to be adjusted in light of the many changes that have affected the news media in recent years? Yes, I do. However, having covered the Davey committee report for the Toronto Star, and having written about the Kent commission for the Whig-Standard, and having seen, I must say, the fine and imaginative ideas of the Kent commission throttled by the owners and editors of Canadian daily newspapers, I am not optimistic that Canadians — the public, the owners of the news media, the journalists, the business community and investors — have the will to support meaningful adjustments in public policy on the media. I am not saying it cannot be done or will not be done or should not be done, I am just saying that it is not my hope at present, and that I am more interested in what journalism schools can do to improve the ability and the will of their graduates to change journalism for the better.
Thus, if you will allow me, that is the subject that I would like to talk about this morning. I can go on and make a few remarks afterwards about some of your other questions and then we can have a discussion, if that is fair?
I might say that I am working, at present, on a study of journalism education, and my premise is that journalism schools must bear some responsibility for the quality of journalism offered to the public. I mean, it sounds pretty obvious, but it is something that is not always remembered. Every year, it seems to me — and I do not know of any comprehensive Canadian research on this — but every year it seems that a bigger and bigger proportion of the news staff in all media comes from journalism schools. I remember when I worked with the Toronto Star there were very few reporters who had been to journalism school. Now I would say the majority would be graduates of journalism schools, and the same is true in all mainline media, and also in the other media that are so important in this country, particularly weekly newspapers, alternative papers and so on.
My view is that with certain qualifications, major qualifications I allow, the individual journalist can do good journalism, whoever owns the newspaper, magazine or broadcast outlet. These qualifications that I see would be first the owner's control of what news is covered and how it is covered and presented. We can talk about that in a minute, but obviously if that control is asserted over the newsroom, then it will affect the quality of journalism that the journalism staff is able to do.
Second, the owner's control over staffing levels, which translates into how much time reporters have to do stories, and the editors have to plan stories and, therefore, into the quality of the journalism, and also the owner's control over the quality of staff.
Third, the owner's pressure on management to use material generated in the owner's other outlets, whether in the same medium or cross-media.
That is a lot to overcome or work around, but given that, and as I say we can talk about those matters further, it seems to me that there still is potential to do good journalism. I am reading a book at the moment by a Chinese journalist named Xinran. The book, in the English translation, is called The Good Women of China. Xinran was an employee of the Chinese State Radio System in the late 1980s. For a long time, she had wanted to improve the lives of Chinese women, and eventually she got clearance to host a phone-in radio show. The show, which was called Words on the Night Breeze, had to operate within the restrictions imposed by government censors. Still, it provoked an outpouring of very moving testimonies, bearing witness to women's attempts in China to improve their lives despite all the civil strife and a highly restrictive society.
That show said — and I say it myself all the time — “No democracy, no journalism. No journalism, no democracy.” I do believe that, in principle, and yet by most definitions the work of people like Xinran is journalism, and powerful journalism.
I might just say that I am from South Africa originally, and I worked for the Rand Daily Mail before coming to Canada in the late 1960s. The Rand Daily Mail no longer exists, but it was the first anti-apartheid newspaper in South Africa. It was the Johannesburg English-language morning daily. I can also tell you that South Africa was not, by all measures, a democracy at that time, yet I think most people who studied newspapers would allow that the journalism done on the Rand Daily Mail in those years was of a superior quality. It certainly was powerful and, in a sense, did lay the groundwork for the changes that came later in South Africa.
Therefore if Xinran can do it in China, it seems to me journalists here can do it despite the restrictions imposed by corporate owners. They cannot do everything but there is a great deal they can do. My point is that if the graduates of journalism schools make up a large proportion of the staff of a newspaper or broadcast outlet, the school that educated these people must accept some responsibility for the quality of the journalism produced. I am not referring only, or particularly, to my own university journalism school. But if, for example, the faculty of the King's School of Journalism is critical of the quality of journalism in, say, the two Halifax newspapers, it should acknowledge that a big proportion, probably more than 70 per cent or certainly somewhere approaching that, of the reporting staff in both those papers, are graduates from King's School and therefore the school must accept some responsibility for the quality of journalism in those papers. Conversely, if it admires the quality, then it can take some credit, I would say.
The responsibility is in the way the school educates students but also in the role it plays as the critic of journalism and the media. The school also bears responsibility for the students it selects for admission, or some responsibility, and the guidance it gives them in their education. It also bears some responsibility in what it offers in the way of continuing education for journalists and media managers.
That is the sort of point that I want to make. I will just tell you a little about the study that I am doing and what my interest is in that study, and then we can go on to other questions if you wish.
My study is based on the premise that journalism is a particularly demanding, intellectual pursuit; that because of the nature of reporting, because of the nature of having to assimilate an unfamiliar situation very quickly, and to assimilate it well enough to be able to write about it with authority, and well enough to be able to scrutinize what sources are saying, and to do that every day in a new situation, which is what most reporters have to do, that seems to me to be a formidable challenge. My study looks at what journalism schools and universities might do to improve the intellectual wherewithal of journalism graduates to cope with these challenges.
This will lead me in the study to some unfamiliar recommendations in the world of journalism education. I do not know whether anything will become of it, but it is my concern at the moment, and you will forgive me if I concentrate on that. It is just as I said to your clerk: My mind is on that at the moment, and it is rather difficult to move away from it.
If you wish, I will just say a few words about some of the questions that you have posed and then we can discuss them. I will not deal with all of them, but just a couple of points that I want to make just in passing, really.
On your question of older and younger Canadians accessing news and information in different ways, I would say this: that the mainline news media have a great deal to learn from what is generally called the alternative media, such as The Coast in Halifax, about how to engage young people in the news. It is true that papers such as The Coast depend for their support on their readers' interest in popular culture or entertainment, but I am very impressed with the way papers such as these engage their readers in political issues, commercial news, social issues and so on. It shows what young people can do, not only as journalists but also in the management of newspapers and as owners.
Papers such as The Coast disprove the assumption that young people will not read newspapers. What I have not seen is anything as impressive as these alternative papers in the broadcast media. I am sure that CityTv in Toronto, for example, and stations like that, have a large audience of young people but I suspect more, or entirely, for their music program and little for their news coverage. In radio, I have not heard a newscast, it seems to me, that is likely to interest young people. I am not saying that it will not, but it does not seemed designed to interest young people.
I am not an expert in the Internet and in how young people use online news media, but I would guess, from what I have learned from the young people at university and from young people I know through my children, and the children of friends of mine, that online news is not big with young people. Therefore when you say “Older and younger Canadians access news and information in different ways”, I am not sure exactly what you mean by that, whether that is a reference to the comfort that young people feel with the Internet or whatever. I just want to make the point that I think newspapers, that old medium, can certainly appeal to young people if they are staffed and managed by young people.
I also do not know much about the role of media literacy studies in schools, but I do believe deeply that children and adolescents should be helped to learn how to consume media critically. I remember years ago when I was working for the Toronto Board of Education hearing its director, a wonderful man named Duncan Green, responding to a call from a business organization for the Toronto Board of Education to get back to basics. What he said was, “What do you mean by the basics?” “Reading, writing and arithmetic,” the business person said. “Reading what?” said Green. “Books, of course.” “Well,” said Green, who was an English teacher, by the way, and a very literary man, “I'm not sure that reading books is as basic as reading television. Maybe that's one of the basics we should be teaching children. How to read television.” This is a powerful thought, it seemed to me.
I will also look, just briefly, at question three on your list: Are communities, minorities and remote centres appropriately served? My answer is: No, certainly not. Certainly not in the mainline media. Maybe in cities like Toronto — if I could talk about cultural communities for a minute, or minorities — maybe in a city like Toronto that has well-established news media for the different cultural communities; Maybe, although not, I think, satisfactorily. I think if people from these different cultural communities, or what we like to call “ethnic” communities, or in our arrogance “immigrant” communities, if people from these different communities feel that they have to go to a newspaper in their own language or a community newspaper that is designed particularly for their cultural community to find out what is happening in the world, then I think there is something wrong. I think that, especially in a city like Toronto, where half the people are from different cultures, it is a shame if people do not find a home for their interest in the mainline news media.
In smaller cities like Halifax and Kingston, Ontario, where I lived before I came here, these communities are certainly not served. I remember when I was at the Whig-Standard, deciding one day to write something about the Portugese community in Kingston. I looked in what was then still a clippings library at the Whig-Standard, and there was one; one paragraph story in the file. That was all. It just said something about a new Archbishop or Bishop being appointed or something of that nature, and that was all there was. I started to look into this situation and found that the Portugese community was easily the biggest other language community in Kingston. In fact, at that time Kingston said it had 60,000 people. It now says it has 120,000 people, but it is now a regional municipality like all the others. However, of that 60,000 people, 6,000 or 8,000 people were Portugese. The Whig-Standard, the award-winning and lionized Whig-Standard, of which I was the editorial page editor and very proud of it, had not written a single piece about that community in all those years.
I started to do some research on this aspect. I went to a rock concert one night and there were a thousand people at this rock concert. Featured was a singer from the Azores, and of course it was not covered in the Whig-Standard. However, the same night, some little classical ensemble was in town and 15 people showed up, but it got an advance story in the Whig-Standard the day before, and a review of their concert the next day. That is an example of the kind of neglect that exists.
You can see it in this town too, in the coverage of the Arabic community. Arabic is the second language in Halifax, I understand; certainly second after French. However, if you read the papers here, you would not know that there was an Arabic community in this town. It is not as if they are hiding; I mean, they are pretty obvious from their dress alone. There is a big Arabic community here but it is not seen as mainline news. The lives of these people are not seen as part of the day-to-day news fare here. I am not blaming the newspapers here particularly for this. I think this is true of mainline news media everywhere. Think of the CBC, for example. I think the mainline news media are still living in an English Canada where the overwhelming culture is Anglo-Saxon, and we have a lot of catching up to do before we can say that our mainline news media truly reflects the composition of our population.
I will say a few words in a second and then I will finish about what I think government can do in that regard. However, I do want to allow just one point. It is very difficult to serve a heterogenic or variegated society. It is a challenge to any news medium to do this. The reason for that is that a story about the Arabic community in Halifax may interest the Arabic community, but will interest nobody else. It depends on what it is, and it depends on how it is written. In general, though, if it is information news, or news of something that happened in the Arabic community that may be of great interest to that community, it may still be of marginal or of no interest to anybody else. You see this not only in cultural communities but also in geographic situations, perhaps even more dramatically.
I did a little bit of work for the New Brunswick newspapers at one point in their recent checkered history, and one of the things I found was that the Telegraph Journal, which is a provincial paper, had a great deal of difficulty writing stories about one community in a way that interested all of their readers. That is the challenge. It is a tremendous challenge and it is something that I do not think newspapers or news media have risen to adequately.
Thus when you ask about concentration, which is perhaps the core of your interest, I would say, “Yes, concentration does reduce diversity,” but I would say that you probably know more about this than I do. The same applies to cross-ownership affecting diversity.
What can the Government of Canada do about this? Can it develop a policy and a regulatory framework that encourages an appropriate diversity without harming freedom of the press? In a word, I would say the way to do this is through rewarding diversity, by funding those news media that can demonstrate an improvement or a plan to improve diversity. I do not know how you would do this rewarding. I will not really attempt to answer that, but I think it can be done — or saluting, if rewarding is scary. I think you could also reward journalism schools for admitting students from different cultures and minorities. Not just minorities, by the way. We tend to use this word “minority” to imply a visible minority, but people from different cultures have as much difficulty in our society no matter what minority they come from. Therefore, if you could find ways to reward schools for embracing more of these people and finding ways to educate them, particularly people whose English is not up to snuff, I think it would be a great contribution.
I think you could also reward news media in some way for giving internships and jobs to students and graduates from different cultures. You could reward them for appointing people from different cultures to management positions. Find some way to salute that and to mark the importance of that in the news media. Also, not just appointments to management positions, but to community editorial boards, advisory boards and so on. That can be done by sponsoring workshops to teach people from different cultures how to access the news media, both as members of the public and as people who want to play a part. Perhaps the government could get involved in some way or other in offering national or regional prizes for coverage of different communities.
That is my presentation, Madam Chair, and if I can help by answering any questions, I would be happy to do so.
The Chairman: I, alone, could ask you questions for the next four hours but I shall restrain myself and go first to the deputy chair, Senator Tkachuk.
Senator Tkachuk: Thank you very much, Mr. Cobden. I must say that you have covered a lot of territory. However, I will try and ask some specific questions, just so we understand what you were trying to get at.
When you talked about the Kent commission, you said that there were many ideas and recommendations that had been throttled by the newspaper owners and publishers. Could you be more specific as to what they were?
Mr. Cobden: The ideas I am referring to — and I did not go back and check the commission for its recommendations — had to do with methods that the Kent commission suggested for giving the public more say in the newsrooms, and trying to offset the moves towards concentration at that time. What I am referring to is anything that Kent proposed that smacked of government interest, even if it tried to assert this interest at arm's length in the media, was throttled right away. There was an assumption, right from the beginning, that government has no business at all in trying to affect the way that the news media do their work. That was the assumption from the beginning, that anything that smacked of licensing or of any other kind of government interest in this area was anathema. I think that is frankly a purist position that just does not add up.
I understand, as well as any other journalist, the reason for this. I know. I come from a country where this kind of government interference happened, and I am not relishing the prospect of it. All I am saying is that there must be some way for the government of the country, which represents the people of the country, to assert some interest in something as important to the people of the country as the news media. I am sorry I cannot be more specific, but that is my thinking.
Senator Tkachuk: Every newspaper person who has come before us has said that they do not want or wish the government to interfere in the newsroom. You mentioned licensing. What are you getting at here? That perhaps a body like the CRTC or something like that would be —
Mr. Cobden: No, I am not getting at that because I do not think that would happen, and actually I would not want that. I think the CRTC has a position because of the public nature of the airwaves, and I think one has to move to a different concept when we are talking about government interest in, or political interest if you like, in newspapers and in other media. I cannot answer the question because, as I say, I have not sat down and tried to plot out a way in which, apart from those few suggestions I made at the end, a way in which government could assert this influence. However, newspapers do live in a society, and they do have to conform to certain standards, laws, policies and public policy. What do those mean? I do not have the answer. I am just saying that they cannot see themselves as somehow immune to any kind of influence from government. That is just not on the cards. It is not that anyone — at least, I certainly am not — is recommending that the government install a censor in the newsroom of every organization. However, the Kent commission idea of some kind of a Community Advisory Board or some sort of Community Board representing the readership of the newspapers, I think, is something that they should embrace. They should not have to be told this by government; they should want to do this on their own. Newspapers, however, especially when they operate as sort of items in a concentrated media empire, are not likely to want to do this. I do not know.
I said at the end, senator, that my instinct is to try and find ways to reward good journalism, and I spoke a bit in terms of reflecting diversity. I think that that is the best way to do it, although even that is touchy, of course. I am sorry; I am fumbling for an answer but I really do not have one. I have not thought it out adequately.
Senator Tkachuk: You also talk about restrictions put on by corporate owners. That was shortly after you talked about journalism itself and the quality of journalists, and that the schools of journalism have some responsibility for the quality of the journalists. What restrictions were you talking about? You did not give any examples, and so I sort of got lost there.
Mr. Cobden: I am talking about head office influence over what happens in the outlying newsrooms. That is my particular concern there. I have not done any research on this and I am not an expert on it, but I read the papers like you do and I read accounts of head offices in Winnipeg influencing the way editorials are written in Halifax or wherever else. I think that is inimical. That smacks to me of “system,” and I must say that, in general, I would have to argue that any kind of system will affect the nature of the constituent parts in an unfortunate way.
Having said that, let me say that the Halifax Herald, for example, is not in a chain. It is an independent newspaper. Whatever one thinks of the Halifax Herald, whatever I might say in judgment of it as a journalism professor, as someone who has spent his life in newspaper journalism, whatever I might say, I must preface that by saying that the public of this community likes that newspaper. If the Herald was part of a system, it would not be the Herald. I can tell you right now, if the Herald was part of any newspaper chain in this country, it would change radically. What would happen is that it would look like all the other papers in that chain. Not only that, its tone would be the same as the tone of papers elsewhere in that chain.
I saw this happening when Southam was taken over originally, and we started to see a change in the distinctiveness, in the idiosyncratic sort of nature and voice of particular newspapers. When that started happening, you could see “system” at work. I knew those papers when they were owned by Southam, in the early days when Southam operated a kind of hands-off ownership and each paper was allowed to be its own newspaper — and they were. They are not now.
Senator Tkachuk: Are you saying that people are buying newspapers that they do not like, or do not want?
Mr. Cobden: First of all, fewer of them are buying papers than used to buy them.
Senator Tkachuk: That is true of all papers.
Mr. Cobden: Yes, that is true.
Senator Tkachuk: Independents and others.
Mr. Cobden: It is true, but still, one must make the point. Fewer people are buying them. I also do not think they are reading them in the same way. I do not think that newspapers are playing the part in family life, in the life of the individual, that they used to play. I do not think they are read with the same gusto. That is not the blame of newspapers, entirely. The whole world has changed, obviously. All sorts of other media are involved now. I saw this happen with the Whig-Standard in Kingston. The Whig-Standard was an eccentric newspaper, by all accounts, when Michael Davies owned it and when Neil Reynolds edited it. It was eccentric in the sense that it decided to do things in a way that most newspapers were not doing them. It was a literary newspaper; it concentrated its efforts in that area. It ran a weekly magazine that no other newspaper would have run.
For example, I wrote a piece in that magazine on a man who was an expert in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. That piece ran to about 10,000 words in the Whig-Standard's magazine. No other newspaper would tolerate that kind of thing, but the Whig-Standard was loved for that exigence. It was loved for the play it gave people's letters. I have never seen a newspaper anywhere else that allowed people to write whatever they wanted to write, and stuck it in the paper in just the way they wrote it, and at the length they wrote it. Sometimes three pages of wild letters would run in that newspaper. Why? Because the newspaper felt it was important to allow people to express their points of view. This all moved away, I can tell you, when the new Southam took over that newspaper. It became a beautifully designed, boring and unreadable newspaper, which is what it is today.
Senator Tkachuk: You mentioned owners, or somebody from Winnipeg, influencing the editorial of a newspaper. We have had testimony to that effect, and we have also had editors from that chain say that —
Mr. Cobden: It never happens.
Senator Tkachuk: — it never happens. I do not know one way or the other; I do not work there, but did the Toronto Star not do the same thing? Does it not do the same thing?
Mr. Cobden: Any business is —
Senator Tkachuk: The owner.
Mr. Cobden: Yes, the owner.
Senator Tkachuk: The owners of the Toronto Star, they influence the editorial?
Mr. Cobden: Yes, sure they influence the editorial, but when the owner is in the community, is a taxpayer and resident within that community and rubs shoulders with other people in the community, that is one thing. However, when the owner, exercising this influence, is three thousand miles away then I think it is a different matter. I think a newspaper is a community institution. I mean, if it is a national newspaper then it is a national institution. However, most daily newspapers are rooted in their communities, and serve their communities, and that is where they belong. As soon as you take the ownership and the ultimate editorial control — “ultimate” is perhaps too strong a word — the editorial control for those papers away somewhere else, then I think you are losing that contact and that responsibility towards the local community.
I worked for the Star and it is quite true that the Star did have certain policies that affected the way in which reporters did their work. Obviously, in the days when economic nationalism was an important principle for the Toronto Star, you knew if you were covering a story in which someone was asserting economic nationalism in Canada, it would get good play — and you would have to cover it fully. You knew that. Thus the answer is, sure, you are influenced by your owners.
However, you can also be influenced in other ways by your owners. This is an important point to make about chain ownership, that it is not always the action itself that influences the journalist; it is the anticipation of action, or the perception of action, or the rumour of action, or the fear — it is all of those things that affect the end product. At the Toronto Star, people were very aware that Mr. Honderich was the owner of the paper, and that he liked certain things but did not like other things. People were nervous around him, for sure. In the end, however, I do not think it affected the quality of journalism on that paper in the way I think it does in many chain-owned newspapers.
Senator Munson: Good morning, Michael. I have a conflict of interest, again. I worked with Michael 10 years ago in this great school of King's, to which my son will go this September. That begs the question that some others would sometimes ask and the criticisms we do hear on journalism schools across the country, that they are out there producing a whole bunch of — for want of a better phrase — “little lefties” who have a point of view once they leave journalism school, and keep that point of view and that sort of bias as they enter mainstream media. Is that an unfair criticism, or is there a balance in future journalists being produced at schools across the country, including yours?
Mr. Cobden: I have never heard that before.
Senator Munson: Perhaps not, but we have.
Mr. Cobden: I am sorry. I do not know where I have been, but I am just thinking of what happens. I mean, I know quite a lot about journalism schools now because I am doing some study of them. I have never heard of a journalism faculty being typed as left wing. We cover all parts of the spectrum, as far as I know. It has never seemed to me, Senator Munson, to be an issue at all. I just cannot see it.
Senator Munson: You do not see it?
Mr. Cobden: No.
Senator Munson: It has come up in our hearings.
Mr. Cobden: I think what is more likely to have come up is a bias in favour of the CBC as against private broadcast outlets. I think that has been charged to journalism schools. It may be because the broadcast faculty in journalism schools tends to come from the CBC, and may tend to feel more at home with the CBC than with private broadcast outlets. That I have heard. But I have never heard any suggestion of journalism schools being politically oriented.
Senator Munson: That leads me again to a question about journalism schools themselves. You talked about the fact that they must accept the responsibility of the quality of journalists that they produce, and I would like to tie that in with your comment. I found your story fascinating about the Arabic community in Halifax, and whether that holds true across the country, that is covered in our question three, where we ask: “Are minorities appropriately being served?” To all three questions about communities and remote centres, you said the word “no,” but I would like to be specific about minorities. Can journalism schools sensitize their students in order to sensitize mainstream media to pay attention to their minorities?
Mr. Cobden: They can do much better than they have done, but I think they do need support in this. I do not know exactly of what that support would comprise. I think one of the big difficulties to be overcome is the question of language. It is very difficult to teach journalism in an English language community or society to people whose English language is shaky. It is very difficult to do that. It is especially difficult if one's teaching method is — and my study is on this subject — the teaching of technique, of which I think there is much too much in journalism schools. The technique then involves news writing, for example, and the news writing is judged in the way that an editor would judge the writing, and instruction follows from that judgment. That is very difficult if people are not writing in English.
I do not know what the answer is but most journalism schools will tell you stories of experiences they have had in years past, particularly with students whose English was just not adequate to the challenge, and they had to find some way to accommodate that fact, or they ran into some difficulties in not accommodating it. It is a major problem, so I do not know what to say about that. I do not know how one can do it. However, I think the challenge has to be accepted.
My answer would probably be that journalism schools should concentrate more on the fundamental principles of journalism, or what I call the foundations, which I think would operate regardless of cultural background, or even a language background. If you get people doing stories right away, when they come into the school, then the person for whom English is a second or third or fourth language will be at a great disadvantage and will incur the impatience of the faculty, and eventually will become dispirited and discouraged. That is the pattern I think you will find in that situation. It is a difficulty.
Senator Munson: Yes, you would, I suppose, without having the state interfere, and nobody wants the state to interfere. I just feel that you have hit upon something within the journalism community, to try to understand that everybody has to pay more attention to their minorities because they are with us and they are a part of society that cannot be ignored. By the way, I never went to a journalism school. My first lesson came from my first news director. It was my first weekend and a big story came my way. I said, “How do I cover this story?” and he said, “Wing it, and then play it by ear.” Then the next week, when I covered the same story, I asked, “What do I do now?” and he said, “Play it by ear, then wing it,” so you fly by the seat of your pants when you are covering stories.
I just have one more question. Mainstream media should take lessons from alternative weeklies. Could you be just a bit more specific on how mainstream media should sell itself to catch up with the youth of today?
Mr. Cobden: I think what has happened is that the youth of today have not embraced the conventions of daily journalism. They have not embraced the language, the rhetoric, the style, the news judgment, the everything, of the mainline news media. They are not interested. They find the presentation boring. The answer to that, in the mainline news media, has been to have a page of pretend teenage or young people writing in the sort of “with it” kind of language, which is always out of date anyway. They have attempted to sort of ghettoize in that way. That is not the answer. Young people — this is a huge question — have a different kind of approach to the society that they live in. They have different interests. It is not that they are not interested. They are as interested, but they approach it in a different way.
I will give you one example. In the municipal election before last, and I do not know why they did not do it again, The Coast had three students covering the mayoral candidates and they wrote — The Coast is the alternative newspaper in Halifax. It is similar to the Mirror in Montreal or Now in Toronto, and so on. It put these three students, three young people, on to each of the mayoral candidates and let them do a piece as they saw it. What you got was three kind of very distinctive, very different narratives of the campaigns of these three politicians, in language, in the style and in attention to the kind of detail and the sort of things that were quoted and the descriptions that were offered and the interpretations that were made. Everything was entirely different to what you would see in the Herald or the Daily News. I wish I had them to show you, but these three stories were wonderful examples on how you can write about what you might think is the dreariest, most boring kind of politics you can imagine: civic elections — and how you can do that in a way that appeals to young people. It is not that they are not interested, it is that they are not interested in the language and the tone and the rhetoric of political coverage as you see it in the mainline news media.
Senator Eyton: Thank you, Michael, for being here. I liked your first message, which I will paraphrase by saying that a good journalist can do good work, no matter their regime. You coupled that with emphasizing the importance of schools of journalism and the role that they would have in training good journalists.
I have a few questions about schools of journalism and how they are today, and how they may evolve. My first question has to do with, in effect, the take-up. Is there an appetite, is there a demand for schools of journalism? Are there lots of applicants, and can you comment on the take-up? In that regard, can you also talk about whether or not there is some consideration of diversity within the stream coming into schools of journalism?
Mr. Cobden: There certainly is a demand for places in the schools of journalism. I think it is perhaps not as energetic as it was at one time. That may be because there are more schools. It may be that there is less interest in the news among young people, the news as it is presented to them, and that they do not see themselves as journalists in the way that they used to. These are not idealistic times that we live in. When I grew up in Johannesburg, you went into journalism because you wanted to change the world. It is not the reason that most journalists, most young people, go into journalism schools today. They go into journalism schools because they want to do something at university that will lead to a job. That is the main reason for going in. They may have some interest in writing or perhaps some interest in politics, or as much as is likely, and they see journalism as a possibility, or they see it as good training for writing and thinking, and so on. However, there are not many young people who go into journalism school wanting to make the world a better place and to use journalism for doing that.
I think some schools have a bigger admission list than others. I think that at King's we do not have quite as many applicants in relation to the numbers we take as we used to. When I came to King's 15 years ago, we had an eight- or nine- or sometimes ten-to-one ratio of applicants to the people we accepted. Now it is around five, I think, or something of that nature, so it has changed a bit. So much for that. What was the next part of your question?
Senator Eyton: Streaming, and the diversity coming into the school.
Mr. Cobden: I think this varies from school to school, but I think Ryerson has been more successful in this area. You see, Ryerson is in a city that is so diverse that it is almost impossible to avoid attracting people from different cultures. I mean, it is the culture. In a city like Halifax, which is less multi-cultural, it ismore difficult. You have to actually work at it. You have to offer scholarships and other inducements and do more active recruiting. We have tried, but we have not been as successful as we could have been. We have instituted scholarships and we have done some recruiting, but it is a tough challenge. We still have a way to go yet.
All I am really trying to say is that I think it is an essential element in the news media's interest in becoming more diverse, since journalism schools are providing the majority of reporters these days, in attracting people from different cultures. There have been improvements, but there is a very long way to go.
Senator Eyton: Can you comment on the content, on the instruction within the school of journalism, given the new technologies and the new media, the whole new world that graduates will face?
Mr. Cobden: I think the pedagogy has kept pace with the technology, quite remarkably, really. It would have been easy to fall way behind, because many of the faculty members grew up in different times in journalism and many of them have never felt very comfortable with the changing technologies. Therefore it is really remarkable that that has happened. It had to have happened, obviously, but I think journalism schools have done very well in that regard. I think they have done too well, actually, in my view. I think they are doing a good job in preparing people for their first job. I think there is too much; much too much emphasis on preparing people to, as the editors like to say, “hit the ground running.” This is the imperative in journalism schools. Get them ready to hit the ground running.
I think journalism school graduates are quite capable of handling the technology that is out there in the newsrooms. I do not mean that journalism schools have all the best technology. They desperately need financial support to keep pace with this changing technology. I mean that it is a nightmare in every journalism school. Every person running a journalism school, or trying to raise funds for journalism, will tell you the same thing. When you have to change your computers every couple of years and all your broadcast equipment and so on, it is a nightmare. However, they have done as well as they could, I think, and the students are prepared.
Senator Eyton: My last question in this realm: Is there someone who does it best? Is there a standard that we can look beyond here and see someone in the schools of journalism that does it best?
Mr. Cobden: It is hard for me to answer that. I like a school in London, England. City University is the big journalism school in London, and it has a program which is adjoined to a hybrid program which works jointly with the University of London, St. Mary's College. It is a program in journalism and contemporary history. I like these hybrid programs. They also have one in journalism and a social science. My sense is that the schools that do best are the ones that train the minds of students best, and give them the broadest and deepest knowledge, rather than schools that give them technical skills.
I did visit Carleton again recently and I must say I do admire that school. I know in the news media there are still jokes told about Carleton that irritate me immensely, but editors love to tell jokes about — I forget the story, but there is a fire, and you have a Ryerson student and a Carleton student and the Ryerson student grabs a notebook and runs out to the fire and the Carleton student goes into the library to research fires. In a sense, I would rather have the student go and research fires. You know, that is the joke. It is very unfair.
As a person hiring, I suppose it would depend on what I was looking for, but I think both Ryerson and Carleton, in their own ways, are schools that Canada can be proud of. I think these are our biggest schools and I think they do set a sort of standard. Most of journalism education in this country was based on the Columbia journalism school model of old. It is now a graduate school, of course, but its emphasis was until recently, and now times are changing there, on training people in the practical techniques, and the techniques of journalism. That was its emphasis and that was the model for journalism education in this country. It still remains the case, by and large.
I do not think my study will be suggesting some radical change, but at the same time I do not want to suggest for a minute that we do not have good schools. My own school is an excellent school when it comes to training people for technique. I think anyone who goes to King's, whether they go into our undergraduate four-year program or into our one-year boot camp, which is really what it is, will come out of there ready to hit the ground running. If that is what it is we are looking for, I think we have a good school at King's, and Canada has plenty of good schools in that limited definition.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Professor, this is a very interesting dissertation. You, more than any person from whom we have heard across the land, have talked about youth. That is my impression of your presentation and I am very frequently raising this point. Before I go into the main part of my questioning, I want to ask you about youth. I want to say that in one session we heard that perhaps it would be preferable, or that the best journalists now are those who have a political science degree, a science degree, a law degree, and then they do the post-graduate work. I do not know how many take the foundation year and then go into journalism, but how would you respond to that, that perhaps with increasing sophistication of knowledge, expansive knowledge and the changing world, that this might be the ideal way?
Mr. Cobden: My study deals with the undergraduate programs because these are the programs that people are more worried about. These are the journalism and arts and science programs. About half of the program is in journalism and half in arts, usually arts and social sciences. That is what I am concerned with at the moment. I think that if my own child wanted to go into journalism, I would probably say to them, “Go and get yourself as much education as you can, in whatever subject you like, and get it as deeply as you can. Learn to think and learn to write, and equip yourself with a substantial fund of general knowledge, and then go somewhere where they can teach you the techniques quickly.” Actually the techniques are pretty easy to learn. If you can think and you can write, learning to do journalism is a piece of cake. I say it is one week's work.
Journalism schools spend a lot of their time trying to teach people how to do those things, while at the same time trying to teach them how to do the foundations for those things. Anybody who has marked assignments in journalism school will tell you how distracted, dismayed and dispirited they become by all of the appalling language in these pieces, and the appalling ignorance of the writing.
To answer your question, I would say, would you not want people to be as well educated as possible? Absolutely. I would not try to interfere in this. I would not say that in our case, for example, our one year students have done better in journalism than our four year students. I would not say that. It think it depends a lot on, obviously, what they bring to their studies. However, I will argue in this piece that one does need a depth of knowledge and a breadth of knowledge to cope with the field these days. I think you are quite right in that regard.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: As a follow-up then, is there any discussion across this country or across the continent — or internationally, if you will — about that being a preferable way to go? Do you think that one would see that change, in time, or will it remain? You use the words “boot camp” for the one-year program that you have. I do not think you really meant that, but ...
Mr. Cobden: No, I do.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Do you?
Mr. Cobden: Yes.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: But are you producing more technicians than thinkers, in the system you have now?
Mr. Cobden: That is exactly my concern. I think if you are a technician you can do the job. You can do the first job but I do not think you have the foundation to grow or to lead. That is what worries me. You know the world is going in all sorts of different directions. In the United States, which of course is the massive bulk of journalism education in the world, they have a system in which there are two kinds of journalism schools: those that have been accredited and those that have not. The ones that are accredited have to meet a whole lot of requirements, and one of them is that not too many courses should be in journalism. The majority of courses must be — in fact it used to be 75 per cent, but I see that the organization that does this accrediting has dropped it a little, but something like 65 per cent to 75 per cent of courses have to be in the arts and social sciences, and not in journalism.
In England, there are dozens of new journalism schools. I do not know why exactly, but every little university, every place that was a polytechnic and has now become a university, has a journalism school. However, they do not offer them any education in arts and social sciences at all. They come straight from their GCE A levels, right into boot camp. It is a three-year boot camp, and that is what they do. They do not do any history, any politics, any English, anything that you would think they would do at all. They may feel that their high school system is so great that they feel that people have all the education they need by the time they reach that level. I find that incomprehensible, and I intend to try and get them to explain that to me, so that is the case there. It really does vary from country to country.
I have to say this as well about journalism education: It has been going for 50 years in Canada, a bit more than 50 years, and about 100 years in the U.S. but it still has not achieved the kind of status, within the university or in relation to its own industry, that other professional schools have. That is really puzzling and disturbing. Why is it that journalism education, which should be doing things that are so central to the mission of any university — learning to think, learning to ask questions, learning to write — is not doing that? I mean these are pretty important things in a university. Why is it that universities have not come to see them as fully-fledged members of the academy, the way they have in relation to business schools, for example?
Business schools. You know that business schools have prestige in universities. Journalism schools are, to many universities, a bit of an embarrassment, so there is a problem there.
The same is true of the industry. While the industry now is more accepting — in fact they do hire from journalism schools — they still mutter a lot about journalism schools not doing a good job, so there is a kind of duplicity there, and I am not sure what to make of it. You do not see as much — well, sometimes you do — of these kinds of attacks on journalism schools; these gratuitous attacks from people who write about this once in their lives. They say, “Okay, John Fraser will be doing a rant about journalism schools”, and he does, and attacks them. You will see this kind of thing: Editors of newspapers or columnists who are not warmly disposed towards journalism education the way people in other professions are towards professional schools in their field.
Senator Munson: Maybe they both forgot what it was like to work in the field?
Mr. Cobden: I think they feel that it was not necessary for them. They are still living in the world of the kind of “anybody can, flying by the seat of their pants” sort of journalism.
Senator Munson: If I could do it, anybody can.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Professor, I have the chance to ask one more question. We were told yesterday that even journalism students are not newspaper readers, be it online or be it something you hold in your hand. I feel very strongly about this, about young people reading anything and everything, but also reading what is happening in their country and in the world. You seem to have a passion about young people. I wrote down a lot of the things you said, where you mentioned young people. Do you think that, as provinces, as a country, we could do a better job of introducing, promoting and rewarding this kind of literacy in our school system than we are presently doing? If so, how?
Mr. Cobden: I will do my best on that, but first let me say this: I do not believe the figures that you have in your interim report, or that one sees in other studies, about the percentage of young people whom have read a newspaper today or in the last week. I do not believe those figures. Just from my own anecdotal experience, and it is quite substantial, I have been in a journalism school for 15 years now. I have raised three children. I have met a lot of their friends. I know a lot of young people and I do not believe 40 per cent of them read a newspaper in the last week, or whatever your figures show. I do not believe that for a minute. I do not know what it means. They may have looked at the entertainment page for one reason or another, although even that I doubt. Or maybe the sports page. However, I think it is wildly inaccurate to suggest that a percentage like that read a daily newspaper once a week, or in the last day, or whatever your figures show.
Senator Tkachuk: When you speak about young people, are you talking high school age or are you talking under 21?
Mr. Cobden: I am talking under 34.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: The last specific question that I asked was about how we can get this level of literacy into our schools. I would agree that we have to think about the continuum from the teens into the twenties.
Mr. Cobden: I will come to that in a second, but I just want to add that I do not think this is true only of newspapers, by the way. I think it is true of television and radio, and I also think it is true of online journalism. I do not believe for a minute, and when I walk around King's and see this, I do not believe that young people who are spending hours and hours on the computer are actually reading online news. I do not think they are. I do not think it is part of most young people's daily diet at all. It just is not.
I think the same is true of television. Television news, newspapers always acknowledge, always wash their dirty underwear in public. The other media do not do that. I wonder what percentage of people aged 15 to 34, or however they are grouped, watch The National or the CTV National News or the Global National News daily, or even occasionally. I bet it is very low.
To answer your question: Yes, I think there is serious problem. Why is there? I think, in a sense, the problem is beyond our doing anything about because the forces that are conspiring to distract people from the news and interest them in other things are so great and so powerful that it is hard to know how to counter them. At the same time, I think that there is a role in high school particularly, and perhaps even earlier, for trying to find ways to interest young people in what is happening in their own country and in the world. I think that is the way to put it. It is not necessarily in news but in what is happening. There is a way to do this. It depends a lot on the enthusiasm of the teacher and it also depends a lot on the pressure the teacher is under to get through content.
I have met a lot of English teachers in my time who all say that they would love to spend more time on ideas in their classes; on promoting an interest in ideas, including the news, and just in what is happening in the world and in their own country. They would love to do that but there is so much content to get through that they feel under pressure to conform to that. Thus it is hard to point the finger at the teachers. If the initiative is to come, it has to come from the people who set the curriculum and set the expectations.
I agree with you: It has to start there in the schools if it is to happen. People always used to say that, “Don't worry if young people don't read newspapers. They will come to it. You wait until they get married and get a mortgage, you know, things like that, and become consumers, big time sort of consumers, they will start to read the paper.” I am not sure that they will now. It was probably true in the past, but I am not sure — I am not as optimistic at the moment that it will happen unless they come with more appetite and unless the news media make a bigger effort than they have shown at the present to satisfy that appetite, to offer the kinds of journalism that will satisfy that appetite. However, I agree with you that it has to begin in the schools.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: We have a perfect opportunity to start very young, because I believe in the middle schools, which is what we call them somewhere around Grade 5, they start social studies courses and that is when one could see it being done. However, it seems to me that the lip usage of lifelong learning — in other words, unless you wake up every day and go to bed every night wondering what you have learned that day, what you have taken in, how you have expanded, you are not progressing. There is no better way, really, than through the media to do this. We have tremendous newspapers in this country, with sections on science, business and politics, you name it. It is all there if you want, and you can learn. That is what our schools need to do a lot more of, because when you say “content,” the content is such a tiny fraction of what one needs to know. However, one does need to know how to learn and how to —
Mr. Cobden: I am sorry to interrupt but if I were teaching, I would use the alternative papers as my way in. Those papers are not actually for teenagers, The Coast and so on. They are written for people in their twenties and thirties. Actually, you do not see a lot of teenagers reading The Coast, but one of the things I would do is to get young people interested in those alternative papers. I would not bring the Globe & Mail into a Grade 6 class and expect people to respond to it, but The Coast I think might work.
I also think, and perhaps I should have said this, that there is a desperate need for magazines for children and teenagers in this country. The only thing they read in this country are these dreadful American teen magazines that are all the same. They all have 25 ways to kiss your boyfriend and all of this kind of thing. Every issue is exactly the same, and every issue of every magazine is exactly the same, and they are all American. I think there is a role here for enterprise, to find a Canadian way of interesting young people in reading periodicals.
I will just tell you one thing that we at the school did at one time. We did produce a magazine. It was called Urge, and it had a lot of the usual stuff in it, but it also had some more challenging stories in it, including a devastating critique of a junior high school in this town. People still talk about that. This was years and years ago, but I still meet people who say, “You know, I was at such and such a school when that thing came out and, boy, I remember what it said.” They will tell you that. I think it can be done, and it is not up to government to do it. It is obviously up to enterprise, but there is nothing at the moment that is very satisfying, in my opinion.
The Chairman: I have a question that I would like to ask you, but before I do that I want to take issue with at least something I inferred from your opening remarks, which was a suggestion that one reason why minorities of one sort or another do not get the coverage that they should in mainstream media is that stories have to interest lots and lots of people; that all stories have to interest most readers or listeners. I would really quarrel profoundly with that. This is way beyond the purview of this committee, but I just cannot resist.
It seems to me that all news media put together packages of which each individual component appeals to some portion of their audience, and that the real flaw, as you suggested with your anecdote about the Portugese community in Kingston, is that the editors, and indeed the working reporters but basically the editors, do not see it. If they do see a community, they see it as tourists would see it. The editors of the Whig would look at the Portugese community in Kingston in the same way that we would visit Bali, and say, “Oh look at those interesting people.” They did not even do that. If they had seen it, they might have done, once a year, a story about the quaint ethnic festival, or whatever it might be, of the minority, instead of just saying, “Whatever that community is doing is as legitimate as every other element of our community.”
It seems to me that that is the step that enormous numbers of journalists and editors still have to take in this country: Stop thinking along the lines of “Some people are quaint,” and looking at them in the way that tourists do, and start saying, “We are all here. We are all Canadians. Everybody deserves coverage.”
Professor, you do not even have to comment on that. I am sorry, I just desperately needed to vent.
I think it is true, and it has been for some time in journalism schools, that a very large proportion, in some cases the majority, of the students are women. This is not new. This has been the case for quite some time now. What happens to them after they graduate? Looking at the people who have been appearing before this committee representing major institutions, major media organizations, who tend to come from the senior ranks, hardly any of them are women. What happens?
Mr. Cobden: All I can do is speculate. I would say a couple of things happen. First of all, you are quite right about the numbers. It may be that some proportion of the people who go to journalism school go into other careers rather than into the newsroom. It may be that some go into public relations and other fields, and maybe the majority of those are women. I do not know. It may be, in other words, that if 70 per cent of your students are women, maybe some portion of that 70 per cent goes into other fields; a bigger portion than the portion of the other 30 per cent. However, if you go into newsrooms nowadays, you do see as many women as men in newsrooms. They have not come to your committee but if you go into any newspaper or media newsroom now, I think you will see as many women as men in —
The Chairman: At what level?
Mr. Cobden: Particularly at the reporting level.
The Chairman: That was true 20 years ago.
Mr. Cobden: I know. Why are women not reaching these management positions? I think the reason they are not is that they were not in those positions and, just like in anything else in life, people tend to do what they are used to doing, or what they are comfortable doing.
It is just the same in the educational system. Even though the vast majority of teachers in elementary schools were women, the vast majority of principals were men. I think there was a sense of promoting the kind of people who were like you, and if your imagination goes no further than saying “People like me means men,” if I am a man, then that surely is a factor in all of this. That is the worst of it.
What happens is that it takes longer to turn that attitude over than one might hope, simply because the people who are now the publishers and senior editors tend to be men, and so they tend to promote, as junior editors, men rather than women because they just feel that those people are like themselves. It might be colour, it might be culture; it happens to be gender. I am not condoning this. I am just saying that one does tend to surround oneself with people like oneself. That is what happens in life and it take some time before that changes. I think it is changing. I know of more and more newspapers in Canada that do have women either as publishers or as senior editors...
The Chairman: You do?
Mr. Cobden: ... or as managing editors than there used to be, when I was working in them. I have not studied this area so I have not looked at the figures. Perhaps you have. I will just say one other thing: This is an ironic thing to suggest but I think it may be that women do better as reporters than men, and so they tend to stay there. I mean, is that a ridiculous thing to say? There is a lot of research that suggests that girls have more literary ability, or tend to read more, or tend to be more sophisticated in language than boys. There is a lot of research on this. I do not know, but it may be that because they do so well in reporting, it sort of acts against their chances, really, of being promoted. I do not know. Is that ridiculous?
The Chairman: I could engage you in that one for some time.
Mr. Cobden: I am not arguing that it is true.
The Chairman: Going back to your discussion of the difficulties posed by language competence in trying to bring in minorities, are there any journalism schools that offer a six-week preliminary prerequisite course in English for journalists? Would it help if ther were?
Mr. Cobden: I do not think it would help.
The Chairman: You do not?
Mr. Cobden: I do not think six weeks would help, and I do not think any journalism schools do that. I think what is needed is a program within an ESL framework, or an English as a foreign language framework, that teaches journalism in this country. I think that is what is needed.
The Chairman: The other way around?
Mr. Cobden: Yes.
The Chairman: Senator Tkachuk, you get the last word.
Senator Tkachuk: This is just a follow-up on young people reading newspapers. Is there comparative research around as to whether young people ever were big on reading newspapers? If we go back decade by decade, would there really be much of a difference?
Mr. Cobden: I think there would be quite a big difference in the late 1920s and in the early 1930s. There has been a big falling off in that age group, in my opinion. I am not suggesting that when I was a teenager we all read the newspaper, although I did. But I think one might guess that there was just less to do at that time than there is now. It is harder to break through now than it was then, and so I think it probably was true. When I was 14, I started reading the newspaper every day. I was not a peculiar animal in that regard. I was at boarding school, and the papers came into the common room and you saw people reading them all of the time. It was part of a lot of young kid's daily activity. It is not now. I do not think you would find that now. I really do not.
Senator Tkachuk: We are probably the same age. I am just saying that in the public school I went to, I do not know anybody who read a newspaper, ever. I mean, we never even had newspapers where I grew up. There were no newspapers delivered. Everybody read books, because we all had books like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Everybody read books but nobody read newspapers.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Professor Cobden. You can tell that you really engaged us.
Mr. Cobden: You are very welcome.
The Chairman: We are very grateful to you for taking all of this time to be with us. When will you be publishing your study?
Mr. Cobden: I do not know what will happen to my study. I do not have the answer to that. I want to try and finish it by the end of June, in which case I could send you a copy, if you are interested.
The Chairman: Yes, please.
Mr. Cobden: Very well, Madam Chairman.
The Chairman: It would be very interesting.
Senators, as you know we had expected to hear from the Halifax Daily News at this point. The Daily News had confirmed that its editor and publisher would be present, but late last week they withdrew, indicating that they had nothing to add to the presentation by Mr. André Préfontaine who appeared before this committee on October 30, 2003. Therefore, we have managed to fit in very quickly before —
Senator Munson: Chair, excuse me. I just want to put it on the record that I find it profoundly disappointing that the Halifax Daily News does not have the courage to appear before us so that we could get a better picture and look at the coverage in Halifax, with two competing newspapers.
The Chairman: Thank you, Senator Munson. We will be hearing from another main witness in just a couple of moments. However, there is one individual who, thanks to a failure of communications yesterday, was not able to appear when we invited members of the public to appear before us. Therefore I will call as our next witness Mr. Brian Warshick to come forward. He will have four minutes to talk to us and we will have four minutes to ask him questions, and then we will hear from Mr. Tim Currie, also of the School of Journalism at King's.
Mr. Warshick, the floor is yours.
Mr. Brian Warshick, As an individual: Thank you very much, and I appreciate your fitting me in, or allowing me to speak here today, because I did come back yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately the sessions for the public had rounded up a little bit early, so I did not get my chance to speak.
Senators, ladies and gentleman, after watching a couple of your previous sessions on CPAC, and reading the announcement in the Halifax Chronicle Herald about your cross-Canada meetings, I thought I would attend and speak. I have never appeared before any government hearing of any type, so pardon me if I am a little nervous. Based on what I was able to read about your mandate, though, I did want to comment on two items in the four minutes of allotted time. However, I do hope that you will ask me a couple of questions later.
The first is the matter of private radio stations. Back in the early 1990s, our economy went into a funk, not only here but worldwide. Many say it was even worse than the crash of 1929. Radio, like all other forms of media that rely on advertising dollars, was hit hard, especially the smaller, independent stations. Many were sold during this period. The CRTC then stepped in and started to allow joint management and operations by various companies under one roof. While that has proved successful, and we in this marketplace and throughout the major centres here in the Maritimes are being served in this way, it should be noted that there are some who now feel that fortunes have changed. For example, look at the number of applications plus the number of actual new licences that have been awarded in this past year, including four in this marketplace alone. Radio obviously has listenership and can make money.
There should be some separation, however, again. In fact, recently the CRTC ruled that sales departments can no longer be shared. It is my hope that you will bring forth this similar concept when it comes to newsrooms, something I saw Senator Munson comment on at a February 23 hearing on CPAC.
While 20 years ago every station was at every media conference, including these Senate hearings — and I do not know if there are any radio stations here today, perhaps other than the CBC — today their appearance at any sort of media outlet or media conference would be classified as rare. Some stations here in Halifax had not one but two sports people not that long ago. Today, not one private radio station has even one sports person employed. Many stations no longer employ either reporters or journalists; just news readers. In fact, many of these readers only make one outgoing call a day. That is to the desk sergeant, overnight, first thing in the morning, at the local police department, to find out what happened overnight. The rest is basically a regurgitation of what is in the morning newspapers, or perhaps the use of broadcast news service. Just as you heard yesterday from the Herald, most no longer have hourly scheduled broadcasts, or daily, either. Try calling a radio newsroom in this city, or many others across Canada for that matter, after six o'clock at night, or perhaps any time on a weekend. All you get is a recording.
There was a time, and it was not that long ago, when getting the story factual and first to air meant something. Not anymore. Canadian retail businesses and many offices still have radio and not TV to connect them to the outside world. In this area, things like hurricanes and day-long power outages are becoming commonplace. People rely on the radio for quick, up-to-date information. This can hardly be delivered if the only staffer that is on duty at the time is a DJ, and he cannot be expected to do two jobs at once. Even Sarah Dennis, in her presentation to you yesterday from the Herald, said and I quote: “Competition makes for better news. There's none currently in private radio.”
The second point I want to raise concerns the CBC, specifically television. Senator Tkachuk, you posed what I thought was a rather interesting question to the Herald yesterday when you asked about spending on electronic media of somebody in the print media. You will usually always get a particular response, but I thought hers was very good.
I do want to speak about public funding for the CBC. I believe in it. I believe in the use of my tax dollars for it. In fact, I would like to make one further point. I do not know if you have heard this at other hearings or not, but as far as I am concerned, it is time that the CBC and our government put money into a stand-alone CBC sports network. There would be no fiascos, then. They would be able to bid straight up and televise the broadcast schedules at the appropriate times for Canadians to view.
To give you an example, just recently as you probably know, Nova Scotians have come to the power front in the world of curling. It was not that way 20 years ago. The winning teams in curling were almost always western teams. In 2003 we had the men's curling champion, Mark Dacey, and of course Colleen Jones is no stranger to curlers. She is also from this area and was most recently the champion in 2004. This year during the brier, with no NHL, certainly one of our most Canadian watched sporting events during the year, on two different stations — one was on regular TV, the other was on specialty TV — tried to show the games. Not all of the games were shown. Some were taped, then delayed, and trying to get the proper listings from either newspapers or even the CBC themselves was pretty nigh impossible. I certainly would encourage the CBC to look at using my tax dollars into getting a publicly funded sports network on television.
I believe that is probably my four minutes. I do have two other stories I would like to tell, although I know the chairperson has only allowed me a couple of minutes, but if you want to hear how a couple of interesting stories affect our lives in radio, I have two others I would like to talk about.
Senator Tkachuk: I think CBC TV already has a sports cable channel, do they not?
Mr. Warshick: No.
Senator Tkachuk: Yes, they do. They have a headline channel because that was the channel that curling was on outside of the regular network. It is called The Score. That is the CBC, and that is a cable channel.
Mr. Warshick: No, that I think that is Rogers, senator.
Senator Tkachuk: No, Score is owned by the CBC. Rogers is Sports Net, I think. The Score is the CBC network, and they actually ran curling. When the CBC did not run it, it ran on The Score. It ran on CBC and on Country Canada, which is a paid cable.
When you were talking about radio, how many radio stations — well I do not know if you are an expert or not but you sound much like you are — we had a presenter yesterday who knew more about radio than many of the expert presenters we had on radio, and I was quite surprised at the lack of any news people in the radio stations. I hear that there is a new, all-news radio station coming to this city.
Mr. Warshick: That is correct. It is not that there is no news people in the radio stations. There are news readers there, but hardly anybody does any reporting. There is no such position as a news reporter, specifically, for private radio stations in this marketplace. I do not believe that there are any news radio journalists, either, who would perhaps dig into stories. There are just news readers.
Senator Munson: Mr. Warshick, why not tell us those stories? Also, do you feel that in our recommendations should contain something about there being a certain quota of news personnel in private radio, or that they be required, at least, to cover their town in a regulatory manner, to cover a town hall or a city hall? If this is the way it is now, it is pretty hard to turn back the clock.
I came out of private radio. I was 15 years in private radio and we actually covered things like you talked about before, but going back to northern New Brunswick every summer, I get very irritated because what I do get is broadcast news and that is it. There is not very much coverage of anything in local radio.
Mr. Warshick: Could I answer the second question as part of the first, senator?
Senator Munson: Yes.
Mr. Warshick: I am not sure that this committee should actually try to define the number of personnel that may be required for a station. To give you one example, there are five stations, all with the same news bureau or newsroom, all under one roof. How can I possibly get anything different from one to the other? In addition, if they only have readers, how can I possibly get any different news, other than what is in the paper?
I think it is time for a separation, just as the CRTC has mandated the separation in sales teams. I believe it is time that we got back to giving Canadians information. They obviously want it. In this marketplace, for example, the show CBC News: Morning is the strongest, I believe, of any marketplace in Canada. The CBC News: Morning show perennially is either number one or number two. It is not that way necessarily in every market. However, here in Atlantic Canada, people do like their news. They do like their information.
Let me tell you my two stories and I will try to be brief, Madam Chairman. I think most of us know that media does shape our lives. We all know where we were on November 23, 1963. We know what happened on July 20, 1969, and we certainly know where we were on September 11, 2001. We were with John F. Kennedy, the first man walking on the moon and, of course, the World Trade disaster. Let me tell you about December 8, 1980, another event that shaped our lives. I had just come off doing a four o'clock, five o'clock and six o'clock newscast at a radio station in Saint John N.B., a private one, an AM only, stand-alone station. That night I went to record city hall. I had to leave copies of my tape. That was a very popular thing to do, as you would know, senator, with private radio. We had to leave a number of pieces of tape there. I was there until after midnight. All of a sudden the CP machine or the AP machine — every newsroom had four or five machines — started clanging incessantly: Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, at least nine times. If you recall, that meant something. Two or three meant very little; a change of a story or whatever. This was nine times. I went upstairs and I went over to the machine and grabbed a one-liner, roared upstairs to the on-air person — who may not be there today — shortly after midnight on that particular night, Monday night, and asked him to put in the card that said, “Doodely, doodely, doo. This is a CFBC news bulletin.” The one line was, “John Lennon has been shot outside of his apartment building.”
That news may not have made it to the ears of many other people until the morning, but I stayed, and I put it on. The DJ was really upset. “Oh, I'm going to lose my job. We broke in the middle of a song.” But that was not the case. In fact, I stayed and I did a special, a one o'clock in the morning newscast to give those who were up and listening, and all night workers, a chance to hear what the latest news was. I will certainly never forget that date, and neither will many others.
I would like to tell you about something a little bit happier. The same year, a little bit later, at the same radio station. In May of 1981, there was a gentleman from Port Coquitlam, B.C. called Terry Fox, who started an unbelievable run for cancer. However, other than the opening day of the national newscast on TV, if you recall back at that time, very little that was coming out of the Maritimes, or very little media coverage, was being picked up anywhere else except for here in the Maritimes. He went to one place or another. I do not mean to pat myself on the back, but I helped that run along. I started getting interested in him when he hit Cape Breton, and I started calling the CP stories and looking at the local newspapers and calling the radio stations to get a feeling for it. If you recall, senator, at that time you could feed BN 30-second stories, and they would be sent national every hour, and you could pick up whichever ones you want, tape them and use them on broadcasts.
I must have fed hundreds of stories through them, and I had the unique opportunity of meeting with Terry Fox, by myself. No other media showed up at the Admiral Beatty Hotel in Saint John, with his brother and his driver friend at the time. There was no media coverage, but I kept feeding this out to the radio in the hope that some places would start to pick it up. As you know, by the time he entered the Ontario border, the story had started to pick up, so that is perhaps a good one, and, again, a radio story. Neither one of those two things would happen today.
The Chairman: That is a lovely story. Radio is a great medium, a wonderful medium. Thank you very much for joining us, Mr. Warshick. I am sorry that we do not have more time.
Senator Tkachuk: Madam Chair, I would like to correct something. I thought The Score was owned by CBC and I always thought it was, but it is not. I guess there is a special relationship between CBC and The Score, but it is actually owned by someone else, and Mr. Black, our researcher, is trying to find out exactly who owns it, whether it is TSN or somebody else. However, I always thought that it was owned by the CBC.
The Chairman: Thank you for that clarification. We will track it down because it is very useful.
Now, senators, I would ask Mr. Tim Currie to join us. We are grateful to you for being patient, Mr. Currie. I think you know what we like to do: We would like a presentation of about 10 minutes from you and then we will ask you questions.
It is possible that before we are quite finished I may have to leave the chair, but the deputy chair, Senator Tkachuk, will move in and keep things going.
The floor is yours, Mr. Currie.
Mr. Tim Currie, School of Journalism, University of King's College, As an individual: Honourable senators, thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before this committee.
I am an instructor in the school of journalism at the University of King's College here in Halifax, where I have taught courses in online journalism since 1999. You have already heard from my colleagues at the school who have spoken on topics such as ownership concentration and journalism education. Therefore I would like to restrict my comments to the state of online media in the Atlantic region. I will try to make these comments brief.
Data assembled by our colleagues at the Canadian Media Research Consortium suggest that a minority of Canadians use the Internet as a primary source of news. However, I believe this changes dramatically when we look at Canadians younger than 35. A number of people before this committee have made the point that fewer young people are reading daily newspapers. I can see this in my own students. Most of them have grown up in an era of free web news and spend a significant part of their day on the Internet. Their primary source of information, and news, is the web. They visit weblogs as well as news sites, and they expect content to be user-friendly for a web audience.
In the Atlantic region the CBC is the only major news outlet that authors content specifically for the web. It has the greatest presence in the four provinces and it is a leader in experimenting with the medium. It is the only major news outlet in the region to post stories throughout the day.
Much of the content on the regional CBC sites is generated from radio and TV reports. However, the staff re-edits it to suit online readers by providing background information and links to previous stories for context. They also direct readers to source documents on other websites.
On occasion, they have provided full-featured online reports of breaking news events. For example, the CBC Nova Scotia web team covered the visit by U.S. President George W. Bush to Halifax in December. They published text reports of the protests every 10 minutes, using a wireless connection, and they supplemented the report with photos taken using a camera phone. Readers gained a moment-by-moment account of the protests backed by an archive of CBC stories on Canada-U.S. relations, and content specifically authored to explain the event. As well, the site listed protests that were scheduled to take place that day, and noted the people involved. In addition, it provided links to the web pages of the groups taking part.
This news package was an admirable effort to engage readers seeking an interactive news experience. More important, it was an innovative means of using the web to better illustrate the diversity of the protesters' viewpoints and to highlight the many issues that concerned them. It may be only a small example but I believe it highlights the efforts of CBC nationally to leverage the web's capacity to serve up layered content to the reader, and to experiment with new forms of storytelling and to engage the reader in discussion. I would argue that the CBC needs the resources to continue this work and expand upon it.
The private-sector media in the Atlantic region have been more conservative in their online content. Major newspapers in the region have websites that offer a few stories for free and other stories behind a firewall that bars non- subscribers. However, these organizations generally update the sites only once a day, and they offer news content duplicated entirely from their print publications. The primary reason for this — the lack of a viable model for earning revenue — is well known to this committee. Still, we see evidence of new media outlets in the region using the web to carve out niches not served by traditional media.
In this province we have allnovascotia.com, a publication devoted to business news, which publishes daily but exclusively on the web. It has a staff of three full-time reporters with extensive experience in journalism. These reporters regularly break stories before traditional media outlets, often by covering court cases that other media outlets do not. Since it began four years ago, allnovascotia.com has become a major, authoritative source of business news in the province. Only the site's headlines are freely available. Readers can access the full stories only by subscription, which is the site's primary means of generating revenue. It is a small operation that has become a viable business by investing in technology, and it protects its content by using software that makes it difficult for readers to copy stories and forward them to others.
In addition to paying for niche content such as business news, many Canadians are flocking to the web to find stories and opinions they do not find in the traditional media. They are seeking interactivity, a diversity of viewpoints and a sense of community. While many of the reports they encounter may not constitute “journalism” as we have traditionally defined it, we should not disregard these voices.
Canadians are turning to publications such as The Dominion, a left-leaning Halifax-based website that dubs itself “Canada's Grassroots National Newspaper.” While much of the content is opinion that is akin to a large weblog, the editors conduct their operation with journalistic values and they regularly publish original news reports, some written by students enrolled in our own journalism program. The site provides a perspective on national and international events that would have been difficult to publish a decade ago. As well, it allows readers to choose the delivery method, to read stories on the web, to receive a news digest via e-mail, or to subscribe to a service called an RSS feed that delivers headlines to their desktop. If people are attracted to The Dominion, it may be in part because the site is evolving technologically and its editors actively invite contributions and comments from readers. If Atlantic Canadians are straying from traditional media, it may be because they do not find these attributes right now.
The Halifax Daily News was the first Canadian daily newspaper with a website when it debuted that site in 1995. Now, after two changes in ownership, the site offers readers fewer stories each day and essentially the same delivery mechanism.
Many people today are looking for a sense of community with their news outlets. They no longer want to be talked at. They want to discuss stories. They want to challenge facts. They want to point journalists in the right direction.
Dan Gillmor, a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a book last year that I believe is an important read for all people interested in the evolution of online journalism. The book is entitled We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. In this book, Gillmor makes the following argument:
Tomorrow's news reporting and production will be more of a conversation, or a seminar. The lines will blur between producers and consumers, changing the role in ways we are only beginning to grasp now. The communication network itself will be a medium for everyone's voice, not just the few who can afford to buy multimillion-dollar printing presses, launch satellites, or win the government's permission to squat on the public's airwaves.
This is an unconventional viewpoint, but one that bears listening to.
You may have read recent news reports on the growing phenomenon of “podcasting,” or publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet to a computer or a portable media players such as an iPod. We will hear more of this and other technological innovations in the next few years, especially as consumers come to expect news authored for, and delivered on, cell phones and devices such as Palm Pilots. These innovations will deliver some publications and broadcasts that we can define as journalism. Much of this content will not be journalism, but the diverse perspectives they deliver and the sense of community they engender will likely continue to erode the audience for traditional news outlets if these outlets do not adapt.
I do not pretend to know exactly how traditional media outlets can adapt successfully. I am not sure anyone does. Good journalism, of course, costs money and until traditional media outlets find a way to earn revenue on the web, we may see little dramatic evolution in the content offered by major news outlets in the Atlantic region. However, I believe that any effort at public policy-making will need to acknowledge the existence of emerging forms of online media and the growing audiences they are attracting.
Thank you for the opportunity to deliver these comments. I hope you find them useful.
Senator Tkachuk: Thank you very much, Mr. Currie. Did the online CBC coverage of President Bush's visit have items on the BSE or softwood lumber issues?
Mr. Currie: In general?
Senator Tkachuk: They had obviously extensive coverage on the protest, but were there any articles on the issues that faced the United States and Canada that were of concern to us, such as BSE, softwood lumber and missile defence?
Mr. Currie: Part of their coverage was a series of articles about the issues concerning the visit by the U.S. President, the issues that the Prime Minister was likely to raise, and the context for that, so yes, a number of background articles concerned the issues at play.
Senator Tkachuk: You talked about giving more money for the CBC and its online content. Would that not be seen as unfair competition? I mean, if we, as taxpayers, give more money to the CBC, and should the government actually say to the CBC “You must spend this extra money on radio, or on online content,” or whatever, would that not be seen as unfair competition to those in the private sector who are trying to put their own online product on air?
Mr. Currie: Not for the time being. It seems to me that the CBC is just miles ahead of what any other media outlet is doing in the ways they author content and the sheer volume of the content that they provide. Still, most of the sites that people go to, torontostar.com, globeandmail.com, are largely republishing the content of their print publications. Yes, they are providing breaking news content during the day, but I believe it pales in comparison to what the CBC is putting up with its various sites.
Senator Tkachuk: But CBC does not have to make any money. They can spend lots of money and make it look really pretty and be productive, but it does not have to have any economic return. Do you think we should continue doing that? I mean, what is the point of it?
Mr. Currie: In the short term, I think we should. I do not think many of the major news websites are gaining much in the way of a return on their investments. These sites are supported almost entirely by their print operations. Yes, they are gaining advertising revenue and paying for some of their costs, but not much. Until we find a workable business model for web news, I do not think these sites will really make a heavy investment in the type of content that certainly young people are expecting.
Senator Tkachuk: Why would they make an investment when their competitor is getting taxpayers' money? In other words, is it not a blunt instrument to prevent investment outside of the government when there is already online a heavy competitor that is subsidised directly by the taxpayer?
Mr. Currie: I think they do different things. Certainly, the Toronto Star is much more of a regional player. I think the CBC has its own niche, it has its own audience. I think it is an issue for the short term, not necessarily the long term.
The Chairman: By way of supplementary, the CBC has the deepest, if you will, site in Canada but it seems to me that it is modelled in a way, perhaps, after the BBC site. You would know more about that me. However, if I look at, for example, the great American media organizations, the New York Times, I do not think the New York Times has tried to do that kind of thing, has it? I have I just missed something?
Mr. Currie: They have not done so to the same level as the CBC. You are correct, the CBC does model itself in part on the BBC model.
The Chairman: Then it is coming out of a whole different concept of what media organizations need to have as their relationship to the web, at least for this decade.
The Toronto Star did tell us that it is just starting to at least break even, maybe even make money, I cannot remember which words they used, on its website, using a quite different model.
Senator Munson: This is a personal observation, and I do not know how far it goes here. What startles me online is this, and it is personal: I have two sons, 20 and 17, and when I walk into our study or den, I can never get on either of the two computers, even the Senate owned one that I have at home. Son number one, the 20-year-old, was on MSN. He was studying, he was reading news headlines, and he was watching the tsunami on live video, and doing all four at the same time. Is this the new generation? I said at the time, “How can you focus on all four?” and he said, “I can.” His marks are pretty good. He understands the news in the world. I am just wondering, in your online line of work, is this the way this generation is going, being able to absorb it and bring this all in?
Mr. Currie: I do not think they are alone. My students certainly have MSN messenger on the background. They are checking their e-mail sometimes while I am trying to teach a class, which can be very difficult.
What I would say is that the BBC, for example, in their style guide, tries to limit their stories to 600 words or less. When you think of it: 600 words, how can you tell a story in 600 words?
Where I think online journalism has its power is the ability to layer information, if we expect or we know that most people who read online news have very short attention spans. Most of the studies show that people online are doing many things while they are at their computer. Then what we need to do online is to layer information so that any particular page tells a very short story, but they are always linked to other pages that provide other background details, all of it fairly short. Online readers do not like to scroll; they like to click. They like the feeling of accomplishment when they move from one page to another. They want to be interactive. They enjoy filling out forms and entering their comments.
I think one of the attributes of the web is this ability to provide endless amounts of background information, but simply link it to those who want it and leave the short news summaries to those who want just an overview.
Senator Munson: Thank you. Just one other observation. We have heard here, I think it was yesterday or the day before, criticism that Canadian newspapers do not quite get it yet, how to use the online services that the CBC, I suppose you could say, but that the Americans are so far ahead and that Canadian newspapers are just using it as a tease to have you go and pick up the newspaper to find out the rest of the story. What kind of investment or what kind of work do Canadian newspapers have to do to get there? Also, is this the way that they should be going in the world that you are talking about?
Mr. Currie: For the time being, most people are trying to get news on their desktop computers, and that usually means at work or in their study at home. I think this will change dramatically in the next couple of years as more people start getting cell phones capable of receiving headline news. We have the evolution of personal digital assistants. Most people's free time is on the bus, it is on the subway, it is sitting in a café killing 15 or 20 minutes. Right now, most people do not have a computer handy to do that. I think we will see that need met in the next couple of years as the technology allows us to have wireless Internet access wherever we have free time. Certainly, the investment that is needed is the ability to, first, technically deliver this content to these devices, but also it needs to be authored differently. In other words, you cannot copy and paste a 1,000-word story, or a 1,200-word story out of a print-base publication and expect that to be easily understood on a cell phone. That will simply not work. What we do need is for media outlets to invest in the editorial staff to re-author this content in a way that is easy for those consumers to consume.
Senator Munson: Do you have any ideas what someone should do when they are going through withdrawal, when they have this addiction to a BlackBerry, once they have had it in the palm of their hand? I used to think these things were nuts. But when I was a reporter, I remember my colleague in competition, Eric Sorensen, in the 2000 campaign, I guess, and he had one of those, and he beat me three or four times on stories because he was on the bus and, like you said, he was using it. I said, “What is that thing?” “Ra, ra, ra,” he would mumble in that deep CBC voice of his. We were great friends. I discovered what these things were because, at 10 o'clock at night, he had a story, and I still had an hour to scramble to match him.
Now I have one but I cannot — I tuck it into the bed beside me here; it is an addiction. I do not know how I will cope with going through these withdrawals. This technology is with you 24 hours a day.
Mr. Currie: I do not have a personal digital assistant, but my wife recommended I start checking my e-mail only a couple of times a day instead of setting it to check every ten minutes, and that has brought my stress level down considerably. That is a hint.
Senator Munson: Thank you very much. I am sorry to get so personal.
Senator Eyton: Thank you for your remarks. I am a novice in all of this. I am old enough that I am not swept up even yet in the BlackBerry craze, for example.
Do I understand you correctly that the CBC initiative on online broadcasting is most particularly here? Is it a local initiative?
Mr. Currie: It is a national initiative. However, all of the CBC regional sites — and they have a site in each of the provinces — are run out of Toronto. We have four sites in the Atlantic Provinces and they are the only news outlets that are updating content throughout the day and supplementing the regional content from the regional reporters with content from the head office in Toronto.
Senator Eyton: So there would be feed, essentially, from Toronto?
Mr. Currie: No, most of it is local content supplied by radio and television reporters in the region. Yesterday, for example, on the CBC Nova Scotia site they had the breaking news item about the Pope being elected and a quote from a Haligonian at the Vatican.
Senator Eyton: Would you have for example access here, locally? We do have access to the service in Vancouver.
Mr. Currie: By way of the web absolutely. Just simply type in the URL.
Senator Eyton: It is indeed a brave new world. Can you give me some idea of the numbers involved here? It sounds expensive; it sounds pervasive, but I wonder at the actual demand: how many people are taking it up. Are you aware of those numbers?
Mr. Currie: The most recent statistics I am familiar with are that 50 per cent of Canadians have highspeed Internet access at home. The penetration of lower speed, dial-up modem access is a little bit higher than that.
Senator Eyton: I am talking about this particular service. Do you have an idea of the numbers? Are people in fact hitting on this site and getting information?
Mr. Currie: I do not have those statistics, no.
Senator Eyton: Within King's College, would it be a common phenomena for the students to be logging into this service?
Mr. Currie: Absolutely. That is where they get most of their news. I think it is fair to state that, with the students, there is a blurring of the line between what is journalism and what is information. That is one of the issues I have with my students, that they see news and information as being a sliding scale almost, and many of the sites they go to for information they will almost consider to be news, even though it is not journalism as we traditionally define it. Up until about a decade ago, we had a very clear delineation between who was a journalist and who was not a journalist. It is only in the past couple of years that we have had bloggers get accreditation to American, Republican and Democratic conventions, that people hosting events will consider bloggers to have the credentials to go to these events.
Senator Munson: Is the course that you teach at King's a mandatory part?
Mr. Currie: No, it is not; not the full courses I teach. I teach classes in our reporting techniques, classes for second year students and in our one-year program. I teach a workshop in online journalism which is an elective, like all of our workshops are. The students can choose any one of radio, television, newspaper, online or narrative non-fiction. I also teach a third year elective, an introduction to online journalism, which is a lecture course, a seminar, whereas the workshop I teach is a reporting workshop and it is a journalistic workshop. We spend most of our time on reporting issues.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Mr. Currie, because you are so up-to-date and modern in your approach to journalism and teaching, do you have the impression that secondary school teachers are actually giving any time, or are they prepared to teach our students really how to do this well, whether it is Internet research and online writing, or does it just happen with young people? Is there much formal — or even a little bit of formal — training in our secondary school system in this area?
Mr. Currie: The school system, I think, introduces students to the technology and to the techniques of finding information on the web for their assignments. However, I certainly have seen little change in my students over the years in their ability to really analyse the sources that they are viewing, certainly on the web. What is this website? Who is behind it? Who pays the bills for this organization? websites, after all, cost money to put up. In many cases, students are fairly consistent in that when they come to journalism school, they need an great deal of prompting in order to verify the information that they come across.
Your question was: Are secondary schools preparing students in that way? I do not see, myself, any specific training for the web, above and beyond the techniques of finding information and looking for the quality sites for their assignments. I think most secondary teachers probably point their students in the right direction for certain websites that would apply to their assignments.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: As a follow-up, do you think that because of the increasing role that the Internet plays in the lives of our young people particularly, and in many of our lives, that there should be some sort of formalized content? I do not just mean about how to get into it and how to use it, but actually how to evaluate it. Do you think that kind of critical approach is being taught at all?
Mr. Currie: Not to any great extent, and certainly I would be in favour of any effort to teach more of that in secondary schools. As many other people have commented to this committee, we are inundated with information. One of the great skills that is needed today is the ability to analyse and verify information, and to sort the legitimate information that we would use for journalistic stories from other information that may be less independent. In many cases we are starting from scratch in our two programs, I think. Any effort by the secondary schools to give more instruction on how to evaluate information, I think, is sorely needed.
The Chairman: Listening to you, I find myself coming back to a question that perhaps just betrays my generation. If we are moving into a world where increasing numbers of people are getting their information on the very limited screen of a BlackBerry or a cell phone — I mean, 600 words; who is going read 600 words on the screen of a BlackBerry? Fifty words maybe pushing it, unless your are totally enthralled by the topic. At the same time, the world we live in is increasingly complex, increasingly difficult to grasp, and because of globalization all of the complexities have a more immediate impact on all of us than they would have done, perhaps, a hundred years ago when it did not really matter to most people if there was a war in Afghanistan.
What is that doing to us as a community? Listening to you, I have this horrible vision of a retreat to an almost mediaeval division of society where there was an elite who knew, and then everybody else who did not know. Where are we going?
Mr. Currie: That many people simply have headline news, and that is it. I think that is one of the big questions of the web age. The studies that I have read show that you cannot force people to read 600 or 800 words. They will not. They will simply read the first 25, 50 words of a story and they will just stop reading. They certainly do not want to scroll, screen by screen. Again, in my opinion, the power of the web is that if we get 50 words on a BlackBerry, we do have the option to click and learn more, and to go deeper and deeper into the story. We cannot forcefeed information to people, but what we can do with web content is encourage them to go deeper and deeper into the story. That requires editors who know how to write online content, how to segment stories and link them together to encourage people to go to a profile, read a background or view a time line, perhaps a piece of audio content or video content. That is, obviously, the nature of the web links and going deeper and deeper into stories, and that is what I see as the future.
The Chairman: That means, basically, that society will become what I am calling, for simplicity sake, an elite of the people who want to go there, and the rest, or most people, will just not know. I find this an alarming prospect. I am 60 years old. I am sorry, I come from a whole different framework, but I am concerned about the implications for society in this. Not that a Senate committee can fix society, nonetheless.
Senator Tkachuk: That is an interesting story, but I will take the opposite viewpoint and I would like your comments on it. Perhaps it is more a democratization of the news so that perhaps the elite will not be as influential as they are now with control of newspapers and the media. It will be more that the influence of the news media will be lessened, and there will be more of a feedback, more democratization, more people responding to the news and other people reading it, as the blogs have shown. I think this is a good thing, but I am not sure. I think it will be very positive and will create more sense of community because we will all be equally involved.
Even in Saskatoon, if there are major political issues we will be able to talk to each other on the Internet, where before we only had what the editor of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix was telling us. Now people will be informed in a different way. I do not know for sure whether this is what is happening, but I am saying that it is a real possibility, and at least allows us the opportunity to communicate in that way.
Mr. Currie: I think that is certainly an attribute. If people are not reading stories in the mainstream media, it is perhaps because they believe that the viewpoints that they want to listen to are not represented there, and certainly more viewpoints will, I think, strengthen traditional media. At the same time, as I mentioned in my comments, I think our definition of who is a journalist and what is news will change. We will have many more people taking on the role of journalist and we will have more voices.
Senator Munson: I have two observations. Maybe I am naive on one. Is there a different kind of writing online than you would teach normally?
Mr. Currie: Yes, and essentially it is “keep it short.” Senator Fraser commented that all people are looking for is a summary, and part of online writing is putting more summaries up top, recognizing that online readers are on the go all the time. That means more subheads, it means more chunked up information, more sidebars, more bullet lists. If you think of online content, think of a PowerPoint presentation. That is the kind of time people have and what they want. The other part of it, of course, is structuring links, and linking to background information and to further stories that provide context, and putting these links in a casual narrative so that you are reading something. In other words, you will not see “click here” on the web, but you will just come across a history of protest movements and you click on that, and just naturally go to a background piece.
Senator Munson: You talked about bloggers and blogging and covering conventions and being accredited to conventions. If this takes off, there will be more people covering the convention than at the convention because people are tuning into bloggers. I will not mention any names but it is becoming quite popular and people are using the blogs in our information society as fact or opinion. It is opinion, but they look at it as fact. There will be a tremendous problem, I think, for people who run organizations to say, “I am a qualified blogger,” in the way that they now say “I am a qualified journalist and, therefore, I have the right to be accredited and have all the rights as mainstream and/or other journalist have.”
Mr. Currie: We certainly have many bloggers calling themselves journalists who do not act in a journalistic fashion, and do not adhere to the attributes that we would normally ascribe to journalistic behaviour.
The Chairman: Thank you very much for your presentation, Mr. Currie. It was very interesting, and full of food for thought.
Mr. Currie: Thank you very much.
[Traduction]
The Chairman: It is our great pleasure to have with us this afternoon Ms. Denise Comeau Desautels, the Director General of the Courrier de la Nouvelle-Écosse, the French-language newspaper of Nova Scotia. Thank you very much for being here today, Ms. Desautels.
I think you know how we work. We ask you to make some comments for about 10 minutes, and then we move to the questions and answers. I will now turn the floor over to you.
Ms. Denise Comeau Desautels, Director General, Le Courrier de la Nouvelle-Écosse: Madam Chairman, on behalf of the Société de presse acadienne, I would like to thank you for giving me this opportunity to describe to you the situation facing the Courrier de la Nouvelle-Écosse, the only provincial French-language newspaper, which has been published every week since 1937.
This weekly is owned by the province's francophone and Acadian community. Like the people it serves, this newspaper has evolved over the years. As the voice of the local Acadian population in the southwestern part of the province, since 1972 it has undertaken the difficult job of reaching the Acadian population, which is scattered throughout the four corners of the province. After their return from the expulsion, the Acadians were isolated from each other in different regions. They had developed their own identity, but the newspaper helped bring them together and make them aware of the benefits of having a unifying common frame of reference and the strength that came from their power to demand their rights.
I often ask myself what the Acadian and francophone community in Nova Scotia would have done without this newspaper. It is essential, because it is one of the main players in the economic and cultural development of our community, which in turn is part of the broader francophone community throughout the country.
In keeping with the philosophy of the Société de presse acadienne, we defend the following principles: to inform, to take positions, to entertain, to motivate, and, as is the case with the Courrier de la Nouvelle-Écosse, to document. This newspaper has provided a record of francophone and Acadian life in the province, and it continues to do so.
Our greatest challenge is to disseminate high-quality information, while operating within a daily context of financial fragility. As a newspaper that reflects a linguistic minority, we are buried in a world of majority language media. We face a daily dilemma. The newspaper is seen and used as a very important way of covering events affecting Acadians and francophones, but it is not used for advertising. Advertisers turn more often to the majority language media, and we are often confronted with the rationale that our client group functions just as well in English as in French. This fact has caused us to become very creative when it comes time to get the advertising revenues we need to guarantee our profitability. If the federal government uses English-language newspapers to transmit its messages to the Acadians and francophones in this province, this is very harmful to our business. The more advertising revenue we have, the more pages we will have to cover events and the more employees we will have to serve our readers.
Close to 70 per cent of our revenues come from advertising. Every week, we have to file complaints with the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, because many advertisements directed at francophones end up in majority language newspapers. This means that francophones in the province have to read advertising in English or in a bilingual format in English-language newspapers. This leads directly to assimilation. One of the reasons these advertisements are not published in our newspapers is a lack of planning on the part of federal government agencies. Often, when we file our complaint, if the advertisement contains a deadline, it is too late to publish it.
We take our work very seriously and we have a very professional approach. We deliver news that is rarely covered by the English-language media in the province. If we do not cover this, who will do so?
If I may, I would like to talk to you about my ten years' experience working for the newspaper. As the director of the only French-language newspaper in Nova Scotia, I am an active member of a number of committees working to advance the Acadian and francophone community in the province, such as the committee on the French Language Services Act in Nova Scotia. As a member of the Association de presse francophone, we have access to a national news service as well as an opportunity to participate in groups of individuals doing the same work and experiencing the same difficulties.
The federal government has established some programs that are very beneficial to us. There is the Publications Assistance Program, for example. It allows us to save on the cost of postage. Applications for projects that come under the Department of Canadian Heritage and Human Resources and Skills Development Canada are also very beneficial, but our applications for programming are turned down by Heritage Canada.
A number of obstacles prevent a newspaper like ours from growing and developing. Our first and major challenge is Canada Post. We have a product and we want to deliver it to our clients as quickly as possible. The area covered by the Courrier de la Nouvelle-Écosse is very large, and we have distribution problems. In our office, which is located in the Acadian region of Baie-Sainte-Marie, we get the newspaper Thursday, Friday or the following Monday. On several occasions, we have had to telephone the various post offices only to be told that our newspaper had either been lost, forgotten during the sorting or even forgotten on a pile of flyers from big-box stores. These practices are harmful to our subscribers and our advertisers and cause us a great many problems. The ideal solution would be to have our newspapers approved to get the label “time-committed.”
A second obstacle is that we are caught between two realities: we can make complaints and lose what we have achieved, or we can take a chance and either win or lose. The Société Radio-Canada requires a 35 per cent reduction in advertising costs in exchange for two minutes a week during which the main stories in the newspaper are broadcast on the radio. This revenue shortfall is harmful to our profitability.
A third difficulty is that the message we get from the departments is sometimes not very clear. In its presentation, ACOA states that the media are a tool of economic development. However, when we apply for a project, we are told immediately that they will not touch our company, because we are part of the press. They put us into the same category as the large, majority language dailies in the province. Recently, an organization put an ad in our newspaper announcing that it was looking for people to rent premises. We asked to locate our offices there, and we were told that this was impossible because the building belonged to ACOA, and once again, because we published a newspaper.
I would like to conclude with a thought which summarizes fairly well the importance of the work we are doing: a group without a newspaper is not heard, whereas a group with a newspaper forms a community.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Ms. Desautels. ACOA is the acronym for Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: The promotion agency, yes.
The Chairman: I did not know the acronym in French.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: It is ACOA in English.
[Français]
Senator Tkachuk: Could you tell us how many French-speaking people there are in Nova Scotia whom your newspaper attempts to serve?
[Traduction]
Ms. Comeau Desautels: There are about 30,000 francophones in Nova Scotia who make up about 4 per cent of the population.
[Français]
Senator Tkachuk: What is your circulation?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: The readership is around 5,000.
Senator Tkachuk: Five thousand households?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, the readership. It does last a whole week, and people do pass it around a lot.
Senator Tkachuk: You talked a bit about advertising, and perhaps I lost it in the translation or whatever, but we have had other newspapers, weeklies, be they French language or other ethnic or weekly newspapers, complain to us — and I know this is somewhat of a touchy subject — that they do not get enough of the federal advertising amount. Do you feel that way as well, that you are not getting your fair share? I don't mean a subsidy, but that you believe you have an audience to reach that would pay for them to use?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: As I said, we do make complaints to the Official Languages people weekly. Almost every day, we have to make complaints to the Official Languages people about advertisements that are not placed in our newspaper. They are placed in French or in bilingual format in English newspapers, so we do not get them.
Senator Tkachuk: Do you have a formal relationship with other French language newspapers across the country? Would you have a relationship with such newspapers in, say, Saskatchewan?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
Senator Tkachuk: I think we have one in Saskatchewan.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, we are members of l'Association de presse francophone which represents almost 24 newspapers, French newspapers outside of Quebec, in Canada.
Senator Tkachuk: From what you know of those in the association, are they facing the same problems?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
Senator Tkachuk: What does the bureaucracy say when you make this complaint? Kind of “Go away” or do they even answer?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Which ones?
Senator Tkachuk: I am talking about when you write to Heritage Canada, or complain to one of the departments?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Official Languages?
Senator Tkachuk: Official Languages, for example.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Official Languages has just put in a new format that now we are getting the ads a little bit faster. Before, when we made a complaint, it would take two, three, four weeks, perhaps a month, before they would do something, and perhaps there was a date by which that ad. should have appeared in the newspaper. Now there is something new in place that we seem to be getting a few, although not a great deal more.
Senator Tkachuk: Perhaps, if an election comes soon, you could let me know if they happen to start placing those ads really quickly now.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: If there is an election, it is not good for us because there are no ads during a campaign.
Senator Tkachuk: Yes, I know.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: It is not very good for us.
Senator Munson: Every time I talk to somebody in the Maritimes, I always feel like I have a conflict of interest because my wife worked with Vaughn Madden, of Fédération Nouvelle-Écosse, and helped develop a lot of community and outreach programs both in tourism and business plans, and so on. Therefore I do know a little bit about the Acadians, so much so that my two sons now charge me as personally responsible for the expulsion, and I keep trying to tell them that this is a 50/50 split in our family, anyway. They went to the Carrefour du Grand-Havre, which was a federally-created institution that I think was a wonderful thing for francophones in Nova Scotia, because they were all over the place, at least in the Halifax area. Federal intervention at that level worked well, I would say.
There are thirty thousand francophones in a province this size, and they are everywhere, in Cape Breton and along the south shore of Nova Scotia. Is there any mechanism that can keep the francophone community connected, for example, in community radio, that the people who live in Cheticamp or up on the other side of Cape Breton and “down shore,” as they would say, that they can interact with each other so they know that they have a strength in speaking with one voice in a very English province?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, we are forming a committee right now, the newspaper and the French community radios in Nova Scotia. We are working on that now, trying to form a committee in Nova Scotia. I think that will help a lot. Right now, we do partnerships with a lot of the radio stations. It is the only way we can survive.
Senator Munson: Would you favour any kind of Government intervention, or would that just be simply from the grassroots up?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Any help we can get is very much appreciated, yes.
Senator Munson: What is your overall view of the English language coverage of the Acadians in Nova Scotia? I noticed, for example, some rather positive moves last year with the Chronicle Herald when I was here for the Congrès Mondial. I was actually startled to see the editorials and how positive all of the coverage was. It was a time for English Nova Scotia to wake up and say, “You have been here a long time. You will be here forever, and you are an equal partner.”
Notwithstanding that, does the English language press understand, really understand, your needs and your aspirations?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: In my opinion, we saw that last year. I guess the Acadians had a very big coverage during those two weeks of the commemmoration. However, we have been doing that since 1937. It was a very good couple of weeks last year, but I do not believe that the Acadian population or the French population is covered that much, no. That is why it is very important to have a French newspaper because we do cover news that will never be covered by the English media.
Senator Munson: The assimilation aspect of it all, is that still a very difficult issue for francophones in Nova Scotia, to survive?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, it is.
Senator Munson: How can that change through the media?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Through the media? I guess we must look towards new groups also. We have the immersion, a lot of students learning through immersion programs in Nova Scotia, and they are very interested in the newspaper. Those are new groups that we can focus on. Also, since 1995 we have had a provincial French School Board in Nova Scotia. That is another group that we can focus on. I believe that we still have a lot of work to do, but I think there is hope.
[Traduction]
Senator Trenholme Counsell: I will try to speak in French, but it will be difficult. Does the paper come out once a week?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: It is a weekly. In my view, it is very difficult for a weekly covering the entire province to survive, because most of the time weeklies come out in a particular region, town or village. Is your paper mainly focused on news or rather on cultural events?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: At our central office, we currently employ four people, and if we could afford to, we would like to have eight employees. So we have to turn to freelance journalists throughout Nova Scotia. These people already have full-time jobs, but they still contribute to our paper. That is how we can publish news from every community, and since we are a member of the Association de presse francophone in Ottawa, we also publish national news, as well as provincial news out of Nova Scotia. One of the big problems for a paper such as ours is that most of the press releases we receive are in English, so we spend a lot of time translating them. Our newspaper covers national, provincial and local news, which covers communities from every region in Nova Scotia.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Do you publish events happening in every region, in towns and villages?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: In advance?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Every week?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Are young people interested in Le Courrier?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: I believe so. We want to reach more young people, but it is hard to do this with only four employees. We can only do what we can with the employees we have. In addition to our youth page, we cover events involving young people in Nova Scotia, be they at the local or provincial level. The Conseil de la jeunesse provincial in Nova Scotia lets us cover all these events.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Do you have entirely francophone schools or only immersion classes in Nova Scotia?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: We have francophone schools, one high school and several grade schools.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Here, in Halifax?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: In Halifax, indeed, there is a high school and there are grade schools throughout Nova Scotia, because we have a provincial school board.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Is it necessary that a certain percentage of the population be francophone to have francophone schools, or does it depend on the evolution of the population?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Every Acadian region in Nova Scotia, be it Pubnico or Baie-Sainte-Marie, la Vallée, Greenwood, Halifax or Cape Breton, has a French school. Since 1995, there is a provincial school board, and several schools have a subscription to our paper.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Is the circulation of your newspaper increasing or not today?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: It has increased a little, but the problem, as I explained earlier, is that the paper is distributed to families for a week, and then they pass the paper around and are even proud of telling us so. How many people can really read French out of those 30,000? That is another issue, so it is more difficult to assess.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: What is the price of a yearly subscription?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: It is $28 a year.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Twenty-eight dollars is not a lot of money.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: That is not what pays for the paper.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: No, indeed.
The Chairman: What is your newspaper's print run?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Just under 2,000 copies.
The Chairman: Two thousand. Yes, with the classic multiplication.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: A very big multiplication.
The Chairman: Is it published in tabloid format?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
The Chairman: How many pages on average does the paper have?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: About 24 pages, of which four are always in colour, so it looks very nice. I should have brought some copies.
The Chairman: Yes, if you could send us a couple of copies, that would be greatly appreciated.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
The Chairman: And you publish 52 weeks a year?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
The Chairman: That is amazing.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: And we do much more than that. We have just finished putting together a tourism guide, as well as engaging in other activities to make sure the paper is profitable.
The Chairman: As far as federal government advertising is concerned, I do not understand the system. If a government department puts an ad in, say, the Chronicle Herald, which should, according to the law, also be published in your paper, you go and complain to the Official Languages Commissioner and not directly to the department in question.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: We always address our complaints to the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages and the office investigates to see whether the advertisement should have been put in our paper or not.
The Chairman: Do you do that because someone told you that is the way it had to be done?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
The Chairman: As far as the delays which you talked about are concerned, is that due to the bureaucracy?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
The Chairman: What is the law? What are the legal obligations? Do only some types of advertising have to be published in both official languages?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: It depends on how you interpret the law. In Nova Scotia, it is not a department, but a federal organization which should place the French advertisements in the Courrier de la Nouvelle-Écosse, because it is the only provincial newspaper, and English advertisements should go into an English newspaper, but the organization seems to have its own interpretation of the law. As a result, we lose out on a lot of advertising.
The Chairman: I can imagine. But are you referring to all advertising from the federal government?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: No.
The Chairman: Otherwise, you would fill 150 pages per week, would you not?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, with the advertisements aimed at the province's francophones.
The Chairman: As well as employment opportunities.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Employment opportunities, exactly.
The Chairman: Health notices?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
The Chairman: Or basic tax information, if I understand correctly?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, general information.
The Chairman: Are some departments or agencies more guilty than others?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
The Chairman: Which ones?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: I can name the Halifax Airport Authority. We have a lot of problems with them. I am trying to think of others. Did you know that Nova Scotia files the greatest number of complaints with the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, as compared to the other provinces? I have a list.
The Chairman: Yes, but you are not the first francophone newspaper outside of Quebec which has appeared before the committee.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, I know.
The Chairman: But are you the first to tell us that you file a complaint every week?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Every week.
The Chairman: Is that because you are better organized?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Perhaps. We have a system. I have someone who reads the English newspaper every morning and who then briefs me, following which I will make a complaint.
The Chairman: Can you send us, at the same time as you send us copies of the paper, copies of some of those complaints so that we can see them for ourselves?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
The Chairman: We have heard a lot about all kinds of problems, but not really problems of that nature. I thought that if something was stipulated by law, people obeyed.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: I have made about 20 complaints since the start of the year. I have a thick file.
The Chairman: I would like to see that file.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
The Chairman: In your case, perhaps it might be a better idea to make a complaint directly with the agencies, or is it better to go through the Office of the Official Languages Commissioner?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: We do not have any contact within agencies or departments.
The Chairman: You are in the network.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Réseau Sélect is our federal placement agency. We send a copy of the complaint to Réseau Sélect, and they can sometimes get the advertisement for us. They are not in the same situation we are in. I realized recently that they do not exactly understand the Official Languages Act.
The Chairman: In Newfoundland, representatives of the francophone newspaper told us recently about an agency which was created specifically for French newspapers located outside Quebec.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: The APF had its own agency, OPSCOM, for many years, but in the last two years, or two and a half years, two new agencies were created, namely Réseau Sélect and Repco.
The Chairman: They must have been talking about Repco.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: That is right. We are with Réseau Sélect.
The Chairman: There are two of them? There are two agencies for 24 newspapers?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, and it is working very well with Réseau Sélect, but as I was saying earlier, I do not think that they exactly understand the Official Languages Act. We have a very good understanding with the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, so they are the ones who contact us.
The Chairman: A little earlier, you talked about Canada Post. Why do you not attach the famous label entitled “time-committed”?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Some APF newspapers have it. Last week, I was in a meeting in Ottawa with other representatives of APF newspapers, and that is one of the issues we talked about. I have started the application about a year and a half ago, but it is a very long process and you have to justify why you want the label. For us it would be the ideal solution.
The Chairman: Do you have to pay for it?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: No.
The Chairman: Do you have to have a certain number of subscribers?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: No, it is Canada Post that decides.
The Chairman: Haphasardly, in short?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: I have not gotten through to the end of the application process, because it is so long. This is what sometimes happens when you do not have a lot of staff to put out a newspaper.
The Chairman: Yes, but it is not because your paper is distributed on a subscription-only basis?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: No.
The Chairman: Do you have regular subscribers?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, we only have subscribers.
[Français]
Senator Munson: This is getting spooky. Concerning the new technology we were talking about this morning with other witnesses, my wife now has questions over the BlackBerry. She does not even know I am talking to you, but you know, it is part of the Acadian conspiracy here. I say that jokingly, in a written word. My wife is from New Brunswick.
You were talking about connections, issues and problems that you have. Do you have a connection with, for example, Le Madawaska in Edmundston?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Le Moniteur Acadien?
Senator Munson: Yes. Do you have that interaction so that they can understand? Acadians in New Brunswick, obviously, have found a way to interact because of numbers and because of determination and everything else thrown in there. But here in Nova Scotia, it must be very tough. Is there a connection, so that people in New Brunswick understand what you are going through here, and vice-versa?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
Senator Munson: Does that appear in your paper?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Last week, or two weeks ago, I had a question about Canada Post. I wanted to ask the other newspapers how they were doing so that the newspaper would get to the subscribers on time, and within minutes I probably had 18 answers from all the newspapers across Canada, the French newspapers. That is how we are connected.
We are connected with Le Moniteur Acadien. Gilles Haché is the President of l'Association de presse francophone. Le Madawaska is part of our association, so we are very well connected with all the French newspapers outside of Québec. We are part of the same association, so we live the same life. The only thing is that nobody has ever offered to buy us out.
Senator Eyton: My first question is one to which I probably should know the answer, but I will ask it anyway because I do not really know.
In your comments you referred, and I think I am right in my recollection, to the Acadians and to the French population. In your terms, is there a difference between the French and the Acadian population?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: I cannot say.
[Traduction]
Acadians are of Acadian descent and francophones come from the outside, but they speak French. If we want more readers, we have to address two separate realities. On the one side, there are the Acadians who want to read a lot of pieces on Acadian culture, and on the other side are the francophones who are looking for other types of news. Does that answer your question?
[Français]
Senator Eyton: It does. It is an interesting reply. How does that factor into the numbers that you gave us? You are talking about, for example, the first number was 30,000 and that is the combined population of the two?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
Senator Eyton: How would that split, broadly speaking? Would it be 50/50? Probably more Acadians than francophones, I suppose?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, there would be more Acadians.
Senator Eyton: In terms of your subscriber list, or people who buy your publication, would it be more French than Acadian?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: There would probably be more Acadians, presently.
Senator Eyton: So you would tend to feature — you do not have a sample with you today?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: No. I am sorry.
Senator Eyton: I heard we are getting one, but you do not have it with you?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: It is a very nice newspaper.
Senator Eyton: You did talk about your revenue split when you said that 70 per cent of your revenue came from advertising. Would that be fundamentally federal government advertising or provincial and federal?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Federal would probably be around 40 per cent maybe, I do not know. I do not even know if it is that.
Senator Eyton: Forty per cent of the —
Ms. Comeau Desautels: The 70.
Senator Eyton: Yes.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: I think. I am not even sure of that. We do have to do a lot of supplements in the newspaper because the locals sometimes will not advertise because we are provincial. We must do a lot of supplements, such as that for the Acadian festivals, in a certain week or something. That is how we do it.
Senator Eyton: To make it more relevant, yes. Now I have 30 per cent. There are private advertisers as well, I assume, are there? There is some private advertising as well?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
Senator Eyton: And there is provincial government advertising?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
Senator Eyton: And that is the 70 per cent?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: We translate, too, of course.
Senator Eyton: Then, I have 30 per cent left over, and that 30 per cent would come on a sort of regular basis. Would it be paid subscriptions? Where does the 30 per cent come from?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Oh, the 30 per cent, no. We count that as revenue from our trust fund. We do have a trust fund that was set up, I think, 20 years ago, or perhaps 10 or 15 years. The newspaper would receive approximately $50,000 a year from that trust fund. This year we will be getting $26,000, so it does go, and the other ones are if we do projects with Heritage Canada. Sometimes, we do a little bit of that.
Senator Eyton: You get something there. But there is a paid subscription list, is there not? I have a number here of $20 yearly.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Twenty-eight.
Senator Eyton: Twenty-eight dollars a year.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: I think it is about $20,000 a year.
Senator Eyton: That is what you get from those subscriptions, and these are the people who are real believers and real supporters?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, yes.
Senator Eyton: With Heritage, you indicated some disappointment with at least some of their responses. I take two things from that that I imply: One is that the responses are a bit uneven and irregular, and the second is that you have been disappointed with the level of support that you did not get from Heritage. Can you comment on that? Perhaps you could relate it to your request. I would like to know, when you go to Heritage and say “I require this kind of money,” I assume you say for this kind of project, or for that kind of special work?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, I have the answers they gave me yesterday. We were refused yesterday. It is just that I took my notes. When we do projects with Canadian Heritage, if the project is good, there is no problem. But we are an organization the same as the other French organizations in Nova Scotia. The only thing with us is that we do generate revenue. Their answer was that they were afraid that we would be “combler une dette ou boucher un trou.”
The Chairman: Pay off your debts with their money?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, and that is the answer they gave us yesterday. But because “la programmation” is just the day-to-day activity that you can pay with some of this money, that is why we did not understand the refusal. It is not because there are only four of us at the office that we do not work for six or eight. You would be very amazed with the work we do there, just four of us. It is four because it is all we can have for now, and we were very disappointed in that response because the more we would get, the more we could —
Senator Eyton: The better job you could do. What are your trends? You say you have around 2,000 in circulation. What is your trend line? Are you increasing year by year, or is it stable?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: We do increase.
Senator Eyton: You are increasing?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
Senator Eyton: Does that mean the population that you refer to is increasing as well?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: With the immersion in the schools, the students are learning French now. That is why it is going up.
Senator Eyton: You have come here and made an interesting presentation, but I am always interested in the “ask.” What is the “ask”? What are you looking for? What I mean is that you must have an “ask”? You would not be here unless you had something that you wanted to ask for?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: It is not really just money. It is just that we would really want Canada Post to do something about ... we were put under flyers for Zellers. I mean, it does not make sense. We would like to have more respect when it comes to delivering our product. Also, with Official Languages, but it is not just Official Languages. We want the ministers to understand that some ads should go in the French newspaper because they are directed to the French community, and we have learned not to ask for much. We are hard workers.
Senator Tkachuk: Can I ask you a question? You prepare your mail. This kind of intrigues me because you would be paying the postage, at the subsidized postage rate. You prepare your mail right? Do you not do it using the postal code, or whatever, so really they have less work to do in handling your mail. Then it comes to the post office and they treat it like a flyer because it is addressed mail, right?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes, it is all addressed. It is all addressed.
Senator Tkachuk: How do they get away with that? Does this happen often? Because it should not happen, frankly.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: No, it should not. There is no reason why we should receive a newspaper on a Thursday, and the week after on a Monday.
Senator Tkachuk: Yes, because they get paid full price although it is subsidized. Nonetheless, in the end they are paid for the mail, whether it comes from your pocket or it comes from the government's pocket; it comes out of somebody's pocket to the post office's pocket, to pay for it. It should be treated like first class mail, actually, because it is prepaid.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Our newspaper is printed in Church Point. It is not printed here. It is printed at Church Point, at that end of the province. We send it electronically to Caraquet, New Brunswick, to be printed and then it is sent to Halifax. We will be changing that probably soon, trying to find a printer in Nova Scotia just so we can do something to get it closer to the post office. We were looking for a good price, but now we must go and look for something closer to the main post office.
Senator Tkachuk: Have you gone to the post office and said “Look, we will actually put it in the box?” I am kidding.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: No, in Halifax, even if we get it on Thursday in Church Point, Halifax can get it here on Monday or Tuesday.
Senator Tkachuk: Yes, that is right. They should be able to do that.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: And it is distributed in Halifax.
Senator Tkachuk: Yes, so you actually drop it in the mail on Tuesday or Wednesday? When do you drop it in the mail?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: In Halifax, it gets here on Wednesday, and sometimes Halifax people will get it the next Tuesday.
The Chairman: You mean the subscribers in Halifax?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Our subscribers.
Senator Tkachuk: That is terrible.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Please help us with Canada Post.
Senator Tkachuk: No, I know something about this stuff. It is not very good.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: We are not the only newspaper that has problems with Canada Post.
Senator Tkachuk: Madam Chair, perhaps we could write a letter, asking some questions. It might take a while to get there, but we will write them. Perhaps we should use FedEx instead of the post office.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: The magic word is “à délai convenu,” time-committed. That is the magic word.
The Chairman: Time-committed?
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Yes.
[Traduction]
The Chairman: Time-committed.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Committed, exactly.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Ms. Desautels. This morning, I was complaining about the fact that there are not any women in senior positions in the media, but in fact, here you are with us this afternoon. Yesterday, it was Ms. Dennis from the Chronicle Herald, so I would like to believe that things are going well for women in Nova Scotia.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: I forgot to mention that all of the four employees at our paper are women.
The Chairman: I hope you will send us the file and perhaps an explanation of how the postal system works, as well as several copies of your paper.
Ms. Comeau Desautels: Perfect.
[Français]
The Chairman: Senators, as our grand finale in Halifax, we will now hear from two members of the public who also were not able to join us yesterday, and it will be our usual routine with them. We will hear now from two members of the public, and I think we will hear from them one after the other, unless they are appearing in tandem. I am not sure which of you is which. The names I have here are Mr. Jason Lawrence and Mr. Raymond Plourde.
Please proceed, Mr. Plourde.
[Traduction]
If you could make a four-minute opening statement, we would then ask questions before moving on to Mr. Laurence.
Mr. Raymond Plourde, As an individual: Madam Chair, I want to tell you that I am both a francophone and an anglophone from Nova Scotia.
[Français]
The Chairman: You are allowed to speak English here, too.
[Traduction]
Mr. Plourde: Yes, I will speak English, but I would like to illustrate the point that I am not an Acadian, but rather a francophone born in Nova Scotia, which is different. I do not have any Acadian roots, since I am a French Canadian.
The Chairman: Plourde is a Quebec name, is it not?
Mr. Plourde: Yes, that is right. From the Lower St. Lawrence area, around Rivière-du-Loup.
[Français]
I will now switch to English and speak on the points that I wanted to make as an individual.
First of all, thank you for allowing me the opportunity, honourable senators. I understand that actually yesterday was the day, but the ad. in the paper did not make that clear or I missed something. I appreciate your taking the time from your busy schedule.
I am with an organization called the Ecology Action Centre, which is an environmental advocacy and education organization. However, I am not here to represent them. I am here as an individual who is both a consumer of news — and a very interested consumer at that — and I represent just my own opinions here, although they may be flavoured by my experiences.
I would like to state that I think we are very lucky in Nova Scotia to have some independent news organizations. In particular, you heard apparently from the Dennis family yesterday. We are very fortunate to have, I think, one of the oldest independent daily provincial newspapers. They have been the newspaper of record of this province since Joseph Howe established it, and I think we are very lucky to have that. It is encouraging to hear that they want to remain independent and that they have turned down offers for what I would call assimilation into the larger organism of concentrated media.
Public policy, I think, should encourage and support independent news entities, be they small community-based ones that, as in the case you have just heard, try and reach a diverse audience geographically spread out or albeit a larger audience but with independent perspectives. The Chronicle Herald is an excellent example. Within its own pages, it reflects many different opinions and attitudes of very good columnists and the like. We have some other excellent newspapers here as well.
However, I wanted to speak specifically about media concentration, which seems to have resulted in more information streams and, of course, there is new media through Internet and so on. Thus we have more streams or brands, if you will, coming at us as citizens, but with less actual news. They are essentially covering the same thing, and often from the same news reporters or news gathering organizations, so diversity and depth of news is being lost through the concentration of ownership of media.
Because most of these organizations are private businesses, the efficiencies of removing, — as we all know, the single biggest cost of most businesses is salaries, and so by being able to concentrate ownership and gain the, in the vernacular of the business world, efficiencies of less staff, there is less depth and there is less actual news. Speaking as an environmentalist, more trees are being cut to sell more ads, but giving us the same news. It would be of benefit if public policy could discourage media concentration, that is to say ownership by a few big companies. Obviously, there is a place for ownership of a certain size, but when virtually one brand can control several strengths in media — Bell Globe Media, for example — it is not that there is anything untoward from a business perspective. It makes sense. It suits the bottom line of a large corporation, but it does not serve the Canadian public well, I do not think, as an individual.
Similarly, CRTC regulations over the last number of years have resulted in changes and relaxation of radio news commitment and other commitments that one could say stimulates the grey matter as well as the toe-tapping and the management agreements that have been allowed to occur. I think this has been even less directed or allowed by the CRTC and more sort of on the initiative of the private broadcasters and then sort of getting the blessing after the fact. That has not been good for the public from the point of view of news and information. It is good for the private broadcasters' bottom line for the same efficiencies that we have been talking about, these management agreements and concentration of ownership, but it has resulted in the gutting of newsrooms where the loss of local coverage and diversity is once again negatively impacted. Locally, for example, in this city, we have a concentration of what used to be competitors now all together under one happy roof. We have news readers, not news reporters.
The Chairman: I will have to cut you off any second now, Mr. Plourde.
Mr. Plourde: Very good. Then I will just make one last point. The cutbacks to the local CBC Radio and Television News, the morning news program, the news magazine in the morning on radio and the cutting of the six o'clock supper hour news program has removed perhaps the finest regional news coverage that we have in Nova Scotia. The public broadcasters, perhaps more important than ever, given the concentration of media like the BBC or the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, are also a source of pride and a source of the continuity and unity of this very vast country where we get to speak to one another and kind of share something in common from Vancouver to St. John's. I would like to see the public policy renewed and funding expanded for that valuable news and culture touch through the CBC.
Senator Tkachuk: You talked about the large news organizations. Do you not see CBC as a large multi-corporation? It is probably a larger corporation with a billion dollar budget than most media businesses in this whole country, and yet you claim they deliver terrific news?
Mr. Plourde: Absolutely, and I think the difference is because their mandate is quite a bit different. It is meant to serve the diversity, regional, national and cultural elements of Canada without having to worry about or focus on bottom line profitability, although it has to look at efficiencies because it has responsibilities to Canadian taxpayers. I think that its focus allows it to get into greater depth. I personally believe that the CBC news-gathering organization in Nova Scotia, and certainly prior to all the cutbacks in the last number of decades, was even better, but it is the finest news-gathering organization that there is. However, more and more there are less reporters to cover that and less in- depth reporting, or investigative journalism. With the private broadcasters in particular, that is becoming less evident at a regional level. Again, we look to our newspapers and thank our lucky stars that an independent like the Chronicle Herald has survived.
Senator Tkachuk: I have always thought that, perhaps outside of Hockey Night in Canada, the only thing that CBC actually did reasonably well was news. It is very hard for government to tell them how to spend their money, but perhaps you could, as a witness, recommend how they should spend their money. Would you say that the CBC perhaps should focus more on public affairs and less on what they consider their other mandates of drama and whatever else they do? I do not really watch it that much; nobody else seems to, either. Do you think that they should perhaps spend more of their money on what they do well, which is news and public affairs, especially at the local level? I know in my province they are good at local news as well. Anyway, I am just asking you that and then I will pass to the next question.
Mr. Plourde: I am probably less qualified to answer about the culture programming. It probably has an important place, but I know it does not gain a lot of ratings, and frankly, I do not watch it. I have actually watched CBC on Saturday night more this year than last.
Senator Tkachuk: American movies.
Mr. Plourde: Let's just say that I have become tired of watching millionaires skating around. I would rather watch junior players play for the love of the game. Anyway, that is an independent, personal thing.
I think concentration, though, of CBC's efforts on news and current affairs, in-depth journalism, or programs like Mr. Munson once worked on, although I believe that was at a private broadcaster rather than the CBC, was it not?
Senator Munson: Twenty-four years ago.
Mr. Plourde: Yes, that kind of stuff, W5 and the First Edition, or Fifth Edition.
Senator Tkachuk: Fifth Estate.
Mr. Plourde: I was thinking of our news program that was gutted there, First Edition. Those types of programs are really fabulous and certainly I watch them and learn a lot from them, and I appreciate that. I guess my answer would be probably yes, although with the caveat that I am not an expert at the cultural dramatic stuff.
Senator Munson: When you talked about, sarcastically, the one happy newsroom covering the five, we heard that, I think, this morning from another witness in Halifax. How does that work? Is that five different stations working out of the same newsroom?
Mr. Plourde: Five different radio stations, as I understand it, working out of the same building, with different control rooms or broadcast booths and one, perhaps two, but I think it is only one news reader going from one to the next to the next to the next, sometimes with different names, but I think most of the time the same name. Depending on the nature of the radio station, they might adopt a radio sort of stage name, if you will, but that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that it is just whatever is coming in from the broadcast news services that they get, reading essentially the same thing, and a little local news. There are no reporters going out and covering a news event for private radio any more, so they are just news readers. It has reached the point where it is irrelevant, and I think they are radio stations that are meant to be just primarily for music, perhaps. I do not know what the solution is except that I know that the quality of local, regional and national news coverage by private radio broadcasters is pretty much nonexistent. It is very weak.
Senator Munson: Less scandals.
The Chairman: Mr. Lawrence.
Mr. Jason Lawrence, As an individual: Senators, I am just here to speak to the committee today. It is relatively short notice but I just thought I would come in anyway and have my say on a couple of different issues and perceptions that I have as a private citizen who has had the opportunity over the last few years to amass information that I have gathered from a couple of different sources. Thanks to the Internet, I will soon have some more foreign sources from which I can assimilate news information in addition to Canadian papers and what have you here.
I have a couple of things that I would just like to speak to specifically, one of which we will cover in a few minutes. There will be the conglomeration of news media companies, such as Bell Canada, or Bell Global Media being a popular one. It will be one of the ones that I was thinking of, in particular. Some other issues that I will be raising as well will be the concerns of language as far as media reporting in Canada is concerned, and one or two other items as they come up in regards to the ability to be an independent reporter.
Myself, I am not a reporter but, as I mentioned, just a general citizen here. The principal concern that I have is with the amalgamation of the media, as I mentioned, in that while I do realize that it is an obligation and expectation of a company that owns things from different media areas such as television and radio, and we will use for this example Bell Canada's media governance, I have also come to concern myself with the thought that there may be some other things that could be suffering in lieu of the expectation or obligation to provide profits to their shareholders, to their own companies and what not. One of them, I think, would be independence in certain ways, the chief being that I have a concern that there might only be a certain number of companies within Canada where there is access to employment within separate organizations. For example, if one company owns television and radio stations in the same area, and one of their reporters writes a controversial story that may or may not run in line with the opinion of the upper management in that particular company, there is a very real concern, I think, if you were the reporter who was reporting on that story, and you were let go, there might be a strong possibility you would not be able to find other employment in that area in your field, the reporting field. That was one concern of mine, from what I have seen from an outside perspective.
Another concern of mine is the problem I would see on the horizon that if a company is large enough and covers enough different divisions in its empire, that inevitably it would be reporting on itself and its own activities in some situations. One good example on that that is something that I have read in some of my U.S. sources like the Washington Post on-line, or San Francisco Chronicle, or what have you. In this particular example, a copyright rule came out in the U.S. in regard to extending copyright for a certain number of years beyond what would normally be the expiration point. Companies that were affiliated directly with an interest in extending their copyrights were reporting a little differently, for example, than the ones that did not have a personal stake in that matter. I will give you a specific example. This, I believe, was under an extension of rights in regards to Walt Disney productions. Media agencies that were affiliated with that organization, such as ABC, at the time were promoting a Save Mickey Mouse Campaign. It was literally word for word on their website, turning it into a personal issue, whereas on the other impartial sites that did not have a personal stake in the matter, or a business investment, were reporting that this would, in fact, restrict innovation in the country up to an undetermined number of years.
I thought I might speak to that today, just because I would not like to see this sort of thing occurring in Canada. I would not like to see us follow the same direction or the path that has been taken in the United States, where a combination of business and media have got together. That would be one of my larger concerns.
Another problem that I see — and this is specifically from a Canadian perspective, once again — is with language, and I am taking into consideration that it might not be feasible, economically, to produce a report in both official languages at the same time. Nevertheless, I am a little concerned about the coverage that I am receiving out of the Province of Québec. Specifically, we have what, Canada's third largest city Montreal, here.
The Chairman: Second largest.
Mr. Laurence: I am sorry, second largest city. It has gone up a little bit since I last looked at my statistics. I do not see a whole lot of reporting in the national papers that I see in the national news agency. I am sorry that I do speak primarily English, but I do not see a lot of coverage from that particular side. I realize that they do have a large concentration of reporters, journalists, as mentioned in your report, but I do not seem to be being reached by a large number of different stories coming out from there. I know there are different problems in British Columbia that are reported on quite frequently on, say, Global News, for example. But for something that is a fair bit closer to us geographically and economically, as far as trade goes in this region, I feel that there is a lack in reporting of that size or that market.
Finally, the last element I would like to speak to is in regard to concentration in the media. I have noticed that there does seem to be an increased amount of reporting coming directly out of news centres about central Canada. You see a lot more coverage on items that happened in downtown Toronto than you would outside of the country. In addition to that, I also perceive that there is a problem once you do concentrate your reporting abilities, as was reported earlier by a few other witnesses, that there will also be a problem for news gathering, whenever something happens. To give a good, specific example for this region, during the second last natural disaster that happened here, which was the large hurricane in the area, the local station, which is CBC, has its own independent, or more localized concentration of reporters in the region, were able to produce information from the field, from different disaster organizations and whatever, a lot faster than the ones that were based primarily with, for example, the CHUM group, which was located in Toronto at the time. While they were giving disaster reports, the more privatized and centralized agencies based out of central Canada were still giving away Top Ten CDs on the radio at the time. I would just like to speak of that as being of concern to me.
I believe that is everything that I have for the committee.
The Chairman: That is a flock of serious concerns that you have raised.
Senator Munson: Is your concern, for example, a company like BC, Bell Globe Media and its ownership of CTV News, that CTV would back away from a story, just say hypothetically, of some corporate concerns inside the telephone company, that that would be a conflict there in that you would not get the objective reporting that private organizations should be delivering? Is that the kind of concern you have, if you are owned by that kind of company?
Mr. Lawrence: It is a concern that I perceive in my own opinions. I have not seen a definite example of that, however, where CTV in particular has gone out of its way to glaze over a fact, or anything in that respect. However, while we have not seen anything to that extent in Canada, I thought I should speak out in that regard, as to why I would not like to see that kind of thing happening here in Canada. Being as it is still an early amalgamation, I am happy to say that I have not seen anything that gives me cause or concern in that respect. Nothing as of yet. However, as I said, I would like to prevent it from going that way if I had any kind of opinion in the matter at all.
The Chairman: As a former journalist, I can tell you that the concern you raise is not new because since your dot newspaper, initially newspapers and now broadcasters as well, have been owned by a wide variety of people, many of whom had other interests, and I am not sure that there is any way, even in heaven, that you could ensure that nobody would ever have any conflicts of interest at all. I can remember, for example, writing rousing editorials in favour of having the City of Montreal permit — which it did not — newspaper vending boxes on sidewalks. I was writing “freedom of expression; people have the right to know” type editorials, but did my employer have a direct commercial interest in having those boxes on the street? The answer is yes. That is maybe a very small and obvious example.
However, it has seemed to me increasingly, as the world has become more and more complex, that one of the solutions to many difficulties is transparency, declaration, having people be clear and upfront as to who owns you, and what their other interests are. For example, if you are with the The Globe and Mail — and they do this, actually, The Globe and Mail — and you are writing a story about Bell, you always include a paragraph stating that BC owns, among other things, The Globe and Mail, so that your audience has a chance, then, to judge whether they think you are giving a comparatively straight story or not. Can you give a shorter comment on that than my intervention was?
Mr. Lawrence: No, I do not think so. I thought that was a fine example for the plug you were looking to speak to there. As you mentioned, and I agree with the notion, you can only be so impartial when you are working for different companies and what have you there.
One thing that would concern me with that, specifically as far as different news agencies go in Canada, is my concern that once you do put yourself out there as an organization that is in support of this particular political position or that particular item, from that point on it affects the people who work under you in that there might always be at the back of your mind a perception that maybe we should not push this too hard in case something negative comes down the pipe, from the perspective of an employment position or something in that respect. That, in itself, would be my primary sticking point, in that respect.
The Chairman: Those are serious concerns, and worth taking seriously. Thank you for bringing them forward.
Before we adjourn, I would like to thank everybody who has contributed to making these days in Halifax such a success: that is, the staff, the interpreters, the public and the witnesses. The committee has had a series of most informative and interesting meetings, and I thank all concerned.
The committee adjourned.