No quick and easy fix for shifting news landscape

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This article was published 08/02/2025 (608 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Marc Edge believes the Canadian media, especially print media, is in big trouble.

“The bottom fell out in Canada’s news media in 2023,” he writes in Tomorrow’s News, “and it kept falling in 2024.”

But, with the subtitle of his new book, How to Fix Canada’s Media, it’s clear he has a solution. Or a few.

Using extensive research, Edge shows examples of different journalistic models that have worked — and many that haven’t — throughout North America and as far away as New Zealand.

But first he looks at what went wrong — how the model of using advertising to pay the bills heightened when the world went digital and people stopped using the classified section.

So many U.S. newspapers were closing by 2009 that it led to “macabre death pool predictions of which would be the next to fall,” Edge writes.

But, he notes, the traditional model was already eating away at the fundamentals of journalism. Advertisers could sway what stories were being printed, leading to an increasingly lower amount of space for hard news and more for “fluff” that attracts ads — real estate, cars, entertainment and sports.

A lot of that, he points out, has been going on for decades.

“Newspapers arguably crossed the Rubicon when they suppressed news of studies that linked cigarette smoking to cancer because tobacco companies were among their biggest advertisers.”

And then things got worse. In the early 2000s, political companies, special interest groups and large corporations started putting out what were disguised as community newspapers but were really “pink slime” — named after a controversial meat by-product that reportedly was sometimes found in fast food burgers.

And that was further heightened in Donald Trump’s “fake news” America.

“The explosion of faux news in the U.S. was indeed not limited to Republicans,” Edge writes, noting a Salon article that said many Democrats believed they needed to “fight fire with fire.”

Edge says the question of whether to subsidize news in Canada is moot. But he does show some compelling models where subsidizing has worked internationally.

While his writing gets bogged down by a lot of numbers — he has chronicled the economics of newspapers extensively — Edge is clearly passionate about what he writes.

The B.C.-based writer has over 50 years of journalism experience and seven books on the topic of newspapers.

And it seems he believes it’s in part up to him to save the once-noble industry.

“In the absence of a forward-looking federal government more concerned with the public interest than serving the entrenched interests of Big Media, it falls to efforts such as this book to help chart a course forward.”

Alan MacKenzie is a Winnipeg-based writer and subscribes to his local newspaper.