Two studies suggest major losses in local news in Quebec and Canada

Two new reports highlight the losses suffered over the past several years in the news media sector in Quebec and Canada. According to their authors, one of the main solutions to curb this crisis is better funding and an “expansion” of CBC/Radio-Canada.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) and the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS) each published a study on Thursday showing a decline in local news coverage across the country.

Between 2008 and 2024, 101 local media outlets closed their doors, and 37 others scaled back their operations in Quebec. The number of journalists is declining in the province, while the number of public relations, advertising, and marketing professionals has exploded, according to IRIS.

According to the 2021 census, there were 3,370 information workers, a decrease of 12 per cent compared to 2016. The number of employees in public relations and advertising jumped by 345 per cent  over the same period, exceeding 30,000 positions.

This gap in terms of workforce between public relations and journalism “is increasingly unfavorable to journalists,” underlines in an interview one of the authors of the IRIS analysis, Guillaume Hébert.

“There’s a risk with this. We’ll end up with more and more actors in the public sphere who aren’t there to produce balanced information or aim for objectivity, but who serve a political or commercial interest. This can be detrimental to democracy,” the researcher says.

The Laurentians and Lanaudière regions were particularly affected by this reduction in the number of journalists, with a drop of more than 30 per cent  between 2006 and 2016, indicates IRIS.

For its part, the CCPA research reveals that Canada has lost 11 per cent of its local print news media and 9 per cent of its private broadcast media since 2008.

Gatineau is the second region in the country to have experienced the highest losses, after Vaughan, Ontario. The capital of the Outaouais region has seen “service reductions or the outright closure of several of its local print media,” the two co-authors of the study note.

But the areas with the most pronounced local news deprivation in Canada are the suburbs of major cities like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Their population growth is far from keeping pace with local news coverage, which “has even declined,” the CCPA maintains.

“Many of these suburban areas have populations of half a million or more, who find themselves deprived of information when there would be plenty of local news to cover, regardless of what is happening in major urban centers,” the two co-authors write.

A financing issue

This bleak picture is largely explained by the erosion of the advertising-based funding model that most private news media rely on, the two analyses point out. Advertising revenue is in free fall, now monopolized by web giants.

In 2020, digital accounted for nearly 60 per cent of advertising revenue in Quebec. In Canada, by 2023, Alphabet (Google, YouTube), Meta (Facebook, Instagram), and Amazon would garner more than two-thirds of the $22 billion annual revenue of the entire Canadian advertising market, according to IRIS.

CBC/Radio-Canada has also seen its funding reduced over the years, the institute says, referring to several decades of “cuts,” in addition to declining advertising revenues.

“Public funding has decreased by 30 per cent over the past 40 years (…) which has occurred in spurts in different phases of austerity,” said Hébert.

The role of Radio-Canada

However, if it relied on better state funding, the public broadcaster could fill the need for local news coverage “which arose with the collapse of the private media business model,” said Hébert.

“The public broadcaster could expand its mission to ensure that people who live in regions and localities that are poorly covered by information can now be better served,” he says.

The CCPA also advocates for “the expansion of public media like CBC/Radio-Canada” to promote local journalism.

“In urban areas where there are fewer than two local media outlets per 100,000 inhabitants, public broadcasters constitute an important firewall and provide on average a quarter of the news media,” the study states.

She also points out that the report by the former Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pascale St-Onge, on the future of CBC/Radio-Canada, published last February, calls for the need to expand the role of the Crown corporation in local and regional information.

To restore and stabilize Radio-Canada’s funding, IRIS recommends allocating budgetary credits in a “more stable” manner, every five years. And that this public funding correspond to a minimum threshold of $50 per capita, comparable to the average for OECD countries.

The institute also proposes increasing the autonomy of the board of directors, notably by having the power to choose the president of the state-owned company, rather than the government.

IRIS also rejects “the idea that state funding of public broadcasters influences their content and diminishes their critical capacity.” Based on research, it states that “when they benefit from a high degree of political autonomy, as is the case in Canada (…), public media and subsidized private media are no less critical of the government than others.”

The CCPA also suggests further support for the digital transition of local news written journalism.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews