I set out with the intention of writing an editorial. 

I really did. 

Every week I have the (un)enviable position of . . .

writing this paper’s official position on a variety of topics, some of which I’m actually knowledgeable about. International politics to municipal disputes, I have to be able to spew out a timely, interesting view every week. 

Did the bad man with the nuclear codes do something else stupid? Did the muppet heading our parliament paint his skin for fun again? Did a local mayor avoid disclosing his ownership of property that might one day be converted into a national park?

I’ve got to admit, it’s rather tiring.

Of course I have opinions on all these things. I have a never-ending scroll of everything coming at us every free second of every day. But why does my opinion matter?

In the age of the internet, the usefulness of newspaper columnists around the globe is in question. Why do they exist? What practical purpose do they serve when billions of people, some of them infinitely more qualified than me, can post their own views on a variety of social media platforms? 

I’m not trying to talk myself out of a job,  I’m just trying to figure out how the press survives in an era of endless, free infotainment, a never ending crush of ‘doggo pics’ and ‘five ways to reduce your cholesterol.’

Our government has no idea. They’ve offered grants to newsrooms that give up to about $13,750 for news organizations in the form of a tax credit that subsidizes journalists’ labour.  Huge corporations like Postmedia, who have done more to destroy community newspapers in this country than any other entity, will be gifted huge subsidies to ostensibly ‘save print journalism’ while simultaneously doing the opposite. They can subsidize a journalist to create a podcast for their online entity, which an online startup or radio station can’t apply for, as they are not legacy print news. 

Torstar and Postmedia, the companies that currently dominate the industry, aren’t going to deliver us from the current landscape that we face: a unimaginably enormous pool of information and a lack of tools with which to parse it. There will always be dozens of newshounds covering Queens Park, the National Assembly and Parliament Hill. How many are covering the municipal councils, the county meetings and rural life? What are these kinds of stories worth? 

Apparently, not enough for media conglomerates to care about, as we saw in 2016 when the biggest companies in the newspaper game decided that dozens of community papers across the country should be shuttered. The hedge fund greaseball at the helm of Postmedia, Paul Godfrey, took a $900,000 bonus that same year he laid off staff and closed many of these local institutions. 

There’s more to the media bailout than that one tax credit, there’s also new rules for non-profit operations to apply for charity status. The largest French-language daily in Quebec, La Presse, moved to this model last year. There’s also funding available through the provincial government, who bailed out the owners of Le Droit and other papers across Quebec earlier this year, with a $5 million loan. 

What’s caused this massive shift and why is the industry struggling to catch up? Simply put, the internet. 

More than 250 news outlets have closed since 2012, as print advertising dried up in favour of targeted ads from Google. Millions of dollars that used to pay for hundreds of competent journalists in small communities have migrated to Silicon Valley, to tech giants like Facebook. To borrow the expression that Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi famously used to describe Goldman Sachs in 2009, these tech companies are like a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming [their] blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

They make their money by compiling data about your online activities and using it to target you for very specific advertising. More worrying, bad actors from around the world have access to this data and can hijack it to carry out their propaganda campaigns more efficiently. When data collection of this scale takes place in an authoritarian setting, like say, China, the result is nothing short of nightmare fuel. 

I probably sound a bit like a buggy manufacturer in the era of the Model T, but this is the stuff that keeps me up at night. Instead of a virulent bigot like Henry Ford, this generation has handed the keys to the kingdom to a bunch of tech bros living in the Bay area, one of whom (Zuckerberg) literally cuts his hair to look like a Roman Emperor. Our technological masters are the ones that shape our societies, and wield far more influence than the average elected official, or even government. 

Here’s to hoping it all works out. 

Caleb Nickerson