Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue No. 37 - Evidence - June 12, 2018
OTTAWA, Tuesday, June 12, 2018
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 9:30 a.m. to study emerging issues related to its mandate and ministerial mandate letters; and in camera, for the consideration of a draft agenda (future business).
Senator David Tkachuk (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications.
We are meeting under our general order of reference, which got extended last night to the end of 2019. We’re here to study the deductibility of foreign Internet advertising.
I would like to welcome our witness, April Lindgren, Professor at the School of Journalism at Ryerson University. She is also one of the researchers of the Local News Research Project, which examines local news coverage in Canadian communities.
Thank you for attending our meeting today, Ms. Lindgren. I invite you to start your presentation, after which senators will have many questions.
April Lindgren, Professor, School of Journalism, Ryerson University, as an individual: I’d like to thank the committee for inviting me to be here today.
I will talk about the research we’re doing at the Local News Research Project that generally shows local news is at risk and available unevenly across the country. I will cite a few reasons for that and make an observation on the tax proposal you are considering. I will do a quick overview and then take your questions.
You should have a handout of a set of slides there. I draw your attention to slide 2, which offers a list of why local news matters. In five minutes, I don’t have time for a detailed discussion of these points. In the United States, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy concluded that information, as they put it, is as a vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets, good schools and public health.
What does “local news and information” mean? Scholars have identified eight types of what they call “critical information needs” that communities have. People need this information, the suggestion is, to effectively navigate everyday life. The list of eight includes information about emergencies and risks, health, education, transportation, economic opportunities, the environment, and civic and political matters.
I mention this list of eight, because it underpins my thinking on what I call “local news poverty.” I suggest local news poverty exists in varying degrees, depending on the extent to which these eight critical information needs are being met within the community by local news outlets.
How are we investigating this idea of local news poverty? The next slide is a map; it’s the local news map. It’s an initiative aimed at trying to get a better idea in terms of local news poverty. The map is crowdsourced, which means contributors, such as you, can add information about changes to local news organizations in your community or others you know about. Has a local television station been closed? Has a local newspaper started up? Has an online news site been started? Have there been service reductions or increases?
All of that information can be submitted to the map. It appears as a marker people can use to get a visual idea of what is happening to local news across the country. There are various filters to change the information you look at.
What does the map tell us? The last time we downloaded the data was on June 1, two years after I launched the map with my colleague at UBC, Jon Corbett. We have 431 markers on the map now, highlighting changes to local news outlets. Basically, three quarters of them are bad news. Two hundred forty-eight markers, which is the large blue section slice of pie you see, represents the closing of local news outlets in 176 different Canadian communities. Another 61 markers record service reductions, reduced publishing schedules for newspapers, and cancelled or shortened newscasts at television stations.
I will remind you the data goes back to 2008. You have a bit of a timeline. This gives us some concrete data to get an idea of what is happening at the local news level.
The next slide, which I’ll touch on briefly, is the introduction to the second project we have, where we examine what is going on in terms of local news poverty: the ballot box slide. In this case, we did a study where we compared how eight communities during the 2015 election received information about the local race for members of Parliament. How did local news outlets cover those local races during the 2015 race?
We found big differences across the country. I’ll touch upon those differences in the next three slides, which are the bar charts. If you turn to the first of the bar charts, we found significant variations in the number of local news outlets per 10,000 registered voters in each of our eight communities. Voters in Brampton had only three local news outlets at their disposal. That was our most poorly served community in terms of measurement. At the other end of the spectrum were voters in Kamloops where there were nine local news sources.
The next slide shows the number of new stories per 10,000 electors. These are the number of news stories about the local race for a member of Parliament. Again, we see significant differences, depending on where voters lived. Brampton and Oakville, the two suburban ridings in our sample, had the least access to local news for the local race for MP, along with people who lived in the rural riding of the City of Kawartha Lakes outside the Peterborough area. That was our example of a rural riding we wanted to look at.
Finally, the third bar chart is the result of work we did to try and understand to what extent people had access to a variety of different news sources. We borrowed a tool from economics called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index to measure what we think of as media concentration. This tells us in Brampton people had the least variety of sources to look at. I’ll put this in concrete terms. In Brampton, there are three news outlets: a newspaper and two online sites. However, the weekly community paper, the Brampton Guardian, provided 43 of the 44 local election stories. There were three local outlets there, but people did not have a great variety of sources to turn to for news about the election. That means a city of 600,000 people really had one source of news about the race for their local member of Parliament in the last election.
By comparison, a place like Kamloops had nine news outlets, including a weekly paper that provided 43 stories, an online news site that offered 36 and a local TV station that had 26 stories. Kamloops was better served by this measure. Voters there had more access to different perspectives and coverage of the election.
To wrap up, our overall findings show local news is at risk and unevenly available across the country. In addition to providing you with concrete data to create some context for the problem you are trying to solve, I want to point out you are dealing with a complex problem. The reasons local media are in trouble have to do with many things: technological change; media concentration; mass migration of advertising to Facebook and Google, and the associated collapse of advertising rates; and at this point at least, Canadians’ overall unwillingness to pay for news they have been getting for free.
Given uncertainties associated with the future of advertising as a revenue source, many news organizations are, if not giving up, certainly starting to develop other sources of revenue. In many cases, this means turning to readers or viewers to pay. We’re seeing an increased push to get subscriptions, subscription newsletters, memberships and crowdfunding.
The work in this area for news organizations is an acknowledgement that advertising, which used to be the old source of how news organizations financed themselves, can no longer be counted on as the staple. There is also an appetite for changes in government policies that would allow for more non-profit models, which would allow news organizations to qualify as charitable organizations, issue receipts, receive more support from foundations and that sort of thing.
You shouldn’t be under any illusions the tax change you are discussing today is a silver bullet that will solve the problems of the news industry. It can be one of many tools. There is a bigger and more complex problem out there that nobody has the answer to at this point. We are looking at a bunch of changes to try and address the sorts of problems I have highlighted in the two pieces of research I talked about today.
I will stop there and take questions.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
For the communities you studied, was it not only of the loss of advertising but also, perhaps, depopulation in small communities affecting the local community newspaper? I know that has happened in many communities in my province of Saskatchewan.
Do you think the competition of all-news radio, as well as the Internet, has had an effect on community newspapers? In the end, it seems that’s all we’re talking about when we talk about local news. There are other news sources people are accessing. Maybe we are concentrating too much on the wrong thing, but I’m asking you.
Ms. Lindgren: We looked at all sources of news when we did the election study. We looked at radio, TV, online sources. We wanted to get a full picture of where people could get news about the election when the election study was done.
As to whether it’s depopulation, maybe in some cases, but the fact is Brampton and Oakville are not suffering from depopulation; they are growing like gangbusters, for the most part.
I think it depends on the type of community you are talking about. The causes — what I think of as local news poverty — vary depending on the type. In the case of suburban communities, there are issues of proximity to a big city like Toronto. People have an orientation toward Toronto. They might be less interested in local news. Any local news outlet that starts up faces major competition from big city media.
The CBC outlet in Toronto covers Brampton, but primarily it’s covering issues in Toronto. The Toronto Star will cover issues in Brampton occasionally, but it primarily covers Toronto. In the meantime, you have a very weak news ecosystem happening in Brampton.
There is research that suggests maybe a large commuter population undermines support for local news because people are less engaged in their communities, potentially; that’s speculative. Also, there is a competitive issue: How aggressive can a local news organization be in terms of selling advertising if most people are subscribing to the Toronto Star? There are competitive issues.
In the rural municipalities, there is potentially a problem with the way these newspapers have been able to shift to the Internet. There is some research that says they haven’t been quite a nimble as they need to be. At the same time, you have an older population who are maybe not as nimble on the Internet as other communities. The problem of the transformation to online is challenging for the smaller community papers, in many cases.
We have a study we are doing now looking at smaller newspapers and how they are surviving. The data shows about half have not had a huge embrace of digital. Then, of course, there is the quality of the Internet connection in these communities. I know the area around the city of Kawartha Lakes fairly well. The library connection is even pretty sketchy some days.
Senator Plett: Welcome. I’m also from a rural area in southeastern Manitoba. I believe we are extremely well served by a newspaper called The Carillon and by an online network called Steinbach Online. We also have local radio stations. I’m going to make sure when I get back home, I make some inquiries as to how they are doing financially and so on.
I know The Carillon was bought recently by the Winnipeg Free Press, which I found a little sad because The Carillon was always a very impartial paper. They still try to be, even though I don’t believe the Winnipeg Free Press is.
I’m wanting to turn this into a question, but much of this be will be a comment. I know some of my colleagues will say I’m unfairly biased. I don’t think I am unfairly biased. I am certainly biased and make no apologies.
We have a situation in Winnipeg. I’ll use only Winnipeg. I’m sure we could use any other city, but we are political people, and we have some political battles.
I got into an exchange with the editor of The Carillon just a week or two ago. He and I don’t always agree on issues. I respect the fact that he respects my right to have an opinion, and he believes it should be presented as a senator from southeastern Manitoba. If I have an opinion, it should be presented.
With the Winnipeg Free Press, I find the opposite is true. They believe if my opinion isn’t what their editor’s opinion is, it shouldn’t be presented because it is, obviously, the wrong opinion and no one is interested.
I wonder why the local ones are having a harder time, because I believe they are far fairer, and they want to make sure their subscribers get both sides of an issue. Certainly it’s more local news — I think many times it’s more interesting — than national news and always will be. I would like your comments on that.
I talked talk to a retired journalist yesterday. We were chatting about the Ontario election. She made an interesting observation: Every time another riding got called and the governing Liberal Party lost — it went either to the NDP or, even more so, obviously, to the Conservatives — the journalist did not say, “More bad news for Kathleen Wynne.” They just simply said, “More bad news; they lost another one.”
Why was that necessarily more bad news? Are journalists taught to be as blatantly biased as I believe they are?
Ms. Lindgren: I can’t speak for individual news organizations, but if in the heat of the moment they said, “More bad news for the Liberals,” 10 times — I’m not defending them, just speculating on what was going on there — there was an assumption that it was more bad news for the Liberals. I can’t speak to what the individual journalists were doing.
I do think, senator, the issues you’ve raised speak to the need to have diverse news sources in different communities. What we are seeing is those last statistics I presented to you about the lack of diversity in terms of having multiple sources for people to turn to is, obviously, a problem.
The community papers, in particular on the local news map, there are a lot of red Xs on there. If you want to go on, you can play with the filters and see the majority of those red Xs reflect the closing of community papers.
There were 248 markers showing the closing of a news outlet, and 180 of those were community papers across the country. That’s pretty discouraging for the newspaper sector.
If I could comment on newspapers. There is some research out of Europe that shows newspapers punch above their weight in terms of contributing to the news environment in a community.
If you think about it, what the researchers found is they tend to have the largest newsrooms. They go out and cover the news more generally and more comprehensively, and then other news organizations, say a small private radio station that maybe has one reporter, there is a bit of rip and read that goes on. That means they’ll just take whatever the newspaper reported last night and incorporate it into their news that day.
The impact of newspapers is punching beyond their weight. Fewer people are subscribing, but they still tend to have the largest newsrooms and are important players.
When I talk about the loss of community papers, I’m talking about the loss of diverse voices that could reflect, as you point out, the different perspectives in a community.
You also mentioned consolidation or papers being bought by other papers. This has happened in the newspaper sector. One the results, we know from the research, is local coverage becomes less local. It’s still a local paper, but there will be more sharing of content to reduce costs. You tend to get more regional news and less nitty-gritty local news many communities want.
I think the response to what you are talking about is the need for diverse news sources in communities to make sure all sorts of perspectives are reflected.
Senator Plett: In part, you answered my supplementary question. I mentioned the local radio station in southeastern Manitoba. They’re owned by what is now a fairly large conglomerate Golden West Radio. What they have done to stay alive is to go across Western Canada and buy small radio stations. They are still very rural and local, because those are the radio stations they bought. There was one in Steinbach, Altona, Portage La Prairie — and they go west.
That is the problem. We have that in all industries. You said there is no silver bullet. This solidifies the idea that in order for any organization to stay alive, they need to expand. They cannot be stagnant; they have to move one direction or another. Would that really be one of the problems as well? The Winnipeg Free Press owners buy The Carillon — using that as an example, although it could be anywhere else. The large organization buys the small organization, and then they can do whatever they want, such as closing it down or letting the paper continue if it is reasonably successful. It’s just as easy, many times, to close it down and take over that network.
Would that be one the large reasons why we have this and there is nothing we can do about it?
Ms. Lindgren: There is some research in Canada where the researchers have said the Competition Bureau has not done its job in terms of taking a close look at the impacts and consequences of concentration in the news media. I don’t think we have any results on it. The Competition Bureau did decide to take a look at the Postmedia-Toronto Star deal, involving all those swapped newspapers just before Christmas. The majority were shut down.
That is certainly one line of inquiry about which there is some suggestion there is a need for more investigation. It is a contributing factor.
The other thing to remember is you can keep alive a news organization — a newspaper or radio station — and sell advertising, but it’s more than an issue of quantity; it’s an issue of quality. In other words, to what extent are they still producing local news?
There is an example in the Port Hope area. A former colleague of mine, who is now retired, did a study of the newspaper in that area. He found there is a massive decline in the amount of local coverage in the local newspaper after it was acquired by Postmedia. Subsequently, it became one of the newspapers that was closed down. That was some work done by Professor Emeritus John Miller at Ryerson, who is now retired.
It is about more than just quantity; there is a significant issue of quality that needs to be spoken to.
Senator Galvez: Professor Lindgren, congratulations. I’m impressed with your research. It’s good work, with very interesting results.
Ms. Lindgren: Thank you very much.
Senator Galvez: I’m always looking for solutions rather than pointing out the incredible number of problems we have. I tend to think, and you will correct me if I’m wrong, there are two different types of problems: the big news outlets and the big news media, and the rural, small and the local. When you mentioned, in your research, you were looking for subjects such as health, environment, safety and security, I thought you know what is happening in isolated and faraway rural cities is that population is growing old, therefore the interest and the needs are changing. I have seen this in Europe — in Germany, Italy and France. The local news outlets work, and they are doing okay, because they answer to the new needs of the communities. To illustrate what I’m saying, at Lac-Mégantic, after what happened, people were developing applications on multiple types of accidents and emergencies that can happen, to have a closed loop of community being informed and interactive.
More than the issue of big media buying smaller ones and then de-serving the small communities, I wonder if the problem is because we are not answering to the actual and present needs of those communities. People want to know about environment, health and security but also the availability of services — the library, as you mentioned, but also other things, such as why Kijiji is so popular and civic engagement. Why are these so important?
Ms. Lindgren: The first thing is I’m platform agnostic. I don’t think we need to have newspapers, radio stations or online sites. I think we need good journalism that’s being made available to people. That’s the first thing. We’re still wading through, trying to understand the contributions of these different types of news organizations, what happens when we lose them and the consequences when we don’t have any or all of them.
Senator, I think you have a point. This goes back to the earlier point about quality. Part of the issue in all news media is the loss of reporters and boots on the ground. My brother is a businessman, and I say to him, “I don’t get it. The thing about news is it’s one the few places where you think, ’Okay, I’m going to reduce the quality of what I’m offering people in a big way, and I’m still going to expect them to pay. I’m going to cut the number of reporters, the number of editors, and the number of pages or the length of my newscast, but I will keep charging the same for the Internet, expect people to subscribe and I should be able to succeed in business.’” In many cases, there’s a quality issue.
This has many ramifications. When the time comes and the decision is made to shut the place down, people say there was nothing in it anyway. Yet there might have been something in the paper, as in the case of Port Hope I mentioned earlier. It perhaps used to provide a role. By the time it gets to the point it’s cut, you’re left with very little.
Media new owners, big and small, have something to answer for this. The publicly held companies are required to report information, for instance, about layoffs. A privately held small operation doesn’t have to. In no cases, are the owners happy to say they’ve had layoffs, which means that instead of two people at city hall, they’ll have one part-time person. Instead of one person covering education, the education reporter and the police reporter will be merged into one job.
Those are the specific consequences of these cuts we don’t get to talk about. That leads to a public wondering what’s going on, that thing is a rag or it’s not worth watching. We don’t think there is anything worth saving about these news outlets.
It’s a vicious circle when we get into this loss of quality.
I’m not starry-eyed about the glory days. There are always bad newspapers, private radio and TV. Not all media outlets are created equal. The strategy of cutting as the main survival strategy is problematic.
[Translation]
Senator Cormier: Thank you and congratulations on your research. This information is very useful. I was wondering whether you had the opportunity to do some research on the francophone media, because they are all over Canada. I was wondering whether you had any data on those media and whether they were different, whether the picture was different from that of the anglophone communities.
[English]
Ms. Lindgren: I haven’t done any research on francophone media specifically. I urge you to talk to Colette Brin at Laval, who has done specific research looking at the situation in Quebec.
We collect information on the local news map about news outlets in all provinces, and we have done a provincial breakdown that tells us since 2008, that we know of, there have been 34 closings of news outlets in Quebec. That compares, in case anyone is interested, to 100 in Ontario, 30 in Alberta, and 53 in British Columbia. Saskatchewan is 12 at this point. Most of the others are under 10. It makes sense that in the largest provinces by population, the media have the most activity in terms of what is going on. I offer that in terms of the Quebec research.
We have had some discussion about trying to translate and make a French version of the map available, but there is a time and resource issue there that we’re looking at. I think our data on Quebec is pretty good. There is certainly more to be had in terms of reaching out to people.
Senator Cormier: Thank you. This information would be good for us, especially because it’s Quebec, but also all the francophone communities outside of Quebec which are very different.
I’m thinking about the ecosystem of the media in Canada. You have local media and we have national media like Radio-Canada, CBC. Is there a relation between the national media and the local media? What are your thoughts? We are focusing on local media. In my province, New Brunswick, we have a close relation with the local media, but we also have a good relation with Radio-Canada, CBC. I’m wondering if there is a solution there or how they can influence each other?
Ms. Lindgren: Interestingly in Canada as elsewhere, it’s only been in the last few years researchers have started to take more of an interest in local media. A lot of the research has looked at national media. Because of the disruption we’re seeing in that sector, we’re starting to learn more about what is happening locally.
The government, as you know, has made $50 million available over the next five years to try and address some of the problems of local media. I have some ideas about how at least some of that money could be spent. One involves a role for the public broadcaster in doing more collaborative and partnership undertakings with smaller media across the country. There are some models for this in the U.K., at least one I can think of that deals with data journalism.
Just on the role of the public broadcaster in general, there is research from Europe that suggests the presence of a public broadcaster has a positive impact on local media in the sense it raises the bar. There is more competition and a community is better served where there is a local presence of the public broadcaster. That’s my one comment. Also the public broadcaster does more to cover elections in particular. I would point out those two pieces of information.
In terms of national media, I think there is potential for more partnerships between the public broadcaster and the smaller local news media.
I know this is contentious, but you know, there is an argument to be made that news is a public good. What is happening right now is the private sector is being really challenged. They used to have these advertising dollars and it was very lucrative. That doesn’t exist anymore. Now who provides this public good if there is not a private sector incentive to do it?
Senator Bovey: Thank you very much. This is really interesting. I want to flip the conversation if I might to civic engagement. Let’s look at the outcome of all of this.
I read your article in Policy Optionson January 13, and there you mentioned a study that concluded: “. . . civic engagement declined in Seattle and Denver immediately following the closure of local newspapers in these two cities.” I wonder if your study has shown the effects of the level of voting in each of those small communities.
On the other side, you have said the BBC is going to pay for 150 journalists who will be hired by local news organizations to cover local politics and public services. I wonder if that’s a model that is working? Is it one that might work in Canada? Again I’m looking to the end as opposed to what comes out of the analysis you have done.
Ms. Lindgren: We haven’t gone beyond collecting the data and having data on how much news was provided. I did a small poll that has a lot of qualifications to it in association with the elections study. We asked people in the eight communities to what extent do you feel you had sufficient information to cast an informed vote for your local member of Parliament in the 2015 election? Interestingly, the results of that poll, limited as it was, lined up almost perfectly with what we were finding in terms of levels of news poverty.
In Brampton, I think it was about 70 per cent of respondents said they felt they did not have sufficient information to cast an informed vote. Whereas on the other end of the spectrum, where you had Kamloops, and some of the smaller cities that had more going on in terms of local news outlets, there was a somewhat better sense of satisfaction in terms of having information they needed to cast an informed vote. I think that speaks directly to the news and information that people have to equip them to participate in civic life.
The issue of engagement is interesting because we know the availability of local news tends to result in more engagement with issues. There is some suggestion — this is not Canadian research — that it can boost participation in elections. The obvious question then is what happens when we have the loss of local news outlets on a grand scale or even a more limited scale? It’s always difficult to make a connection because so many other factors come into play. You can suggest there is an association. The Denver study you mentioned was an example where they said, yes, there seem to have been, at least in the short-medium term, a correlation between the loss of the papers.
In both of those cities, they still also had other newspapers. They weren’t completely bereft.
The BBC example, yes, they are hiring 150 reporters. They are going to pay them. Then they will be placed in local newsrooms to write specifically about civic and political news. Then the content produced by those reporters will be shared through the BBC network. It’s a general gain with a specific local focus.
My other suggestion is for how maybe some of this $50 million could be spent relates to some data journalism initiatives in the U.K., one of which was undertaken by the BBC. It is a local bureau or the BBC local news site. They are bringing in reporters from different parts of the country into their data journalism unit and collectively working with the BBC data journalism experts to develop a project.
An example: they looked at bus service throughout the U.K. They got all the data. The big challenge even for local journalists is dealing with and making sense of data. They cleaned up the data, they put it in good shape. They made the data set available to journalists across the country, so everybody could produce a local version of the story.
They wrote a national story. Local journalists then had access to the data so they could talk about what happened to the quality of bus service over time in their community.
What is interesting is BBC made it easy for those journalists. They handed out something almost like a play book. You want to write a story about this data and how it affects your community? Well, here is why it’s an issue. The government was looking at cutting some funding for bus service. Here is why bus service matters. They had a fact list for the reporters to draw on. Here is a question and answer with some experts so the local reporters could draw from those questions and answers to craft their own local story. And here is how you can use the data to find out what’s going on in your project.
It really made it easy for people at small news organizations, whom we know from before have limited time and there is increasingly fewer of them, to use that data. At last count there were at least 70 local stories about bus service.
It’s an example of the kind of collaboration I’m talking about that produces more than just using money for a straight wage subsidy. When the money is gone, the journalists who are subsidized will be gone.
Senator Bovey: To follow up on dollars and revenues and the issue of advertising we’ve been talking about, and the concept of not-for-profit models in journalism, do you feel with individual donations or corporate support through charitable foundations for media will drive perspectives of the news? Will that be buying content?
Ms. Lindgren: Again, it comes down to the quality of the news organization. In most news organizations using this model, and there are examples in the United States, and The Guardian in the U.K., you have newsroom standards. The question is: In all the years advertisers were dominant funders, did they buy all the content in news organizations? I would argue they didn’t.
In the same way there was a firewall between advertising and news in the heyday of the advertising era, there would also have to be a news organization conscious of the firewall between the funders and the news organization. Ideally you would want multiple funders so there is no great reliance on any single donor. Also, other sources of revenue, which is news organizations getting more involved in doing events where they sell tickets as a way of generating revenue and trying to be more creative about places to go for money now that advertising is on the wane.
[Translation]
Senator Gagné: Thank you for your presentation this morning.
[English]
For the of sake of democracy, what I’m hearing is we need good journalism, diversity of opinion and citizen engagement. In the context of this study, how can we get there? What would be your recommendation to improve public policy?
Ms. Lindgren: If I knew how to get there I could make a lot of money as a consultant to news organizations. There is no single answer; at least at this stage, it’s not evident. I think news organizations have to be more nimble in terms of their sources of revenue. Maybe there is some crowd funding, maybe they can get charitable status, maybe still sell some advertising, run events, and really engage more with your community so people have a stake in it. This speaks to one of the earlier issues raised. People should feel like they have a stake and they are getting important news and information provided by that news organization to the point where they are willing to pay for and support, again, almost as a public good and really paying directly for the news.
In terms of public policy, as you know, there is a big debate about the extent to which governments should be involved in the subsidization of news to an even greater extent at this stage. Obviously, I would not like to see governments have a hands-on role in terms of funding and making decisions because that is potentially problematic. I don’t think direct subsidies of wages is the way to go. I think you want to have support available that produces a broader good than one journalist being subsidized in the newspaper.
The BBC model I talked about before with the data journalism is a possibility. The BBC may be putting a journalist into a newsroom, but having their content broadly shared throughout the whole news organization is a solution.
To the extent we talk about wage subsidies, I was chairing a discussion with a group of journalists recently. One of the ideas was perhaps funding young journalists or newly graduated journalism students at a news organization for a year. If there is going to be a component of wage subsidy, I have some sympathy in that it helps us get young people out to different parts of the country, working in different parts of the country, building a core of journalists for the next generation of journalism work.
Those are general ideas I think are good. I have a problem with any idea to put money in a pot and news organizations can apply and get a wage subsidy for their journalists. That’s the worst possible model.
The Chair: We are studying limiting the deductibility of foreign advertising in operations like Facebook or Google. How do you feel about that? Do you think it would be helpful?
Ms. Lindgren: In anticipation I tried to talk to some advertising managers at news organizations to get a better sense of how it would work. There are a number of issues.
First, I don’t know. I think it’s an okay idea. How much it will help is up for debate. There is something to be said for an equal playing field in terms of tax policy and being consistent in terms of tax policy but I’m no tax expert. If Facebook and Google are offering rates that are significantly — and they are — lower than the local news organization, I’m not sure how many people are going to change their advertising practices.
In digital advertising in general, there is a problem with the ad blockers. That’s another upcoming issue in terms of how useful it will be for news organizations.
And there are all the concerns about privacy. One of the reasons Google and Facebook work in terms of their advertising is their ability to pick out the targeted audience. As we are becoming increasingly concerned about people’s personal Internet pathways being tapped into by Facebook, political parties and Google, I think for digital advertising that will raise some barriers in the future.
The Chair: Do you think part of the problem may be, which has been discussed by past witnesses here, the question of intellectual property? In other words, Google and Facebook are using news feeds borrowed from news organizations trying to make a living selling news and they’re profiting off it for free. Is that part of the issue?
Ms. Lindgren: That is part of the issue and that’s why we’re seeing an increased emphasis on the subscription model that news organizations are adopting. You can access the materials if you are a subscriber. I think that’s one of the responses to what you’re talking about.
If you look at it in the long term, there are equity issues associated with that. Does this mean only people who can afford subscriptions are going to get access to premium quality news, in a sense, and everybody else will get a free click bait and the occasional free story.
In the bigger picture, I think about that.
The Chair: Isn’t that what they do now? You always had subscriptions to subscribe to a newspaper. What is the difference, except that in one case it’s a paper, and in the other case it’s electronic?
Ms. Lindgren: I can read a newspaper and then hand it to you to read. If I have access on my computer at home, I can read it but you can’t.
The Chair: I can read it if I live with you, but I can’t read it if I’m your next door neighbour, right?
Ms. Lindgren: That’s right.
The Chair: That is a question of intellectual property. That is what they worry about, the passing of free information.
Thank you very much. It has been and is an interesting study. We hope you continue, and we hope you keep us informed.
We did invite Facebook and Google to appear. They declined.
We’ll suspend for a few minutes to go in camera.
(The committee continued in camera.)