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| Vote for me, I have my own newspaper... |
Louis Shalako
Consider
the current state of mass media in Canada.
Let
us focus primarily on the journalism aspects of local media and make a review,
some analysis of local media here in Sarnia-Lambton.
It’s
also something of a tough assignment. We’re not here to insult local
personalities or to put down local companies, (Don’t worry, he’ll get to it. –
ed), all of which employ people and contribute to the local economy. They make
other contributions as well, some of which are intangibles.
As readers, they’ve been part of our lives
for a very long time…
Basically,
some of the effects are difficult to measure or quantify, but one might agree
that they exist. Simply put, the local marketplace is served, and to determine how well it is served might lie mostly in
the eye, (or ears, or mind), of the individual reader, viewer or listener.
What
do we actually expect, from local
media.
***
Okay,
in we go—
Corus
Entertainment, owners of Global News, and television and radio outlets across
Canada, is laying off workers, cutting costs, and have seen their share prices
fall from twenty-five dollars or so, down to twelve cents.
I
won’t get too deeply into that, but
some of those stations are considered local stations.
We
will go through systematically, examine print, online, radio, television (of
which there are no stations except possibly TV-6, public access TV with
extremely limited funding and minimal content).
One wonders if the local daily generates much of a profit for the Postmedia Group, or whether it breaks even, or operates at a loss. What strikes me with some of the long-standing, more traditional news outlets is the insistence on having a print edition. Ink, paper, and time on the press, the labour, it all costs money. Printing requires physical infrastructure. In the past, the Observer shut down their own printing plant, and it was announced that the paper would be printed, to my recollection, at the London Free Press plant in London.
The
papers would be trucked into town, with distribution from their own loading
dock in downtown Sarnia. My mother and step-father actually took a couple of
rural paper routes, showing up a seven a.m., six days a week, and they kept
that up until one or the other got back to more renumerative work. Ron is a
licensed auto body mechanic, and Shirley has worked in taxes, financial
planning, teaching, all kinds of things. As retirement age creeps up on me, I
have considered it myself. I suppose I’d rather write for the news as opposed
to tossing bagged copies out at the end of people’s driveways. I have to admit,
grabbing a stack of papers and then cruising the side-roads might be an all
right way to eke out some rather small pension benefits…I could look at the
birds, the trees and the grass, and listen to the radio, and enjoy a coffee and
presumably, a pay-cheque.
Sarnia Observer Scales Back Print Edition. (Sarnia News Today)
That
being said, what do you do if the thing really isn’t making money? The parent
company can only afford to subsidize any one local operation for so long, and
in the current environment, they might have quite a number of them on hand.
This can only go on for so long, as we see from the lead example, the
Corus/Global TV story.
In
the classic sense, subscriptions paid for paper and ink, and advertising was
considered to pay for the editorial staff—writers, photographers, graphic
artists and editors. One must assume the combination of all revenue streams
provided some level of profit.
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| So, you want my story now, basically... #Fletch (Click any image to enlarge.) |
The Sarnia Journal recently won an award for a series of stories on homelessness locally. They have won awards in the past. It’s almost like they make a point of it—all it takes is a good, deep look into an issue of local importance, one with regional relevance. The story or series has to be submitted to the Association, who give such awards once a year.
It
is (was) a weekly, and after a publishing hiatus brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic
and related economic factors, have brought back the print edition. The online
version seems quite good, yet one wonders at pricing in terms of the ads. A
print edition, going out to 14,000 households or so, still carries a lot of
weight with advertisers. Simply counting clicks isn’t quite the same thing, or
maybe there are other factors as well. Originally, media outlets realized they
must have an online presence, and yet the persistent mentality was to focus on
their print editions, the online material being something of a must-have, but
also an afterthought.
Announcement from Sarnia Journal regarding Distribution.
What is a local issue with regional relevance? Well, homelessness for one—it struck me one day, when the provincial government provided a couple of million dollars on the homelessness file, (and it was in the ‘paper’), to go looking at other publications, big and small, all across Ontario. There are thousands of municipalities, counties, regions, and they were all getting money in dribs and drabs, some quite small amounts, in the larger centres, quite large amounts. That series of stories had regional, provincial, national relevance. And no one had ever thought to go through, systematically, and tally all of that money up. Or to draw conclusions from that data, or offer any sort of editorial opinion. It’s not like they can afford to go on data-fishing expeditions, just for the sport of it.
The
quality of journalism depends on the quality of the questions asked…and having
the resources to pursue such questions.
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| (...oops. No offense intended.) |
The Petrolia Lambton Independent.
The Independent is online-only content. In such a small marketplace, print copies would very much be a luxury, and would have to compete head-to-head with all other local print media. Sales staff have to compete with all those other sales staff, assuming any small publication even has someone. Paper and ink cost money, there are distribution costs, and many weeklies are simply given away, or regular mailbox-stuffers, where the motivation is all those full-colour flyers tucked in there, each and every week. They get a penny for each one, presumably. I’m sure the publisher has had all these thoughts and done the cost-benefit analysis…if the publication is free, subscribers can’t pay for the paper and ink. If there is no paper and ink, advertisers aren’t too interested, and it’s a small, local publication to begin with. Update: Heather Wright says it is a print publication, along with the Observer.
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| It's a fucking print shop. |
First Monday is a monthly print and online publication. Produced by Huron Web, (named for the ‘web offset press’, rather than the internet), it contains a mix of news and opinion, definitely slanting to the right side of the political spectrum. The company owns their own presses, and one monthly publication, really isn’t enough to sustain the operation, which is a fairly substantial employer in Wyoming, Ontario. If one considers the bulk of their income comes from jobbing for other publications, other printing jobs, having one’s own newspaper takes advantage of the investment in the sense that your own work keeps the assembly line rolling. In that sense, it’s all about production. A factory requires investment. To let it sit idle is a waste of resources. The print edition is one thing, the website is something else. The news content is essentially a photographic reproduction of the print copy, and the columns appear PDF-based at first glance, although that may be unfair. It’s safe to say that few of the local publications place outbound links in their copy—too afraid of sending readers off somewhere more interesting, in my own opinion.
Years
ago, this author sold a couple of stories, submitted by mail, to this
publication. He was much surprised to receive a couple of cheques for fifty
bucks some weeks later. This is a tourism-focused publication, with features as
opposed to hard news. It is a print publication and is distributed over
southwestern Ontario. There is no subscription or news-stand price, it’s given
away at various retail outlets in a kind of reciprocal arrangement. The ads are
purchased by all the same sorts of people who will have that on a rack or
shelf, just inside the door of their establishment. This might very well be
printed on the same presses as some other local publications…or maybe not. I
just don’t know.
Cool 106.3 FM
This is the one most familiar to this writer.
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| Edward R. Murrow. #analysis |
With a rebranding of the sound, (softening and broadening the play-list,
with a view to attracting more women listeners) and voice-tracking, an operator
with half a dozen radio stations could essentially put out the same show in
multiple markets. It's almost seamless, your local radio personalities are all
still right there (maybe)—due to Covid-19, working from the kitchen table in
some cases. It's all a matter of software and some training and experience. The
fact the operator has three local stations doesn't change anything. A 'lite-FM'
station in town might be mirroring content in half a dozen other markets, same
for the C & W sister station. Truth is, it makes a lot of sense. It's like
a force-multiplier in military terms.
With
local radio, in the sense of journalism, they do news, weather, perhaps traffic
alerts, road closures, missing persons reports. The actual news stories are
factual but fairly shallow. The website basically repeats what has been said on
air, in what are necessarily short time-bits. They are writing twenty and
thirty second news stories. The attention span is assumed to be rather short.
Why
would you write a thousand words for the website when the story will be
forgotten by tomorrow. The website is seen as a necessary adjunct and nothing
more—a chore rather than an opportunity, and no question of a print copy here. It’s not what they do, is it.
In
the Sarnia-Lambton marketplace, a two-hour phone-in show might hold a fairly
tight little audience, largely composed of news and current-events junkies,
ideologues, and certain scruffy old men, who phone in at the same time every
day, in the simple hope of being heard. The majority of listeners would simply tune out and go somewhere else, and
this is probably why this kind of radio is only successful in the major markets,
where peeling off a small minority is still a sizable sample in terms of
advertising sales. More than anything, they don’t want to bring you down…Bruce.
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| Is there a print edition, or does the site merely mimic one. |
Locally,
Blackburn Media has three radio ‘stations’, which have some duplication of
personality and content. There is a physical location, as to whether there is
actually anyone in there, or where the
actual show emanates from is a
matter of speculation. I’ve often thought it’s a bit of a sweat-shop, created
at someone’s kitchen table up in Mennonite country. As much as anything else,
it prevents anyone else from starting up a radio station in the local market.
My chief criticism would be the preponderance of children’s music including Roxy Roller and other tunes such as Len,
(Don’t Steal My Sunshine), Men
Without Hats, (Pop Goes the World),
and other pablum-like shit, for example, anything by Kiss. How many times have
we crawled out of bed at four-thirty a.m., stumbled out into the other room,
only to hear Def Leppard, whose singer sounds like a drunken retard with some
kind of a speech impediment. Honestly guys, it’s not bad music, merely
unremarkable and devoid of any real intellectual content. And just for the
record, the Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar
really ought to be offensive, if only anyone had ever thought of it, if even just
once. I would love to hear the
spluttering, red-faced, slightly-too-much-white-around-the-eyes justification
for that one.
And
let’s be honest: that’s the way things have been done around here for many
years…
Like
television, the local listener or viewer also has access to many other
channels, online and traditional, which tends to dilute the market. Those
outside channels have a disadvantage, in that the music might be ‘better’ to
some perceptions, but much of the news and ad content is obviously relevant to
a distant market and more or less meaningless to a local (Sarnia-Lambton)
listener.
END
The Eagle FM radio, Kettle Point.
Difficult Changes at Kingston Radio Stations. (CTV)
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| "We're looking at some changes, Murphy... |
Interestingly, you can probably still propose programming for TV-6. The only problem, is that you’ll have to do all the work yourself. Production values are low, and the local audience miniscule. I have known people who volunteered, and at least got to broadcast local hockey games, which means you get to watch for free, essentially. There is some sort of news content, as far as I know, you have to tune in on your Cogeco service at the appointed time.
Sarnia
Journal Editorial: When the News Goes Dark. (Tara Jeffrey)
Feedback:
I can’t recall the last time the Sarnia Observer won an award, although they have done so in the past.
Blackburn Media. (Local Radio)
Larger Than Life. Peter Henderson.
Offset Printing. (Wikipedia)
Louis Shalako has books and stories available from iTunes.
Louis Shalako is the founder of Long Cool One
Books and the author of twenty-four novels, numerous novellas and other short
stories. Louis studied Radio, Television and Journalism Arts at Lambton College
of Applied Arts and Technology, later going on to study fine art. He began
writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines over forty years
ago. His stories appear in publications including Perihelion Science Fiction, Bewildering
Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse
Macabre. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time. Louis enjoys
cycling, swimming and good books.
Thank
you for reading.
Additional: a big thanks to Chris Cooke at Huron Web for the hard information.
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