Fawcett v. Fildebrandt： Can & Should Canada’s Legacy Media Be Saved？
Episode Stats
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Summary
The Western Standard's founder Jen Gerson joins host Derek Fildebrandt and co-host Max Fawcett to discuss the future of Canada's legacy media companies, and why they should be saved. The Western Standard is a podcast about Canadian journalism, politics, and culture.
Transcript
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Good day and welcome to Fawcett v. Fildebrandt. I'm Derek Fildebrandt, publisher of the Western
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Standard, and this is the very first episode, our first, well, I guess to borrow a term from
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our first guest, Jen Gerson, experimental episode to see how well it goes. I'm going to be joined
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by my regular co-host, Max Fawcett, who is the lead columnist for Canada's National Observer.
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This began when first Max invited me on his show, Maxed Out, and we were expected to disagree and
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be assholes to one another, and it had a surprisingly civil and fruitful conversation.
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And I reciprocated, hoping that maybe I'd get a rise out of him, and I failed as well.
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Coming at things from different angles, but unfortunately managing to find more common
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ground than we had hoped. But we put our heads together and thought, you know, kind of reminisced
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about the old firing line show that, no, not firing line, crossfire that CNN had on, and we thought
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that, well, Canada and the West could use something like that. So that's what we're doing here today
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with our first episode of Fawcett versus Phil de Brandt. Our first show is going to deal with
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one big question, which will obviously have a lot of smaller questions as a part of it. Our first
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question on our first episode is, can and should Canada's legacy media be saved? Before we get into
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that, though, I'm going to hand it over to my co-host, Max Fawcett of Canada's National Observer.
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Thank you, Derek. Pleasure to be here. This is going to be interesting. See if we can find a way
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to disagree a little more loudly than perhaps we have in the past. But we have someone here,
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I think that both of us have probably disagreed with on more than one occasion.
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Jen Gerson needs no introduction, but I will give her one anyways. Don't worry, don't look scared.
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Um, she is a, I would say, kind of perfect blend of new media and old media. So Jen got her start
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in the mainstream media, uh, working for the Calgary Herald, working for Post Media, um, and still
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keeps a toe in those waters to this day as, uh, what's the official, you're a part-time columnist
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with the Globe and Mail? Contributing columnist with the Globe and Mail. Contributing columnist with
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the Globe and Mail. Show up at the CBC on occasion when they forget that they don't like me anymore.
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There we go. Yeah. Um, but she is the co-founder of The Line, which is, I think, one of the most
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successful and encouraging startups in the new media space in our country. Um, sort of a centrist,
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center-right perspective, but brings on a lot of really smart, interesting voices and is making a
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go of things, uh, financially is doing well. And, uh, you know, I think for anyone who says,
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if we just let the old ones go away, the new ones will flourish, they are, they are thinking of
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the line, uh, in a lot of respects there. So, uh, it is a pleasure to have Jen on.
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They can't get rid of me. I mean, you're stuck with me in some form or another. I'm like a
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barnacle of the entire industry. You're the cockroach of the media.
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Thank you. I'm instantly regretting my life decisions and wondering what I got myself into,
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All right. Well, I guess we'll just start with the big question and I'm sure you're
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going to have a quippy, lippy answer for it, but can and should Canada's legacy media be saved?
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I expected, I expected a hard no, uh, but maybe, maybe elaborate a bit.
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Well, what do you mean by save? Saved by whom and under what terms?
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I think it's very clear. The, they're not capable of saving themselves. They've had a lot of time
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to do it. They can't. I suppose the answer would then be, can the state, can and should the state?
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No. Like, I don't know what to say. Like, if we are dealing with, we're dealing with private
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for-profit corporations, um, that have had every opportunity to make the transition to a digital
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first space and have demonstrated over the course of, what, 30 years that they are incapable of doing
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it in a, in a financially sustainable manner. Why should the state save them? I mean, make the
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argument for me. Make the argument for why the state ought to, ought to save them just for devils,
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just devils ought to argue. Let's play with that idea.
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Making, making Derek make this argument, by the way, is hilarious.
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This is, I'm here to, I'm here to just push everyone's buttons.
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This is, throw it out there, throw it out there.
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This is a, this was an interesting bit of jujitsu that you have done, making me make
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the argument. This was from, uh, Sunday's Toronto Star, um, or I'll paraphrase. They have a picture
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of, uh, heritage minister, minister Pablo Rodriguez up there, and they more or less frame it as,
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oh, this is the front page above the masthead. And they said, uh, along the lines of, uh, you
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know, will, uh, Pablo Rodriguez defeat, uh, meta and Google and save the news industry in
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Canada. Right off the bat, just, just great, independent, fair, detached journalism. I mean,
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while they're at it, why didn't they just put his, like, put him on a pedestal, put a little
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frame around his face, do a little smiley face and some heart emojis around too. That's exactly,
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that's exactly the sort of mentality you want to have as a national newspaper.
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And I'm sure they put a financial, I, I, I can't confirm. I haven't looked into it. I don't
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have the print version, but 20 bucks says they probably didn't put a disclosure on there,
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but their wild conflict of interest of hundreds of millions of dollars in covering that story.
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Can this really nice, awesome minister save us? Don't you love this guy? Will he save democracy?
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Will he save democracy? Okay, so, so, so, so I'll try to frame it the way these guys do. It's that,
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they're not saying we need to go away, the independents need to go away, but they're saying
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that we're not really adding to the conversation, that legacy media is the guardian of reliable and
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factual journalism. And without these institutions in particular, reliable, factual journalism goes
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away. Yeah. And therefore democracy itself. Because legacy media in the last five, 10 years
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and five years in particular, just covered itself with glory in terms of being the bastions of
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reliable, you know, public service journalism with, with exceptions that I will, I can certainly
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happily name if you like, what you have is a legacy media that's done, that has done nothing, but
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essentially cut itself down to nothing, and, and, and prove itself, prove itself less and less
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competent and capable of just marshalling the resources required to, to, to cover the basic news
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in a daily way. We've seen, we've seen the legacy media pull out of beats, pull out, sorry, fire people
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on mass. We've seen them pull out of jurisdictions. So like what, how much, when we take, when do we
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talk about saving sort of things like post media or tour store or CTV or things like that? What, what
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do we mean here? Are we talking about keeping them technically in their current state, where in post
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media's case, what you have is government money going to overwhelmingly service American batch hedges, debt
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plays, or are you talking about saving them in a way that you're restoring them to what they looked
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like five years ago, 10 years ago? Why stop there? Why not try and fund them to the extent that they
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look like they, like the newsrooms look like they did in the 80s or the 70s? Like what, what, what are,
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what does it, what does saving mean in this context? Well, I think it's a fair question because
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as you point out, um, sort of keeping them in their current like weekend at Bernie's state is not
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really saving them. It is keeping them from not dying. Uh, because I think no government or certainly
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this government does not want that on their watch. Uh, and they especially don't want the Toronto Star
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dying on their watch. That, that has always, I think been the understood quid pro quo is that they're
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going to bail out post media because they want to bail out the Toronto Star and they can't do one
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without the other. And they live in a, in a mindset from what 1999 where this, this is actually some kind
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of fair exchange for the purposes of the Canadian public because if you bail out, you bail out your
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left-wing media organization, it will bail out your right-wing media organization and what other
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organization counts and what other factors matter in this conversation? Totally. Because they don't.
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But there's, but I think there's a, a legitimate concern around news gathering, news dissemination,
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reporting, funding the things that are not easy. Um, so, you know, I talked about the line,
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the line is a success. The line does opinion and opinion is, you know, as you know,
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it's lower cost, lower barrier to entry and people want it. People want opinions. People don't
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necessarily want like a 10 part series on corruption within the schools or some sort of corporate
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malfeasance that takes work. It's not sexy. And I'm my concern. And I think a lot of people's concern,
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maybe even the government is that if we don't find a way to fund journalism, that will go away completely.
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So my, my response to this is that to some extent, what we're talking about are the
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aesthetic and class concerns of an, of a, of a, um, overthrown priestly class. I mean,
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when you say stuff like, well, the people don't actually want the 10 part, uh, series of corruption
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on their local school council or whatever, aren't you hearing a little bit of, but the plebs won't
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listen to the opera there? No, it's not the opera. Well, but, but, but it is because if you can't
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present or package your journalism in a way that an audience will find value in it,
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that's the issue, right? The, the issue isn't with saving the media. The issue isn't with government
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funding. The issue is with what you fear your audience will accept. Well, I think it's, it's the
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economics of it that sure, like think of it through basic inputs and outputs inputs of time, especially
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investigative work. So, you know, you'll get, uh, we've all been pitched and, Hey, I've got the big
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story and you know, nine times out of 10, probably more it's a quack and, and he's got a conspiracy
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theory, but every once in a while, okay, maybe this one's got some merit. And so you give it to
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an editor who gives it to a reporter and that reporter might follow this thing. And it could,
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if it's a big story, it could take weeks, maybe more. And there's a really good chance at the end
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of the day, there's a dead end. There's nothing you can publish. And so you've invested your inputs
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are a lot of time and a lot of therefore money, and you got nothing out of it, which is why it's easier
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and more economical to do opinion or short news of the day, latest crap going on.
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So that's why the thing is you actually need to have a media organization. That's not just
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surviving paycheck to paycheck. You need a media organization that's thriving and bringing in
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enough money to be able to divert resources to potentially low cost outcomes, high reward,
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low cost outcomes. But I would say like to say there's no market value in that is wrong because
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as we've seen, when there are certain investigative pieces or there are certain types of reported
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pieces, and when they hit, they're hugely profitable. They can be hugely lucrative.
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Well, like Global Mail covering China, like that was the Global Mail slash CTV's baby.
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They did that. Sure. But then the other thing I would say is, you know, when Matt and I do spend
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money to send one of us to a thing to do on the ground reporting, that is some of those lucrative
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stuff that we do, because it brings in and generates subscriptions, like paid subscriptions from an
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audience that suddenly is like, oh, you guys are more than an opinion outlet. You're doing stuff
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of value and I'm willing to support that. So there's a market argument for doing all that kind
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of stuff. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't underestimate the market value for that. But getting away from
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the market, I do think that it's very possible that there are going to be types of high risk,
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high reward journalism that costs a lot of money to produce and may or may not produce a return.
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And in a market that is where newsrooms are much more pared down, the newsrooms of 5, 10, 15 people,
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and where you have newsrooms and news organizations that just don't have the mega tons of money that
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they did 20, 30 years ago, that becomes a harder, harder thing to picture working, right? I do think
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there are private models that will make it work. But we don't know what those models are right now.
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And that's going to emerge over time. So I would say, yeah, there is a place for the state to step in
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and address the potential market failure here. I do think that's right. What do you think that
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could look like? The CBC, that's what it looks like. The federal government is already hugely
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invested in Canadian journalism to the tune of the CBC, which gets a billion dollars a year in public
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funding. Like, if the CBC isn't well equipped to address the market failures that are going to emerge
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as a result of this terrible apocalypse that we're all about to go through, then what the hell is it
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Okay, but let's say there's a redefinition of the CBC's mandate, and they take all the
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programming television, scripted television, they take all the opinion out of it, and they just
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put all the money into reporting in communities that aren't well served, in local communities,
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doing the things that maybe other people don't want to do. Is there going to be a consensus around
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that reporting and that it's acceptable, that it's of public interest, or is it just going to become
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yet another front in the culture war of, like, well, we can't trust the reporting on XYZ because
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it comes from the dreaded CBC? Everything is going to become a front in the culture war,
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but the way that you best prevent becoming a front in the culture war is by preempting it and
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understanding that that's a risk, and the CBC has to be able to address it. And this is why I've made the
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argument that a mandate review for the CBC is so crucial, because so much, a significant portion of the
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population has so fundamentally lost trust in the CBC that it's not going to be able to serve its
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basic function under the current, under the status quo. I just don't think it's there. I've made the
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same argument. And I think that the mandate that you've described is pretty close to what I would,
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what I would also agree with, but I would go a little bit further and I would say I would like
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a CBC that does not see itself in competition with private media, because otherwise what you have
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is you've got a new imperial oil, you have a new essentially monopolistic journalistic exercise.
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But what I would like to see is a CBC that sees itself in service to its local journalism
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organizations and startups. So I would like to see, for example, all of the written content is maybe
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open license. So every media organization can use it, all of its photos, open license,
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all of its videos, open license. I would like to see massive money put into the CBC archives.
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I'd like to see, for example, I would just like to see a shift in mindset, because right now I think
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the CBC sees its role as dictating to Canadians what Canadian values are. And I would like to see
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them shift that way of thinking into saying, no, our role is to serve Canadians.
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Well, because there's this confusion over, I think, what they are and they feel this sort of
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survival instinct fear of like, well, we got to get bigger or we're going to get smaller.
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They go to the places where they should actively be backing away from. They go to the advertising,
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they go to the things that sell. So opinion, you know, what have you, whereas they should be going,
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oh, no, the private market is doing a very good job there. We'll go over here. We'll go over to the
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thing that is not sexy, is not attractive, but serves a public interest.
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And what if you were to have like a CBC, instead of in only major urban centers, more and more doing
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what CBC Calgary did, which is branching out to places like Lethbridge, these sorts of low and saying,
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hey, our job is to serve this particular center. And maybe part of our job is going to be providing
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journalism training. Maybe our part of our job is going to be sharing what journalism values looks
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like. Maybe part of our job is going to be helping people to do media editing. We're going to teach
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people how to use editing software. We're going to open up our facilities so that local media
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organizations can come in and use broadcast facilities. They can use our podcast studios.
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We're going to see ourselves less as a competitor in the space and more like a public library.
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Like infrastructure, where we're going to provide access to the tools of journalism
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for community members so they can make their own contributions.
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I would like to see the CBC understand that we're about to go through a media apocalypse. It's going
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to last five to 20 years. And their role is to be the seed bank in the apocalypse.
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The arc. The preservation of certain values and virtues that they can then help, that can be then used
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to help other private media organizations flourish and create their own for-profit and financially
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You know, one of the basic principles of capitalism is creative destruction, that the existing firms and
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industries will often need to be destroyed for capital to be reallocated to the new.
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And that's... The federal government is very clearly doing everything in its power, humanly possible,
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to stop that from happening. I guess there's a couple scenarios we can look at, but based on the
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current scenario, we have media bailouts, we've got C18, all of this in place. What do you think the
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emerging new media is going to look like if that status quo remains? Let's say, you know, there's no alternative
00:17:09.500
scenario where Polyev comes to power and blows all that up, but just Trudeau and his successors
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continue on there, and this is the regime, and they continue to pile one thing on top of another.
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What's your prognostication of what it's going to look like?
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Sickly, incredibly, and intensely dull. Absolutely unwilling to innovate and take risks.
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Just a really awful place for ambitious young journalists to work. You're going to see a huge
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brain drain because who wants to work in that kind of media environment? Nobody.
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And I just sort of think it's going to be a slow chipping away of independence over time,
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right? You're just going to see a lot of these private media organizations fall further and further
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into whatever government it is. I'm not even talking about an ideological government, but it's going to
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be just more inclined not to make waves with the existing government. Because why pick a fight if we
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don't have to? And well, you know, we don't really want to piss the wrong people off. Then, well, and
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like, it's not going to, it's not going to be an obvious, like, oh, hey, we're going to become
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propagandists for the liberals overnight. It's just going to be a slow, slow dulling, dulling of the entire
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media market. It's going to get a little more boring, a little less controversial, a little
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less willing to push, a little less, and it's just going to chip away over time. It's going to
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worse and worse. I think one of the things that is not commonly understood among the non-journalist
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class is how bad things already are. I think people look at papers like the Herald or the Journal,
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or they look at the Toronto Star and they think, well, there must be like hundreds of journalists
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still working in there, you know, pursuing their craft. And I heard from someone who is, you know,
00:18:48.140
close to the Journal there, like, I think it was like, fewer than five people are reporters there
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now. Like, it is already dead. There's no there there. It is just more in like the newsroom on
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the other side of this wall than the Journal probably has. A lot of it is management and then
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life support is sort of what is sustaining things. So, you know, I think I'm supportive of the idea of
00:19:11.740
taking it off the ventilator. My concern is just always, what do we lose when we do that? Because
00:19:17.900
there was a really interesting podcast with Paul Wells, Andrew Coyne, David Hurley. And,
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oh, God, her name escapes me. She worked at Le Journal, CBC, and not Chantal. No, no, no, no.
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Oh, God, this is going to go badly for me. But anyways, and they were talking about the future
00:19:37.340
of the media. What do we do? And they all sort of seem to say, like, wow, look at the New York Times.
00:19:42.460
There's, you know, there's Figaro in France. Like, just let the market figure it out.
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Canada's in English Canada. Quebec is a whole different story. But in Canada, English Canada,
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our media market is the hardest, I think, in the world in terms of what you have to do to build a
00:19:57.820
new media company. Because we're competing with the Americans. We don't have population scale. We don't
00:20:03.340
have a geographic or cultural barrier that makes people, I need to get the news from somewhere because
00:20:08.780
the people on the other side speak Welsh, or they speak French. And I just think if we put our faith
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in the market, I think we are ignoring the fact that the market in Canada is unusually challenging.
00:20:22.220
I'm not ignoring the market. I'm saying that's the argument for having the CBC.
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If you have a non-challenging environment, the logic for the CBC disappears.
00:20:32.140
Yeah, right. But yeah, I mean, I think that when you say creative destruction,
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that's a really pretty term. It maybe underplays what destruction looks like and how ugly that can
00:20:43.180
be. I've never had anyone describe it as a pretty term.
00:20:45.420
No, but I mean, it's, yeah, we're going to have a couple of really, really weird years.
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And we're going to see what the impacts in a country that is sparsely populated,
00:20:55.180
very diverse in many different ways, including geographically and culturally,
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what happens when you lose a unified narrative that follows through a mainstream media
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conversation. When we lose that, and we are, we're losing it, that's going to get weird.
00:21:13.180
And I think especially in some small towns, underserviced or unserviced markets, things
00:21:18.220
are going to get really weird. You know, I've heard stories of people going in through small towns in
00:21:22.540
British Columbia, and like the whole QAnon craze is the predominant craze now. Like that is just
00:21:28.380
overwhelmingly accepted in those those small communities and cultures, because they don't
00:21:32.060
have access to great information or their cultural milieu is such that they're getting their news on
00:21:39.500
particular Facebook groups, right? Just yesterday, actually, I had without naming them, I had a small
00:21:46.540
local community paper approach us about buying them out or doing essentially share swap where they would
00:21:54.540
come in as a little part of us. But I mean, there was just an absolute no way to make that work.
00:22:02.300
First of all, I can barely locate where they were on a map. But you know, it's local paper community,
00:22:08.140
no one's paying for a paper subscription anymore. So you don't have that. And they're no longer
00:22:15.580
have a monopoly on advertising that ended not with Facebook and Google, but with Kijiji. That was,
00:22:22.780
Yeah, there's no way. And I do think these these small ones, they're all gonna die. I don't,
00:22:30.780
But what potentially replaces them? What potentially replaces them are people from within these
00:22:35.500
communities, who decide to take up the role of serving their communities with information that's
00:22:41.180
useful to their neighbors and their friends, probably through platforms like Substack,
00:22:48.380
platforms like Facebook, and can these people make a living on a subscription based model?
00:22:54.780
Yeah, of course I can. Because you don't need a lot of money to make money to, sorry,
00:22:58.780
you don't need a lot of subscribers to make money on a subscription model. Even if you're in a town
00:23:03.180
of what, 10,000 people, and you have 100, maybe if you're lucky, up to 200 or 1000 of those people
00:23:11.180
paying you a small amount of money. And that's before you're looking at any advertised local
00:23:16.060
advertising revenue, you can potentially have a living in that. If you're in a, if you're in a,
00:23:20.780
if you're in a town where your cost of living is reasonable, right? So is it going to be a newsroom
00:23:26.620
of five people with a monopoly of advertising? No. But is it going to be maybe mom and pop kind of
00:23:32.780
operations that are providing a service to their community because they saw a vacuum,
00:23:37.100
and maybe we're able to monetize that to a reasonable degree? I think that's a potential.
00:23:42.220
Let's talk about the transition though. You're talking about, you know, there's little communities
00:23:45.900
in DC where everyone's kind of getting their news on QAnon. I think inevitably in the transition,
00:23:52.940
there's going to be some, there's going to be some weird shit. There's going to be stuff like that.
00:23:58.060
I think we'd probably come through all right on the other side. I mean, I mean, people believe
00:24:03.020
all sorts of weird stuff in the 60s. And they came out through and they're like, oh, that was weird.
00:24:07.180
Let's get back to work. As long as there's a penalty for the weirdness. I think that's...
00:24:13.260
What do you mean a penalty for the weirdness? There used to be a social penalty. If you were one of the,
00:24:18.060
if you were a person who was putting newsletters on cars, windshields, and they said, you know,
00:24:21.980
you had your worldview and put it there. How familiar were you with the 60s?
00:24:25.820
Pretty familiar. Pretty familiar. There wasn't a lot of social penalty for weirdness.
00:24:30.380
Eventually there was. Absolutely there was. Well, eventually.
00:24:32.460
It was called the 80s. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, that's what we're talking about. That's, that's,
00:24:36.620
that's the process, right? We're going to go through this experimental phase where people
00:24:40.460
are going to, well, the satanic panic, which is the subject of my book, happened in the 80s.
00:24:44.300
People believe in all kinds of crazy shit. But yes, there is going to be this weird, this
00:24:49.500
intermediation period. People are going to start to believe all kinds of alternative narrative theories.
00:24:56.220
And they will in time live or die on the value that they have to their community.
00:25:02.460
That's, that's, and yes, you can't, I don't see how you practically punish people for buying into QAnon.
00:25:10.300
You don't practically do it because that, I mean, that would be, you know, you can't tax them.
00:25:13.740
No, you can't tax them. But the challenge is that right now we have.
00:25:17.020
This is Canada. They will try. Well, okay, fair enough. But we, you know, we have technologies now that
00:25:22.300
allow people to actively seek out other people with the same views as them and then build foundations
00:25:28.380
around those communities that doesn't let anything into them, right? That did not exist in the 80s.
00:25:32.940
That did not exist in the 60s. Well, actually it did at a smaller scale.
00:25:36.700
At a much smaller scale. Like the part of the reason, this is where we get into my book,
00:25:40.220
part of the reason why the satanic panic took off the way it did was because you had small
00:25:44.700
communities of professionals who would meet regularly for conferences where ideas around satanic ritual
00:25:50.460
abuse and all of these kinds of theories would, would, would spread within these relatively
00:25:55.340
closed professional groups and would then the professionals would leave their conferences,
00:25:59.100
go back to their home communities and spread them within there. That was one of the chief
00:26:02.460
agents of travel for this conspiracy. You're seeing that on social media happen at scale,
00:26:07.980
right? Yeah, that's the difference. And that's what's extremely disruptive about that. But the other
00:26:13.740
thing I would say is that in the past, when you had moral panics, like the satanic panic,
00:26:18.300
it's my model for a lot of this stuff for obvious reasons. Those, those moral panics would last years
00:26:23.260
and years and years and then burn themselves out. What you're seeing now is a lot of moral
00:26:26.940
panics and conspiracies lasting a couple of months and now burning themselves out. And then
00:26:30.780
within a higher degree of frequency, right? So we're in a place of, of just radical experimentation
00:26:36.540
where people are trying on alternative narrative theories. It's kind of what I call a lot of this
00:26:40.380
stuff. And it doesn't hold, it doesn't manage to capture the mainstream in the way that it did
00:26:47.740
previously. And it burns itself out at a much higher rate. I don't think it's good or bad. I'm
00:26:54.540
just saying it's, it's, it's, it's not, I don't expect within 10 years that because of the collapse
00:26:59.820
of mainstream media, that we're all going to be like hailing Q. I don't think that's going to be
00:27:04.940
where this goes. I, but okay, surely the satanic, then I confess that I'm not deeply knowledgeable
00:27:12.700
about the satanic panic. Let me tell you all about it. But that was confined to a very small
00:27:19.980
slice of the population. No, it wasn't. This is actually something that people was, is really
00:27:24.620
interesting. This was mainstream. This was radically mainstream. This was mainstream in modern therapy.
00:27:30.300
This was mainstream in media. This was absolutely mainstream in police departments all across North
00:27:36.060
America. I remember in churches in the nineties. It was still kind of, it was still kind of, it was
00:27:40.700
petering out, but it was still there. This was mainstream in a religious space at the time. And
00:27:44.460
it was also concurrent with the rise of evangelical Christianity as well. This was a, this was,
00:27:48.940
this was not some, like the satanic panic of the eighties and nineties was way more mainstream
00:27:54.060
than QAnon is today. Interesting. Way more mainstream. And there's some interesting reasons why that happened.
00:28:00.140
Even there, there were even people today who are ostensibly mainstream people who are very,
00:28:04.860
very convinced. In fact, you can make the argument that the satanic panic became QAnon. Right. Right.
00:28:10.940
So this was not, this was not a small thing. Oprah, Geraldo, they were all, this was on the front
00:28:15.980
page of the Globe and Mail. This was, this was, there's the whole thing about, about uh, heavy metal
00:28:20.620
and playing the records backwards. Highly credentialed people at the upper echelons of things like, uh,
00:28:25.820
psychological sciences here in Canada were firm proponents. When I was a kid, I had to, I had to
00:28:32.300
keep my like Marilyn Manson CDs, uh, pretty, pretty hidden. I guess the way it was, uh, maybe could
00:28:38.780
switch it back a little bit to where we were to beat journalism. Um, the regular grind of the news,
00:28:46.460
watching city hall, watching the legislature, you know, you know, one reason I think, uh, you know,
00:28:52.780
you were both talking about this, that most of the new media tends to focus on analysis and opinion
00:28:59.340
on the news that's already out there is because beat journalism is so expensive.
00:29:04.220
Uh, also there's a limited market for it. There's a limited market, but, uh, another is
00:29:09.340
the cost as well. There's a few things like our, our news department, our news department is almost all
00:29:15.820
full-time salaried reporters. Our opinion side is one editor and then a bunch of contracted freelance
00:29:23.900
writers. Um, news generally for the most part requires salaried full-time people. And so it's
00:29:31.900
a totally different economic model. What do you think beat journalism is going to look like 10 years
00:29:37.420
from now? If, you know, let's just say, um, you know, Rodriguez gets hit by a bus, not that I would
00:29:44.300
say that, but let's just say he gets hit by a bus. Let's say his bill gets hit by a bus and the bailouts
00:29:48.060
get hit by a bus. Just, it all dies and they have an epiphany and they say no more bailouts, no more C18.
00:29:53.820
We're just going to let the market go. What does beat journalism look like in a decade?
00:29:57.020
Regardless of the bailouts, this is, the bailouts aren't actually going to dramatically shift the
00:30:01.660
course of anyone's destiny here. We're talking about the bailouts. They'll buy them time.
00:30:05.420
They slow down the change. They slow down the change. They don't stop it.
00:30:08.380
But let's just say that stuff ended. We had 10 years of growth.
00:30:10.940
A lot of beat journalism is going to be replaced by AI. Not all of it, but a lot of it.
00:30:16.860
So, you know, local city hall, city hall puts up its transcript of all of its meetings and
00:30:24.220
subcommittee meetings and AI goes through it, creates a story. This goes back to a human editor.
00:30:29.020
The human editor double checks for facts, tries to put anything in context. It pops up on the website.
00:30:33.820
Now all of a sudden, um, a new start article that used to take hours and hours and hours to produce
00:30:38.460
can be produced in 10 minutes. So, you know, weather stories, humans don't, are not going to be
00:30:44.380
producing weather stories in 10 years. Sports. Sports. Humans are not going to be producing
00:30:48.380
sports in 10 years. Is it going to replace all of journalism and all reporting? Absolutely not.
00:30:52.620
AI can't do that. But AI can not, but AI can certainly play, will certainly replace, you know,
00:30:59.020
day-to-day coverage of what's happening in parliament. AI can replace day-to-day coverage of
00:31:03.820
what's happening. Um, just anything that's automated where the, the text can be put online,
00:31:09.180
AI can, can do an adequate job of, of, of covering and filling in that.
00:31:13.580
That's just, it's already pretty much there where you can also have a fake AI person who
00:31:18.380
looks like a reporter and you can have them in a fake AI studio and reading the news,
00:31:23.020
looking like it was on CNN. It's not just the text now.
00:31:26.220
Their hair will never go gray. So great. But, um, no, I mean, it's not going to replace all
00:31:30.620
journalism. And I don't see AI as being a threat to journalism because let's be honest here.
00:31:35.660
AI is not going to replace journalism jobs. The journalism jobs are already gone.
00:31:39.340
AI is going to serve as a tool for human journalists, human editors to maximum, to massively increase
00:31:46.060
their output. And to build on. And to build on. Yes.
00:31:48.460
One of the, one of the problems right now is we're still stuck in a mode where we're doing,
00:31:53.580
we're trying to protect things that were done simply because they exist, right? Well, that,
00:31:57.580
that job was there. We got to protect it. And to make journalism successful and thrive,
00:32:03.660
it has to be not what have we done, but what should we do, right? What need is not being
00:32:08.220
currently met by technology, by the market. And we don't need, you know, we don't need people to
00:32:12.700
cover box scores and baseball. We have that already. We don't need people to, like Jen said, do the sort
00:32:17.340
of tick tock of what happened in the legislature because AI can do that. But there are some things
00:32:21.420
that technology definitely cannot or will not do. And those are the places that journalism should be
00:32:26.780
going into. And until we get that mindset, mindset shift away from how do we protect to how do we
00:32:33.260
build, I think we're, we're going to be in this sort of, this sort of purgatory.
00:32:39.660
You know, maybe small little sidetrack, but I think it's relevant to this question that we've
00:32:44.460
been tackling here at the Western Standard is, you know, we are looking at how we integrate AI.
00:32:50.620
What do you think are some of the guidelines a publication or newsroom should have around
00:32:58.060
legitimate and illegitimate use of AI in the newsroom?
00:33:01.020
That's going to be such an interesting conversation in the next years. I don't think AI is,
00:33:04.780
is like exactly where it needs to be for us to do this, but it's so close that we need to start
00:33:10.140
having that conversation. I think disclosure is the first one. Like if this is not written by a human,
00:33:16.300
I do think that you're until, until AI becomes so normalized that everyone just sort of assumes
00:33:20.860
that a lot of this stuff isn't being written by human. I do think that you need very proactive
00:33:24.380
disclosure with people about it. Also, I do think that I wouldn't let the machines run wild without
00:33:30.300
a human supervision or human editor like that. I think you still need to have somebody.
00:33:36.140
There you go. But I mean, I do think that you need, if you're going to have an AI sort of recap
00:33:41.100
the latest happenings of the city council meeting, you still need a human on the other side of that,
00:33:45.580
double checking the quotes, making sure everything is correct. There's still going to be a fact
00:33:50.220
checking process that stuff, the stuff's going to need to go through. And I think that you always
00:33:55.260
need to ask yourself, you know, is this AI replacing humans or is this tool making us more helping humans?
00:34:05.180
That the tool shouldn't be an end in and of itself. I would say that the tool should be an aid to human
00:34:11.020
productivity, not a replacement for human creativity. That's if we're kind of assuming
00:34:15.980
in this that AI is going to be used within publications, current and future publications.
00:34:23.260
But this could very easily take the form of, well, let's say Google, Google's not allowed to do news
00:34:28.140
in Canada anymore. Well, they might just say, we'll create our own news.
00:34:33.820
So their big, their big thing is they're tired of their search, sending people off of their servers.
00:34:39.740
Yeah. And so what they're going to do is when next time you Google, I need a recipe for such
00:34:43.740
and such, rather than it sending you to allrecipes.com, they'll just have their AI serve up the
00:34:48.860
recipe for you and you stay on their turf and you pay them your money that they are going to try to
00:34:54.620
eat more of the pie. And I'm just picturing like, okay, so what if it might not even be us using the AI,
00:34:59.980
we might just get completely cut out and AI without any human supervision, because it'll be easier.
00:35:06.140
I don't think the AI is there to be used without human supervision. I really don't.
00:35:09.660
Not yet. But I mean, it could be there really soon.
00:35:12.220
It could be, but I still think that you're going to have use for our skill sets. Let's just say,
00:35:20.060
Well, and I think it will send us ideally up the value chain. There's a lot of things that
00:35:24.780
journalists do right now and certainly used to do, you know, the glory days. There's a lot of
00:35:28.940
pointless tasks that were being done inefficiently.
00:35:31.980
Grunt work. And now the machine will do it for us and we get to focus our mental energies on
00:35:37.420
analysis, on higher thinking, on, you know, on delivering value for the customer
00:35:43.820
in a way that is more than just the AI can do. I think it will push good journalists to a better
00:35:50.380
Well, except the problem is that good journalists get their start on the grunt work.
00:35:55.020
So if you get rid of all of that need to do some of that grunt work stuff, I mean,
00:35:58.780
my first job at the Toronto Star was listening to the radio room, right? It was listening to
00:36:03.020
police and the radio scanners waiting for someone to die or waiting for a terrible thing to happen
00:36:06.940
and then gathering information about it. You couldn't replicate that training now.
00:36:12.140
And if we have a situation where AI is able to spot, do what radio rumors used to do,
00:36:17.900
firstly, you know, you're, you're just losing opportunities for young journalists to get the
00:36:21.980
training and the mentorship that we, that we used to get. Now that being said, we've already lost it.
00:36:25.980
It's already gone. So where do you balance this? I don't know. But my, my suspicion is that the real
00:36:32.060
crisis or the next crisis after this crisis is going to be, how do you train up a whole generation of
00:36:37.500
journalists in an AI space where all of those mentorship and, and training opportunities are now
00:36:43.340
gone and you're asking them to go from university to essentially to do, to straightforward, straight
00:36:49.100
into analysis or high level thinking journalism before they've had the 10 year apprenticeship that
00:36:54.060
they actually need to do that. I get that and I understand it, but I keep on having this
00:36:59.420
meme in my head that keeps recurring when you're talking about this. And it's, you know, we all remember
00:37:04.940
our, you know, grade four math teacher when we complain about learning our multiplication table saying,
00:37:10.620
well, you're not always going to have a calculator in your pocket. God, they were wrong. Like, like,
00:37:17.980
yeah, it's nice if you know your times tables, but it's kind of useless now because we all have
00:37:23.260
a super calculator in our pocket that could put a man on Mars. So maybe it'll be the equivalent of
00:37:29.100
that. Maybe it's just like, this is just something we don't even really need to worry about anymore.
00:37:33.020
And they're just going to go straight to calculus with their weird graphing calculator.
00:37:37.420
Or maybe Western civilization collapses and we all have to go back to some kind of
00:37:42.620
repeat of the local grain news. I mean, like I said, I'm, I'm not really worried about my ability
00:37:47.980
to function in the future world. I just sort of think that it's not going to look like it was in
00:37:52.620
the past. And being wedded to the way it was is a pretty good way to sort of tip the scales in the
00:38:00.140
wrong direction. I mean, I, you know, I, I'm an optimist, so I'm a technological optimist, but
00:38:08.140
you know, to me, the interesting premise with the thing that AI forces us to confront
00:38:13.260
as journalists is how do we be trusted? How can, how can we demonstrate and earn trust from the
00:38:19.580
people who use our services? And I think the problem with journalism is for a long time, we've
00:38:23.980
taken that for granted. We show up assuming we're trusted, right? You walk into the building, it has the
00:38:28.540
letter, you know, it has the masthead and you're like, I'm trusted. And you haven't had to work for
00:38:32.620
it. And I think the new environment that we're in, you have to prove that you're trustable. You can't
00:38:39.820
make mistakes. You have to be accountable when you are or when you do. And I think that has to be sort
00:38:45.500
of a defining question when, when media companies roll out AI is how does this impact our trust? How does
00:38:52.380
this, does it increase or decrease the amount that our, our users, our supporters, our customers trust us?
00:38:58.940
And I didn't, I'm still not sure that that thought is as prominent as it should be.
00:39:03.660
I think that's true. If we're talking about kind of, you know, catch all publications that people on
00:39:11.100
both sides of the divide used to be able to read at the same time and more or less have an agreement
00:39:15.820
on facts on, this is probably the wrong term for it, but perhaps it's, we're headed towards kind of a
00:39:21.180
return of the yellow press, maybe not as extreme, not as explicitly partisan, but if nothing else,
00:39:26.780
a more tribal press where, well, Western standard readers trust the Western standard, but they don't
00:39:31.900
trust the national observer, national observer readers trust you guys, but won't trust anything
00:39:37.100
from us. The yellow press was the norm for most of the history of the press. The whole period where
00:39:43.020
we all have shared narratives in a shared media conversation is actually relatively recent.
00:39:49.020
Prior to this, the more norm thing was like you had your press, you had your ideological newspaper
00:39:56.380
that you went to and you relied on and your writers and your readers to tell you about the day.
00:40:00.220
You had pamphlets and all that kind of thing. So like the, the, the tribal and highly siloed
00:40:07.260
media environment, it is actually the norm for society. It just hasn't been the norm in our lifetimes.
00:40:13.820
And that's what the shift that we're getting used to. But I'm also wondering if the future,
00:40:18.380
going back to Google, if the future is Google creating its own news hub in every community,
00:40:24.140
right? Using AI, and maybe they have a handful of journalist editors in every region, helping to
00:40:30.380
direct news generation of news stories, doing the weather, doing the sports, doing the local town
00:40:35.900
meetings, doing the local blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then that becomes the shared thing.
00:40:40.540
Everybody has essentially the same news hub. And then you have your, your Western standards, your national
00:40:46.300
forums, or more interesting in depth stuff for the good writing, right? I mean, an AI can do good
00:40:55.180
writing, which is not as fun, now is it? So what if, what if that's, that's how we reestablish a kind
00:41:01.260
of shared narrative is through AI generated news hubs. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not saying that's
00:41:06.060
the way it's going to be. I'm just saying that that could be one way this picture rolls out.
00:41:10.300
I think the danger there is always in, if there's a central sort of one publication, or one company
00:41:17.100
that's running things, what happens, the control of that becomes very, very valuable, and very, very
00:41:23.900
We already saw that with social media trying to grapple with regulating what can be posted on it
00:41:28.700
during COVID, because there was some disinformation. But a lot of times, as it turned out, things weren't
00:41:34.540
disinformation. If we're talking like, like, leaks from the Wuhan lab, that stuff was
00:41:39.420
flagged as fake news turned out not to be. And so social media plot for, you know, especially,
00:41:43.900
you know, Google, YouTube, sorry, Facebook, YouTube would highly regulate what was allowed
00:41:48.700
and ban you if not. But that was regulating who could post onto it. Now it just might be,
00:41:54.860
it could get more extreme to that if the common narrative is just kind of a Google news.
00:41:58.540
This is, but this is the, this is exactly the same conversation we've been having for the last,
00:42:02.460
but however many decades with the consolidation of news under post media.
00:42:05.820
I mean, yes, when you have one entity controlling the majority of the content, you run into these
00:42:14.700
problems. And this is why you need to have strong antitrust conversations. Maybe the Google news
00:42:20.060
hub is going to be different from the, I don't know how that's going to work out. I'm sure that
00:42:24.700
eventually someone's going to go after Google for antitrust stuff in this Canada, for it's in Canada.
00:42:29.020
This will not prevent that or potentially it's another company. It's another company doing the
00:42:34.620
equivalent of this, right? So part of the problem, I think is, you know, C18 is going after Google
00:42:40.540
and Facebook all the wrong way. I think there is probably a strong case for antitrust against both
00:42:45.420
of these companies. But I'm not sure that can happen in Canada. I think that's, that is
00:42:49.740
got to come from the United States. There's no track record of being able to consolidate. Well,
00:43:00.140
we love monopolies as long as they're Canadian monopolies. Exactly. I mean, like that's,
00:43:03.340
that's how the media got into the situation in the first place, right? I heard someone describe us
00:43:07.180
as the test case on C18 for the Americans. And I thought that seems backwards. Why would we want to
00:43:12.220
be their test case? That seems like a good way to end up as, as roadkill. Yeah. And that's,
00:43:17.420
we're going to be the first guy on the beach here. We don't even know where we're charging.
00:43:22.140
Yeah, it does not, that's not a good place to be. No. No. All right. Maybe last word to you,
00:43:28.860
Jen. I don't have any more words. What else do I have to say? Come on. Well, it was all very eloquent.
00:43:36.220
Well, before we wrap up, where can people learn more and support the line? The line.substack.com.
00:43:43.900
Yeah, that's right. There you go. We'll show up. You'll find us.
00:43:46.700
Great. Well, I guess that's a wrap for our first attempt at this. We're going to try and find
00:43:51.500
something where maybe Max and I are a little less agreement, a little less agreement than this,
00:43:57.340
because I think we will have a shared stake. And I will be there. It'll be, it'll be great.
00:44:01.020
You two have at it. Have fun. Have fun, boys. And I, I'll try and avoid having my Jon Stewart moment,
00:44:05.580
where I explain how another crossfire is bad for democracy. And you guys are bad for democracy,
00:44:10.380
and you should not do this. We probably are bad for democracy, but it's just so much fun.
00:44:13.580
Yeah. What do you do? Yeah. We're both going to get yelled at in our respective silos for this.
00:44:17.900
So we're not allowed. We're not supposed to be talking to one another. All right. Well,
00:44:23.420
Jen, thank you for being our first guest. And Max, it was a slice. All right. Until next time.
00:44:28.860
Thank you very much for joining us on our very first episode of Fawcett versus Fildebrandt.