Northern radio station pleads for more ad dollars from province

An all-party committee of MLAs looking for ways to save local journalism in Manitoba made the trip to Thompson Friday — nearly a year after the northern city lost its only newspaper.

NDP MLA and committee chair Robert Loiselle, local NDP MLA Eric Redhead and Progressive Conservative MLA Greg Nesbitt (Riding Mountain), consulted with residents in the “hub of the north” about ways the government can support local news outlets that have to compete with online platform giants.

“We’ve managed to hold on,” said Sue O’Brien, station manager for Arctic Radio that has stations in Thompson, Flin Flon and The Pas and online websites, including thompsononline.ca.

“Advertising revenues aren’t quite what they used to be,” said O’Brien, who owns and runs Arctic Radio with her husband, Tom O’Brien. Some local businesses haven’t been able to survive. The Thompson Citizen, which operated for more than 60 years in the city 770 kilometres north of Winnipeg, was one of them.

“There was not a real strong advertising base to support the paper. It’s a challenge we have with radio,” O’Brien said. “I don’t think a lot of people understand how radio stations make money — we sell advertising.”

The provincial government bought advertising on Arctic Radio to notify residents about the community consultation on local journalism.

“It would be very nice if our provincial government and (Crown corporations) would consider advertising more with our businesses, as opposed to (Manitoba Liquor and) Lotteries advertising on Facebook and other things, but haven’t advertised up north here with us,” said O’Brien. She said she and others raised the matter during a virtual consultation with the committee in July.

“We have identified it and the committee acknowledged it,” said O’Brien.

In Ontario last year, the provincial government directed its four largest Crown corporations to allocate a minimum of 25 per cent of their ad spend toward Ontario publishers.

Corporate internet giants don’t support local jobs or community causes, said O’Brien, whose stations provided daily wildfire updates this summer and are often asked for donations to local events or causes.

“Many people are finding free forums like Facebook and not realizing that these folks do not pay taxes in our community, and they’re not the ones supporting local roots and charities.”

Loiselle, chairman of the all-party committee, said that was a familiar refrain they heard during public consultations throughout the province. He said he expects it will be in the report they present to the legislature later this month.

“When you support Instagram or Facebook, we’re not supporting the local hockey team, we’re not supporting our municipalities, we’re not supporting our cities,” the former teacher said. “We’re not supporting the people that support our local economies — that’s important,” Loiselle said.

“Our premier has been clear: the economic horse pulls a social cart, so we’ve got to do a better job of supporting local.”

Premier Wab Kinew has also talked about the importance of freedom of the press in a healthy democracy by holding those with power to account.

His government’s agenda, laid out in the throne speech, called freedom of the press “one of the most important freedoms,” especially since the rise of social media.

“In an age of so much misinformation and polarization, we can’t afford to let journalism disappear,” the speech said.

To avoid politicizing the issue, the government established an all-party committee to consider matters of public support for journalism. Its consultations were to focus on rural and cultural media such as French, Filipino, Punjabi and Chinese language publications.

It got off to a rocky start, with the first public meeting in Gimli cancelled because no one registered to attend. Since then, the committee has held sessions this summer in Winnipeg, Brandon, Winkler and a virtual session for northern Manitoba. A second session was added in Winnipeg after many registered to speak at the July 2 event.

The committee had planned to go to Thompson in early July but switched to a virtual consultation to avoid non-essential travel as wildfires threatened the region, Loiselle said. When the smoke cleared, they rescheduled.

“We felt that it was really important to go to Thompson like we had planned,” Loiselle said.

“Let’s not forget — they’re a 13,000-person community and they lost their paper. We felt that it was really important to go up north, go to Thompson and see the good people of Thompson face to face.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca