The sudden silence heard all across Hamilton on Wednesday morning was deafening.
It’s not every day a historic radio station goes off the air before it tells its listeners. They, and staff, found out when beloved AM station CMHL 900 just suddenly went dark. Just like that, an almost 100-year marriage ended without any notice or chance to say so long or thanks for the memories.
h/t DS
What had been obvious “to the rest of us” for years, is finally official: late last night, shares of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent of CNN and TNT, crashed 10% to the lowest level on record after it reported dire results, which missed across the board and plunged across every income statement category…
H/T DS
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?
Losing the ability to share news on Facebook has hurt Theresa Blackburn’s bottom line and her newspaper’s ability to serve her community — and as she works around the clock to keep her business afloat, she’s pleading with lawmakers to make a deal with Meta so publishers can once again share their content.
Blackburn’s free newspaper, the River Valley Sun, covers “ultra-local” news in New Brunswick’s Western Valley, a rural stretch of the western part of the province serving about 35,000 to 40,000 people.
” … After sitting down with St-Onge over coffee, it’s become clear to me that to save good, local, impactful journalism in this country, we either need to dramatically increase government subsidies or dismantle the online advertising oligopoly of Google and Facebook. Or, better yet, we can do both.”
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.
OTTAWA—Inconsistencies in how Meta is implementing its Canadian news ban, and gaps in the Liberal law that spurred it, are creating loopholes that are hurting news businesses, some media executives say.
Chuck Lapointe, the CEO of the Narcity Media Group, says his team has spent the past several months collecting hundreds of posts from entertainment accounts on Facebook and Instagram that repackage news content from more legitimate sources — which can’t reap the benefits of posting that content themselves because of Meta’s ban.
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.
This month, a reader e-mailed to question the use of the term “far-right” in news articles. Who defined this term, and does it not convey an editorial opinion rather than fact?
The reader was referring to coverage of the European Union elections, which took place June 6 through 9. Indeed, “far-right” has appeared in headlines, reported news, analysis, explainers and opinion pieces in The Globe, as in other news media. But how is it different from “hard-right,” “extreme-right,” “alt-right” or just plain “right-wing?”
There’s no nuance about it. It’s shorthand for Nazi.
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.
Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis is being denounced this week after the end of the short-lived tenure of Executive Editor Sally Buzbee and delivering a truth bomb to the staff. Lewis told them that they have lost their audience and “people are not reading your stuff.” It was a shot of reality in the echo chambered news outlet and the response was predictable. However, Lewis just might save this venerable newspaper if he follows his frank talk with meaningful reforms to bring balance back to the Post.
h/t DS
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.
