It’s been a tough month for humans who get paid to talk with humans.
In Canada, Bell Media, owner of national brands CTV, BNN and CP24, cut 1,300 positions, closed its London and Los Angeles bureaus, and closed or put up for sale nine radio stations.
On the same day, it also asked the federal regulator Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), to eliminate mandatory requirements to broadcast a minimum of 14 hours/week of local programming and six hours/week of local news.
So long supper-hour newscasts.
Meanwhile, Bild, a German tabloid and the biggest-selling newspaper in Europe, announced it was cutting 200 jobs and exploring how to use artificial intelligence to aggregate daily news and edit human reporters’ copy.
That follows announcements that UK tabloids Daily Mirror and Daily Express were exploring using AI instead of human editors and BuzzFeed’s use of AI to help create content and online quizzes.
Expect more AI integration and layoffs of journalists, many of them seasoned pros, as newsrooms enter the final phase of transitioning from the 20th-century model of centralized information production and distribution into…something else.
I say send all the journalists home; that’s how we’ll save the news industry and, by extension, democracy.
Why? Because the most critical information we need to gather, analyze and act upon isn’t about what is happening in the world; it’s about what is happening in our neighbourhoods.
There is one simple rule for great journalism: pick up your notebook and go out into the world.
The story is not going to show up in email; you need to go out and find it in the voices and actions of people.
I graduated from Ryerson’s (now Toronto Metropolitan) journalism school in 1994. That was the year The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star and The Toronto Sun – newsrooms mere blocks from my classroom – cut their internships for the first but not last time.
That forced my graduating class of 60 to take off for the four winds.
I went north, 21 hours northwest of Toronto to be precise, to the Kenora Daily Miner and News for a summer of covering bass fishing derbies, accidents on the TransCanada Highway, layoffs at the local pulp mill, and the precarious balance of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in this small resource town.I have four strong memories of Kenora.
First, it’s beautiful, and the Lake of the Woods should be on everyone’s must-visit list of Canadian sites.
Two, there was significant disparity between the people who lived in Kenora year-round and the wealthy who flew in on their private planes via an airport no commercial jet ever visited to summer on their private island estates.
Three, people in Kenora were expert event planners via ‘socials’ because when you live far away from a major urban centre (Winnipeg is two hours away), you make your own fun.
Fourth, underlying all that laid-back bonhomie was a casual racism against Indigenous people born of watching the effects of institutional racism – public intoxication, petty crime and poverty – and on the other side, a growing Indigenous-led movement towards self-reliance and rejection of Canadian institutions – the police, courts, social services, public education, and health care – steeped in racist responses and practices.
My next stop was Cornwall, another mill town at the other end of Ontario, located one hour west of Montreal and an hour south of Ottawa. It had a lot in common with Kenora. The St. Lawrence River was beautiful; there was significant economic disparity between the locals and the new monied class, which in Cornwall meant between those who smuggled and those who did not; Cornwall residents knew how to throw a party; and rippling just beneath the surface was a casual racism and growing resentment that defined local Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations, as well as French/English tensions.
For the past 25 years, I have lived in New Brunswick, one of Canada’s three Maritime provinces. It is undeniably beautiful, there is great economic disparity between the locals and the region’s small monied class, it is the land of the legendary kitchen party, and there is an undercurrent of casual racism and resentment imbedded in the Indigenous/non-Indigenous relationship and the French/English divide.
This is Canada in 2023: a beautiful place peppered with growing economic disparity and a bonhomie that masks an undercurrent of racism and growing resentments we’d rather not confront. How this story plays out over the next few years will define us as a people and a country for the next generation.
This is the story we need to seek out, analyze and then integrate into a new shared value proposition that reflects the best of who we are today, which should include being willing to confront the sins of our country’s past so we can decide where we need and want to go together.
It’s a story that won’t be gathered through analytics, handed to us in an unmarked brown envelope or be responsive to clickbait.
That’s why we need to send all the journalists home.
To analyze and interpret the historic economic inequities and institutional racism that helped build this country neighbourhood by neighbourhood, and the cracks taking shape beneath the surface that are producing shock waves that, if left unattended, will shake us to our core.
