By Tim Shoults, St. Albert Gazette / Great West Media
I listen to a lot of podcasts when I’m driving around town — everything from Canadian history and politics to British satire to a lot of media industry podcasts from Canada and the U.S. If you’re a podcast listener, you’ll know that there’s a lot more ads on them lately, from local car dealers to tech platforms to mattress ads. (So. Many. Mattress. Ads.)
I was listening to a podcast recently when I heard a new ad that surprised me.
“Local news is in decline across Canada,” said a strident voice over some stirring music.
“And that’s bad news for all of us. Rumours and misinformation fill the void, and it gets harder to separate truth from fiction.”
OK, you’ve got my attention, strident voice actor. Go on.
“That’s why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us. Because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News.”
It’s a good thing I don’t drink coffee in the car, because I probably would have choked at that point.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a CBC hater. I think a country with as much geography and as little population as Canada absolutely needs a public broadcaster to knit the country together with national and regional coverage, and to cover the communities that just can’t support private media outlets to serve them.
But there’s the rub: CBC spends a tremendous amount of its resources covering communities that already have local news outlets — some of them, like us, locally owned and operated. That’s unnecessary duplication, at your expense.
And they’re adding more. In addition to its $1.4 billion in funding from the federal government and the hundreds of millions more it pulls in advertising and subscriber fees (competing with private media in the process), CBC is getting $7 million a year from Google as its share of the Online News Act. This is the same fund that has provided funding to community news organizations like ours. At Great West, we gave our share directly to our local reporters, bringing their wages up for the first time in years.
CBC used that money last year to hire another 30 reporters in communities across Canada, which is great. The problem is, it’s not in places like Gibbons or Legal in Alberta that have no community news, but towns like Red Deer and Medicine Hat, which already have daily newspapers, private TV stations, multiple radio stations and online news outlets. Towns like Banff, that are already served by community news outlets like our very own Rocky Mountain Outlook — a bureau they’re now expanding to two reporters.
Better still, it’s poaching those reporters from community news companies — two last year from our company alone, offering wages we can’t even come close to, even with our new funding.
I have no problem with CBC stepping in to fill the gap in actual news deserts — communities that have lost their local news organizations, either recently or many years ago.
But covering communities that are well-served by local media just because CBC doesn’t have a presence there isn’t useful — if anything, it could make it harder for those local outlets to survive. I have a problem with that.
And I really have a problem with them spending their government money advertising their expanded competition with community media. Here’s an idea for the CBC: look to the United Kingdom, where the BBC’s Local Democracy Reporting Service funds 165 reporters for news organizations across the country, with the stories they create shared with more than 1,100 media organizations.
I sure wouldn’t complain about hearing that on a podcast ad.
As published in the National Post
Tim Shoults is vice president of Great West Media, a family-owned and operated community news media company serving 20 rural and suburban Alberta communities.
