The Media

It has been five years since the temporary, one-time federal bailout of the newspaper industry was supposed to have put us on track to recovery. It has been a year since the Online News Act was supposed to have dragooned Facebook and Google into assuring our survival in the longer term. How is that working out?

Well, it isn’t, of course. Industry revenues continue to plummet – at roughly $2-billion annually and falling, they are less than half what they were a decade ago. Paid circulation is likewise in freefall. As late as 2008, daily paid (print) circulation at the country’s 10 largest newspapers averaged more than 200,000. By 2015, it had fallen to a little over 120,000. And today?

Given how smoothly the knife went in and out, it’s hard to blame the casual reader for failing to notice the most recent assault on the concept of media independence in Canada.

As revenue slumps from a “challenging advertising environment,” Canadian media company Corus Entertainment — which houses brands like Global News and YTV — is “aggressively” cutting costs, continuing layoffs and shutting down parts of its business.

In the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Monday, co-chief executive officer John Gossling said that by August, Corus expects it will have reduced its full-time workforce by 25 per cent — or nearly 800 jobs — compared with September 2022. By the end of May, Corus had cut about 500 employees.

At any point in the next ten days, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump will announce his choice for a 2024 running mate. While we don’t yet know who it will be, we do know that the media elite will likely greet Trump’s new running mate with derision and scorn, because that’s what has faced (nearly) all Republican VP candidates since the Media Research Center began tracking political coverage in the 1980s.

A Telegraph journalist who was hired by Sir Will Lewis to help overhaul The Washington Post has opted against joining the newspaper.

Staff at The Daily Telegraph have been told that Rob Winnett, the deputy editor, will remain with them in London, having previously ­announced his departure on June 3.

More than two dozen people in Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario have been let go from their jobs at Global News this week, with its parent company placing blame on “the current economic and regulatory reality” for media organizations.

Twenty-five positions were cut in Western Canada, CBC News has confirmed. Thirteen were in Calgary, eight were in Edmonton, one was in Vancouver and three were in Lethbridge.

CBC News has also confirmed journalists were laid off in Global’s Ottawa bureau.

Activist journalists don’t like their new British bosses

Say what you want about Washington Post hypochondriac tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, but she was correct when she said that “the journalism industry is overrun by rich, elite, underqualified entitled, nepo babies.”

In several high-profile mainstream media outlets, the inmates are still attempting to wrest control away from those put in charge of running the asylum.

The beginning of the end came in 2017.

After a New York Times report exposed the supposedly sexually charged “boys’ club” atmosphere at Vice—a magazine started by three boys in 1994—a clutch of employees publicly condemned their employer for its past and demanded that the company that paid their salaries start acting like an entirely different company.

Vice co-founder and CEO Shane Smith, once a frequent presence in the New York office, retreated to his $50 million L.A. mansion and transferred control of the company to a female CEO, former A&E Networks head Nancy Dubuc. A staff-wide email from Smith and fellow Vice co-founder Suroosh Alvi, sent hours before the Times story dropped, offered an expression of “extreme regret for our role in perpetuating sexism in the media industry and society in general,” which rather overestimated the company’s influence and overstated their sense of contrition.

French media broadcasters are illegally discriminating against those on the political Right, a report has found.

Populists in the country have expressed little surprise at the findings, with Reconquete MEP Nicolas Bay telling Brussels Signal that everyone was well aware that the “so-called ‘public service’ media in France is a mouthpiece for the political left”.

You mean government bought media skews left? No way!