No News is Bad News

From the Introduction

The blame lies less with the rapid disruptions wrought by new technology and instead with complacent owners, tremulous investors, and inattentive regulators, whose failure to recognize what is happening to media business models has been exacerbated by soft-minded journalists, who have largely missed the story of their own demise. It’s as if Canada’s journalists were assigned to cover a state funeral, and only now are wising up to the fact that the body in the casket is their own.

Journalists aren’t easy to love. They are less trusted than police, schools, banks, and the justice system, and only marginally more trusted than federal Parliament and corporations. But what journalists do is important, and it isn’t just the business of rooting out liars, holding policy-makers accountable, probing the public accounts, championing the underdogs, or hounding the overlords. It is all of those things, but it is more importantly the practice of using stories as a way to help people make sense of their world.

It is not enough to write the first draft of history. The job of journalism is also to recall and reflect on our shared history, to capture or at least help channel the currents of our times, and to help us imagine what sort of society we wish to invent for ourselves and for those who come after us. Yes, debates happen in this country’s legislatures, our rules of conduct are enforced in our courts, and our commerce is carried out, sometimes in public, often in private, and most of the system works for most of the people most of the time. But not always, and not for everybody—which is why our public square needs to include spaces where we can challenge the status quo, encourage dissent, listen at the margins, and champion new ideas, new ways of doing things, new ways of seeing the world, new ways of understanding our place in it. We need new places to share those stories in multiple and evolving ways.

To do all that, good journalism needs a home, many homes actually, but in Canada we’ve failed to keep our media house in order, and our public square is shrinking fast. Canadian journalism is on life-support—not because Canadian reporters don’t know how to do journalism, but because there are so few places to put it anymore. We’ve clung for so long to dinosaur media-business models that while pretty much everyone else in the developed world is driving the journalistic version of a Tesla these days, here we are all crammed into a second-hand Edsel, wondering if we can afford snow tires. How did things get so bad? Will they get worse? Should we even care anymore? And if so, what should we do about it?