The fifth anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on the untold history of Canadian news media.
is one of greater than 120 cutting-edge, English-language born-digital journalism organizations launched since 2000. That’s greater than the number of each day newspapers that populated the country in the second half of the twentieth century.
As we reflect on the last five years as co-founders and journalism scholars, we discover ourselves a part of emerging journalistic infrastructure inhabited by a latest group of key contributors, from cottage industries to larger, established organizations.
These players – equivalent to , , , and — shape what it means to be a journalist and what journalism can and should do in this country. They took advantage of the Internet’s low barriers to entry and the potential of the digital space, which provides a place to experiment with a variety of approaches.
However, the decline of traditional business media has been of particular interest to policymakers and journalistic reporting, at the same time as these latest born-digital journalism organizations are gaining recognition in industry awards and filling gaps in news reporting.
Dealing with critical problems
Our research over the past two years has focused on identifying and understanding this wave of digitally born participants. We found that almost all latest digital news organizations proceed to operate, despite the fact that many startups fail inside the first few years. For example, greater than half have been launched since 2015.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
Most of the latest journalism organizations are situated in British Columbia and Ontario, although most are situated in non-urban centers. About 40 percent of its coverage has a national and/or international perspective, which is surprising given concerns about the loss of local news.
Many of these latest organizations are consciously mission-driven, and some recognize their role in responding to pressing global issues and live in a settler-colonial nation-state. Some are taking clear stances on the harms and errors of past media coverage, including justice for indigenous peoples, racial injustice, the climate crisis, the economy and more.
Nearly two-thirds of latest digital news media were founded by experienced and emerging journalists, and the rest by media creators, business people or activists.
This latest system is not without its challenges, nevertheless, including sustainability, scale, living wages, audience attraction, and donor influence, to call a few.
The growth over the past two a long time in the number and scope of journalism entrepreneurs and owners is essential because there is evidence that ownership concentration has contributed to a limited diversity of perspectives and types of organizations that may and have pursued journalism in Canada.
The trend towards nonprofits
Our research shows that over the past two a long time, journalism has shifted toward nonprofit organizations, including .
The evolution of ownership types and business models is significant given the highly concentrated nature of ownership in Canadian journalism, which has been a problem since the first government commission was established addressed this problem in 1970.
Contemporary Canadian journalism also has a largely business orientation, despite the significant presence of public broadcasting professional ideals of objectivity and independence.
These elements have contributed to a widely shared and relatively uniform perception of journalistic roles among public and traditional media. Largely described as “monitor”, journalism roles in Canada have focused on a five-point “creed”: “fairly reporting the views of public figures, quickly transmitting information to the public, giving ordinary people a chance to express their views, examining the activities of government and public institutions, and providing analyzes and interpretations of complex problems.”
“Agenda of one newspaper”
This skilled business logic extends to Canadian English-language and French-language media systems. A recent study by Quebec researchers found that Canadian media perceives a similar focus on content. These scientists suggest that this finding confirms previous research that there is “one newspaper program in Canada”, with the caveat that this program “goes beyond issues specific to Quebec.”
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kevin Frayer
These are essential considerations because there is evidence that the relationship between journalists’ skilled ideology in Canada and perceptions of bias and politicization is paradoxical. While journalists ascribe neutrality, the audience perceives them as biased.
This paradox is current because it coincides with decline in public trust in media. English people’s trust in journalism has fallen to a low of 39%, down from 55% in 2016, and to 47% from 55% over the same period among Francophones.
Perceptions of trust are linked to a “perceived lack of diversity in media ownership” in addition to concerns about media independence from political and business influence.
What journalism may be
The magazine’s fifth anniversary is an opportunity to specific our deep gratitude to the many people, including the editors, who have contributed to its success—and to its significant contribution to journalism in Canadafrom coverage of Covid-19 to a podcast.
Our goal as a co-founder was to explore how the values of non-commercial journalism influence what journalism can and should do in this country. (We are each full professors at the University of British Columbia and do not receive any income from or play any role in it.)
It was an initiative to explore what journalism could possibly be if it were written by experts in their fields and edited by journalists, consciously welcoming the critical research and perspectives of scientists who were excluded and/or needed to operate on the margins of the media.
Our approach sought to deal with established power relations in journalism, expanding how the newsroom and its presence in the business environment, largely produced by white, skilled journalists in Canada it is customarily conceptualized, understood and practiced.
Canada is not alone in deciding on policy responses to the economic challenges facing traditional journalism, while also seeing the rise of latest players attempting to survive alongside the dominance of platforms like Facebook and Google. Countries like Australia, Belgium and others are grappling with how best to support quality journalism today, with various degrees of success.
Our research continues inside a number of related studies in Canada and Australia on the impact and use of content nationally and internationally, funded by a research grant from the Canadian federal government.
The evidence is clear that national social, economic and political conditions influence the nature of our media systems. The query for Canadians is what decisions they have or should have in the types of journalism available to them now and in the future.