For many years, those of us in this profession have understood that we are living through a “challenging time” for the media. The advent of the internet and related digital communications has completely transformed how our industry functions. In some ways, this transformation has been for the better. We can now do things that would have been either prohibitively expensive or outright impossible only a few short decades ago. Consider the smartphone as an example. It’s a dictation machine, voice recorder, high-definition camera and video recorder, writing tool, and, oh yeah, a telephone, all rolled into one. It has never been easier to do the work of journalism.
Unfortunately, not all the changes have been good. It has never been harder to finance journalism. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a perfect coincidence of history. The newly emerging mass media had pulled together enormous audiences, and growing political and commercial interests were willing to hand over huge sums of money to purchase advertisements that would reach those newly created mass audiences. This money funded the media — newspapers first, but then radio and television, too — for generations.
For those of us here in the early 21st century, it’s easy to forget how transformative that quirk of history truly was for humanity. Before maybe 200 years ago, and really closer to 150 years, the idea of having millions of people across an entire continent receiving the same information in a timely way, eventually nearly simultaneously, was not only impossible — it probably hadn’t even really been conceived by anyone. It would’ve seemed too absurd. Try explaining to someone who thinks a horse’s gallop is the maximum attainable speed for overland communications what a telegraph is going to do to our society. And then try to tell the first telegraph operators about a radio. And so on.
Unfortunately, the economic model that made all this possible no longer works. It’s not that people aren’t willing to pay money to access mass audiences — generally speaking, though there are peaks and valleys in line with economic and global events, spending on advertising and marketing is going up. The problem for my industry is that there are far more ways to spend that money on top of newspaper, radio, and television ads, and many of the new digital options allow much more micro-targeting than the mass media does. The need for journalism hasn’t gone away. The need to reach audiences through advertising hasn’t gone away. It’s just that these two things are no longer joined by mutual need. The news media needs advertisers. But they don’t need us anymore — and have found frankly better ways to do their job elsewhere.
This week, Corus Entertainment announced that it was shutting down CHML 900, a Hamilton talk- and news-radio station that had been on the air for just shy of 97 years. The announcement was a shock, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected. The writing has been on the wall for conventional news- and talk-radio stations in this country for a while. And Corus itself has been grappling with major financial challenges. We all expected something like this would happen eventually.
Many Canadian cities have lost radio stations in recent years. But they’ve often been more entertainment-focused — music and sports stations, particularly in smaller markets, have been hard hit. A city as large as Hamilton losing a news station is more unusual. And ominous.
And devastating. I’m a big believer in the power of modern media, for the reasons I noted at the outset. But there are basic, fundamental things that journalism needs to be able to do that no longer have the steady flow of money they depend on. No amount of technology crammed into a smartphone or any combination of live blogging and podcasting can ever replace the output of large, well-funded organizations willing to assign human beings to sit in on city-council meetings and school-board hearings and to run down stories that might take days and days of effort and ultimately end up going nowhere.
Journalism is an investment. You need people to do the work. And you need enough people doing the work to allow all the normal human-resource needs to unfold as they would in any organization. People need vacations; they miss days due to illness or family events. Some of their productive work will not result in content the public ever sees. Some stories never pass legal muster or just fizzle out. Sometimes there’s no there there. There has got to be slack in the system. It just won’t work any other way.
I have personally lived through the downsizing of media companies. I’ve been the guy deciding who gets downsized, and I’ve been the guy who’s gotten downsized. It is a fact of life in our world. Sometimes the cuts genuinely did reduce duplication and waste. But I think all the fat was trimmed away from Canadian legacy media companies a long time ago. Every cut now cuts into muscle and bone.
And in Hamilton, the latest cut was fatal. An entire institution has been lost. The people of Hamilton are going to be worse off for this. Losing radio is a particularly hard blow. Radio journalism provides the best bang for the buck in any breaking-news situation. A reporter at the scene of an unfolding story can provide, at relatively low cost, invaluable information that can then be transmitted to either a local audience, or, if the situation warrants, a global one. There is an immediacy to radio reporting and distribution that has simply not yet been adequately replaced by any of our new digital tools.
Live-streaming and social media offer some of this functionality, but radio stations also brought professional standards, training, and discipline. We live in an era when any breaking-news event will be live-streamed by any number of angles. But there will be fewer professionals available to talk to witnesses, to liaise with authorities, to start pulling together a comprehensible narrative — everything that goes into building a story out of what is otherwise just overlapping noise and chaos, even if it takes days or weeks. You need people and money to be dogged in chasing down a story.
As more and more media institutions in larger and larger cities turn off the lights and shut down forever, I agree more and more with what an old colleague concluded all those many years ago: you may hate us now, but, boy, you’ll miss us when we’re gone. You might not even know it. But we are better off when there are large numbers of reporters and editors and columnists and broadcasters all working together and competing to tell each story as well as possible and from as many angles as possible. It kept us more honest as a society. We’re losing that. That will hurt us. I suspect it’s hurting us already.
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