00:00:25.820You were speaking on a panel that actually got, it was one of the more engaging panels because there was a fair bit of contrast about the internet regulations.
00:00:33.580And there are a great many of them from C11 to C18 and now C63.
00:00:38.160At its core, you had said something that I found quite interesting, which was that, you know, yes, you're against a lot of what the government's doing.
00:00:44.400But you're also concerned about a media ecosystem in which there's only a particular type of media left.
00:00:50.460I mean, frankly, one in which True North fills that void.
00:00:53.180And I was wondering if you could just expand on that a bit.
00:00:55.200Yeah, I mean, this goes back to my argument, and it's a very unpopular argument in this room, and it will definitely be an unpopular argument with your audience,
00:01:03.300is that I do think there's an important role for an organization like the CBC to play, especially when we're talking about a population.
00:01:10.480We don't have the same population density in the U.S.
00:01:13.100We don't have the same economies of scale that the U.S. has.
00:01:16.200And therefore, it's a really, really hard place for private media organizations to cover extensively, particularly when we're talking about local news, right?
00:01:24.660I'm not talking about Calgary or Toronto.
00:01:31.140These places have become news deserts, and I think it becomes really difficult not only to govern countries that don't have access to good quality journalistic media,
00:01:40.580but also how do we maintain a sense of national identity and a sense of national cohesion in a media environment where private media has essentially vacated this field.
00:01:50.400This is where I think that there could be a role for a radically reformed or radically rethought out CBC or something like it to be able to, by statute or by mandate,
00:02:02.460provide good quality, basic, objective journalism in, say, every town over 100,000 people in this country.
00:02:09.420I think the counterpoint to that is that that was supposed to be what CBC was doing,
00:02:13.380and they've had a fair bit of mission creep in the sense that they haven't wanted to do that.
00:02:17.420I mean, when CBC launched its online opinion section, it's like, can anyone say that opinions on the Internet are in short supply, that we need a government?
00:02:26.480Why do we have a CBC streaming service?
00:02:28.240Did you know that CBC actually is trying to duplicate Duolingo with an app to teach people French and English?
00:02:33.280I mean, these are things that are radically beyond what most of us would understand the CBC mandate to be.
00:02:39.020However, the answer to that question isn't necessarily to defund the CBC.
00:02:42.500The answer is a radical mandate review.
00:02:44.120And the other thing that I would do is I would take the CBC out of the Broadcasting Act, where it currently nestles and has a very unclear and fairly vague mandate,
00:02:51.740which permits that kind of a mission creep, and I would create a CBC Act.
00:02:55.220I would essentially put the CBC in statute, and I would enshrine things like their journalistic standards of practice.
00:03:00.620I would enshrine a standard of journalism that I think most taxpayers could get behind.
00:03:04.120And I would enshrine things like every, let's say, for example, every town over 100,000 people needs a CBC reporter, for example.
00:03:11.300The other thing that I would do with the CBC, I mean, if I were in charge and got, you know, that's going to happen.
00:03:16.960We can put your resume to the top of the pile for taking over.
00:03:19.800I would also say everything that the CBC produces should be open source.
00:03:23.440So every news organization, left, right, center, whatever, should be able to take the CBC's written and visual content and audiovisual content.
00:03:30.060Canadian press might not like that, but let it be a public good.
00:03:34.040If we're going to fund it like a public good, we should treat the resources of that thing like a public good.
00:03:37.740I would have the CBC imagine itself more as a library, like a library of journalistic knowledge and resources.
00:03:42.520The other thing that I think people are not remembering as well is that the CBC is a huge store of archival information, digital and physical archives.
00:03:49.100This is the repertoire or the reservoir of a huge amount of Canadian culture and history.
00:03:55.080And I think that we need to treat it as such and put some serious investment into maintaining those archives and those archive services for the purpose of maintaining a Canadian culture thing.
00:04:05.240The other thing I would do, and I would just say this, I would also have the CBC see itself as a training apparatus or a training role.
00:04:12.220So perhaps you go to the CBC if you want to start a podcast in Lethbridge.
00:04:16.440Well, maybe you can go to the CBC and get a workshop about how to do podcast editing.
00:04:19.520Maybe you can go to the CBC and rent out a room.
00:04:21.300Maybe you can go to the CBC and rent out your equipment, that kind of thing.
00:04:24.400So I could see them as being a real hub for being a support for creating an innovative media model in a country like Canada,
00:04:32.420where we have some unique sort of market-based challenges by virtue of our size and lack of population density.
00:04:38.000To go back to the local aspect for a moment, one of the challenges with a true north is that, you know, and the line in particular, we're lean operations.
00:04:44.460We can also find a coalition to support what we're doing nationally.
00:04:49.100It would be incredibly difficult, if not possible, to do that at a local level.
00:04:52.620It's a hard, the numbers are really hard.
00:04:55.400Because, you know, how many people do you need to make a living?
00:04:58.600Well, you really need about a base of about a thousand people who will pay for you.
00:05:01.840I mean, it's not huge. It's not unattainable.
00:05:03.680It's the old 1,000 true fans argument.
00:05:06.060So, okay, that's easy when you have, well, it's not easy, but even in a country of, what, 40 million people, what are our fan bases?
00:05:14.020Our fan bases are maybe large enough to support our income and a small team around us.
00:05:18.220They're not large enough to support the 20, 30-person newsrooms of yore.
00:05:22.100And I think that's just a reality that mainstream media has got to get used to.
00:05:25.180But if we're talking about, well, how do we ensure that people in Sparwood have good access to local information?
00:05:33.200Are there going to be 1,000 paying people in Sparwood?
00:05:35.320Well, maybe for some people they're really good.
00:05:38.560But, you know, if what you're producing is the local football team, the local basketball team, your local city council, your local court cases, those sorts of things,
00:05:47.720it's really hard to make the economy of scale work there.
00:05:51.180And that might be a reason or an argument for some kind of help in the form of maybe it's just the CBC is in that space and supporting any kind of local startups,
00:06:01.180but also serving that community in that space.
00:06:03.040I think the CBC also does need to get back into the mindset of, like, its job isn't to be a top-down creator of culture and meaning for people.
00:06:13.020It's a service that the people need to buy into to understand its value.
00:06:16.440If you lost the audience in your CBC plan, I think you can get them back on this one,
00:06:20.300because you had also made a comment in your remarks on stage that was, I think, probably the most controversial thing you'd say to some people,
00:06:26.520which was that we need to get comfortable with the idea of things going out of business.
00:06:31.140And we need to get comfortable with this idea of collapse, because there is never going to be that reinvention without that death.
00:06:37.080And what we have now is this weird, you know, indefinite life support model where we're keeping industries that don't want to reform a board for what?
00:09:01.000But go look at how they covered themselves in that.
00:09:02.980There was very, very little coverage outside of the independent media.
00:09:06.220Organizations like mine, organizations like yours, and academics like Michael Geist.
00:09:10.480There was very little critical coverage of that.
00:09:13.300So you can see in real time how money affects the way people approach problems and coverage.
00:09:18.760And by the way, I don't think that that's even unique to government money or advertising money.
00:09:22.980The people who cut the check kind of get to set the rules.
00:09:25.960I mean, we're right now, the line is 100% reader funded.
00:09:29.460Everybody who supports us supports us because they find value in our product.
00:09:32.820The risk of that kind of a model is audience capture, right?
00:09:35.740How do you make sure that you're providing stuff that's true to yourself and demonstrates integrity for your own beliefs and not just pander to your audience because you know that's what they're going to pay for, right?
00:10:07.780But the way to avoid that is to try and create as many different revenue streams as possible so that you can avoid too much dependence on one kind of revenue stream.
00:10:16.640And the other thing is to do is just to try and maintain your integrity as much as possible with a high diversity of revenue streams, but also not making yourself solely dependent on one revenue stream like the government.
00:10:27.620Which is also true of you because even though you run the line, you're publishing everywhere.
00:10:34.340And there can't be because in an environment where everybody takes government money, if I want to do any freelancing on the side, yeah, I mean, I guess I have to, I'm going to the CBC.
00:10:43.000I'm going to take a fee for going to the CBC, but I'm also going to take a fee if I go to write something for the Star or the Globe.
00:11:39.180I think he's got a misapprehension of why mainstream media is in trouble.
00:11:43.140It's not for the reason that people like to think it is.
00:11:45.300Most people, especially conservatives, like to think that mainstream media is in trouble because mainstream media doesn't align with their viewpoints and therefore they've lost audience.
00:11:55.680I think there is a, I think the trust.
00:11:57.060I don't think you can separate the trust deficit from the business issues.
00:12:01.060Yes, there's a trust deficit and there's a decline deficit.
00:12:03.920But the primary, and I think that those are accelerating right now and have accelerated in the last five years.
00:12:08.640But if you want to go back 10, 15 years where the problems with media started, the problems with media started with the collapse of the ad monopolies.
00:12:15.440And you need to fundamentally understand that.
00:12:17.520And as the collapse, the money got sucked out of the industry, the industry became more and more beholden to a kind of ideological viewpoint.
00:12:26.080And that contributed to the trust deficit.
00:12:28.100They became more dependent on government money.
00:12:29.540That contributed to the trust deficit.
00:12:31.420But it doesn't start with the trust deficit.
00:12:33.240It starts with the collapse in the ad monopolies.
00:12:35.520And this is why you see the same issues affecting mainstream media and legacy media, regardless of whether or not they're left or right.
00:12:41.640Because the reason why these organizations traditionally were able to print money is because they had an absolute ironclad monopoly on the ad market and particularly on classifieds.
00:12:50.500The second newspapers lost classifieds, they were in deep shit.