Well, OK, some of you idiots are at it again, so I'm going to have to, once again, tweet out why Your Pet Theory About Why The MSM Is Struggling Is Wrong And You Should Feel Shame.

This wasn't how I wanted to spend this evening, but it's obviously needed.

So, the reason I'm doing this is because today, Global News announced layoffs. I don't have a full sense of how bad they were, but clearly it was a big hit. Lotta people lost their jobs.

And, as always, the gleeful vultures are here to cheer about it. +

FYI: I worked for Corus, Global News' parent company, from 2016-2019, for CFMJ, a radio station that was rebrand to be part of Global News during my time with the company. I also wrote for http://GlobalNews.ca  during this period.

Back to the thread. +

The announcement of the layoffs today has triggered the usual reactions. Everyone has an opinion about the media, and everyone thinks they know why the media is struggling. Here's some of the common ones.

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- The media outlet is politically biased.

- The media outlet doesn't cover the stories I want them to.

- They spent too much time on national stories, not local stories.

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- Too much of [news/business/opinion/entertainment/sports] and not enough [news/business/opinion/entertainment/sports].

There are others, but those are the big ones. I led with the one I see/hear the most — that the media outlet is in the bag for this or that political party. +

As you'll have noticed, most of the issues cited above are a matter of opinion. If you tell people that, they'll get weirded out and insist that NO, dammit, it's TRUE, but it's mostly just a matter of subjective taste.

But here's the thing. The sneaky little truth. +

Whatever your personal gripe/complaint against a given media outlet is, it could easily be true. You might be 100% right. You might have a completely accurate, bang-on criticism.

But it's not what's killing the outlet.

What's killing us is that we're out of money. +

It's not that readership is down. At newspapers, it's up. We've never had more readers. Subscriptions for home delivery may be down, but READERS are up, because the web reaches a vastly bigger audience.

TV and radio news is a bit different, but the same general rule applies. +

People who hate a particular paper or TV/radio station LOVE the idea that it's failing because people have abandoned it. "Hey, loser, NO ONE READS YOU" or "Ugh, I stopped watching years ago." Stuff like that. But that's generally not the problem. Not even close. +

The problem is a shift in marketing trends. Journalism, for most of the 20th century and all of the 21st thus far, relied on advertisers to fund itself. People gave us money, and we advertised their products or services to the news-consuming audience. +

The cost to the consumer of news (that's you) was basically free. Even if you paid for home delivery of a newspaper, you were paying for the DELIVERY — the cost of getting a physical paper to your door every morning. The advertising paid for the actual journalism. +

But the advertising went away. We aren't the best option for them anymore. We're still an OK option, for some customers, but most of the advertisers have moved to the internet, and news websites are just a tiny part of the internet's content. An important one, but small. +

More money is being spent on marketing than ever (well, probably not RIGHT NOW, mid-pandemic, but generally). But it's also going to 10,000 different websites instead of a dozen newspapers and TV/radio stations. The pie is much bigger, but our slice is much smaller. +

Check out these numbers, from this report, linked below. It's how much money advertisers were spending on Canadian newspapers, TV stations and radio stations.

For daily newspapers, in 2009: $2.2 billion.

In 2018: $946 million.

Down $1.3 billion. +
https://nmc-mic.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2018-Net-Advertising-Volumes-Report_NAV.pdf

Community papers, 2009: $1.2 billion.

In 2018: $688 million.

For TV stations, 2009: $3.1 billion.*

In 2018: $3.1 billion. Flat over nine years, when inflation was 16%.

I'm not sure how this breaks out for news vs. other programming, so just use as a big picture reference.

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For radio stations, again, the numbers aren't broken out specifically for news, but the numbers are also basically flat, holding static from 2009 to 2018.

During that same period, in Canada, internet advertising spending rose from $1.8 billion to $7.5 billion.

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So the numbers, obviously, are most stark for newspapers. For TV and radio, it's not as bad. TV, though, is getting creamed by another challenge — cord-cutting. But that's a different thread.

So you see the problem. The advertisers have gone on. It's killed our industry. +

So, again, maybe you have a really strong opinion about a news organization. Maybe there's something about it that makes you really mad. Fine, whatever. I don't care. You could be right, even. But that's not what's killing us. Money is. We don't have any. +

This isn't about right-wing news. Postmedia is struggling. This isn't about left-wing news. TorStar, which owns the openly progressive Toronto Star, just sold for less money than it literally has cash in hand.

TorStar's value as a company is literally negative dollars. +

So, again, you're welcome to your pet peeve or gripe about any company or journalist. You do you. But don't delude yourself into narcissistically thinking that you gripe is somehow killing an entire institution. Your opinion doesn't matter THAT much. We just need money. +

Personally, I'm skeptical that any of the private-sector news brands you're used to in Canada will survive the next 10 years. Not under their current owners, anyway. The trend line is just ruthlessly, relentlessly bad, and COVID has sped the trend up. A lot. +

I don't have any meta-solutions. I think we'll see a lot of different things attempted. Some will work, some will fail. And I think later, like, decades from now, we'll probably see a return to something more like we were used to maybe 20 years ago, with a new economic model. +

The collapsing revenue has also made it hard to do a good job of journalism, and it's brought to the fore a lot of major problems within news organizations that would be easily handled, or even solved, if we had more money. I agree with Jeet's take here: + https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1286440743599394817

But anyway. A lot of good people lost their job today. I feel for them. In this economic climate, some will probably never work as journalists again, and that's gutting for them. No one is left in this industry who's not in love with it.

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But it's a loss for you, too. You might not think so. But you're wrong, and some of you are dumb. Every media job loss reduces, a tiny bit, the amount of information and ideas that are getting out there in society. That's bad for us all.

Oh well.

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