Mourning Media's Meltdown

It would appear that CanWest, which owns GlobalTV, the Sun, the Province and many community papers in B.C., is on the financial ropes. The impression by some financial observers is that the Aspers paid Conrad Black too much and that they have made some bad investments.

My concern is, what will take their place whether they find some long term financing or not.

CanWest is scarcely the only media outlet in trouble. CTV appears to be reeling. The problem is world wide. The San Francisco Chronicle, that city's only major paper and older than B.C. itself, is teetering on the edge of folding. Even the venerable New York Times, America's newspaper of record, is in deep doo-doo.

Where are the muckrakers?

The Vancouver papers and I are hardly a mutual admiration society. My complaint -- it is a subjective one -- is that they don't hold government's feet to the fire and no longer have columnists who are prepared to take issues past one or two columns here and there. I compare that to the time I was in the B.C. legislature and every day faced Marjorie Nichols, Allan Fotheringham, Jack Wasserman, Barbara McClintock, Allen Garr, Jim Hume, Jack Webster, Pat Burns, Ed Murphy, David Todd and Andy Stephen to name some.

That people like this are no longer in abundance is no doubt dictated by cost factors. I also understand that newspapers must produce for their readers a lot of things I don't read, so I must be careful not judge on too narrow a basis.

The last five years have seen the arrival of some new "holders to the fire" online, such as The Tyee and Opinion250.com, both of which I write for.

But by and large, what we have lost in Canada is the "muckraker" -- the media person (as opposed journalist) who gets an issue and like a dog with a bone, hangs on tenaciously. "Convergence," the popular strategy of having one company attempt to increase its profit by owning many forms of media -- newspapers, Internet portals, TV, radio, etc., may be part of the reason. I read with interest the comments http://thetyee.ca/Books/2009/02/20/KenWhyte/ of MacLean's editor Ken Whyte in The Tyee recently. He expressed concern that a company that wants licenses from the government might not want to be too aggressive with that government.

Too much competition?

For many years, CanWest had a clear field in B.C. Then the Toronto-based Globe and Mail stepped in and not only came up with a B.C. section but in regular news coverage did much more in depth stories from British Columbia. And, of course, the "street dailies" proliferated.

Newspapers now not only compete with radio and TV but also handouts and cyberspace.

Personally, I like the heft of a newspaper and prefer it to a screen just as I vastly prefer a solid book to words on a computer. But I'm a little long in the tooth and I'm sure that my opinions don't reflect the views of younger people to whom the computer was as much part of them as was their mother's milk.

I don't even like cell phones, much less Blackberries, because, unlike newspapers, they're intrusive. You are expected to deal with your phone and e-mail when it shows up on your phone, not when you get time to sit down and deal with it in an orderly way.

I find computer screens hard to read. But they do clearly contain a great deal of what I want to learn about.

What is especially interesting about the Internet is that newspapers, seeing they are losing readers to it, have increasingly posted their content online. Presumably, the people reading that content used to read the newspapers producing it.

Buried in the web

Newspapers more and more suffer by their lack of immediacy. TV, which used to be the "fastest with the mostest," can't keep up with Internet news services. Again, ironically, news services are often owned by the TV networks they displace.

The Internet has its shortcomings. Mostly, there is just too damned much to wade through to get to what you want. In trying to obtain and assess information, the moment you bring up Google, you test your patience and as the options pile up, you find that the surfeit of choices amongst the opinions or blogs available makes it difficult to sort out the pepper from the fly shit.

When I was in law school, a cagillion years ago, there was a pat answer when the professor asked a question to which you were unable to supply an answer: "The law is in a state of flux."

That certainly can well and truly be said about the media industry.

Related Tyee stories:

• Dear Editor, Ken Whyte Says You're Boring
  Interview with Ken Whyte, author of The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
• How We Educated the New York Times
  A zillion clicks taught newspapers they aren't in control.
• Al Jazeera's New Canadian Boss
  Tony Burman ran CBC news. Now he calls shots at the top Arab news network's English arm. Why can't we see it here? A Tyee interview.