Theft and subsidies won’t save legacy media
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
197.33925
Summary
In this episode, I talk about how to adapt to the changes in technology and methods in order to keep up with the times, and how to stay ahead of the curve in the field of surveying and other industries.
Transcript
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At the beginning of the 1990s, I landed a job with a survey company, and they specialized in
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advanced work for seismic projects. It involved travel and working in isolated areas. The starting
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pay was pretty modest back then, but I loved it. Climbing the workplace ladder in the survey
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industry back then was a slow process. I had to put in a few years as a rodman and a chainer
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before I was even allowed to touch a survey transit as a junior surveyor, so I had to take
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my lumps and abuse and learn. I had to learn how to make solar observations to determine an azimuth
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out in the bush, how to double angles in my head to ensure accurate measurements, and I had to
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process my raw data and to finish survey at night in the hotel rooms or camps I was staying in. It
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was a big learning curve. Now, shortly after I became a junior surveyor, everything changed
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as real-time survey systems, GPS systems, came onto the scene. Suddenly, with only a few hours of
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training, a person could navigate to a location, record the elevation just as accurately as I'd had
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to learn how to do with conventional surveying. Just a few hours of training. Demand for conventional
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surveyors dropped dramatically as fewer people with less training could cover more ground in
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staking out exploration programs. It felt unfair, and certainly annoying to say the least, all that
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time I'd put in to find my job was obsolete. But it left me with two options. I could stubbornly refuse
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to change how I work and slowly fade into unemployment, or maybe change trades even,
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or I could adapt with the changing times. Now, many of the older surveyors opted for the first
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option. I mean, old dogs can learn new tricks, but it is tougher for them as things go along. As for
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myself, I was young, I adapted. I learned how to create maps using GPS data, took on more supervisory
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roles in the field, and being flexible, I kept working and spent over 20 lucrative years working in
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energy exploration. I left the field eventually as I got tired of being out of the country for months
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at a time, and the feast or famine nature of petrochemical exploration started to wear on me.
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But if I'd have wanted to, I could have stayed in the field. I would have had to constantly adapt,
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though, to the changes in new technology and methods. Now, let's get back to the media. Changes in
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the media industry over the last decade have been no less dramatic than they were in the survey world.
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Readership and viewership for conventional media platforms such as television and newspapers dried up,
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radio stations, they're going to be a thing of the past within a generation. Advertising dollars
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have followed audiences and headed to platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Every major media outlet's
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been forced to heavily cut back on staff and resources. They're in a dire position. But the
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Canadian government has responded by directly subsidizing media outlets, and now they're trying
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to extort funds from social media platforms to try and prop up these legacy media sources.
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Now, not only will the efforts to bail out obsolete media outlets inevitably fail,
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but it will also actually hurt them. I mean, if I, back when I was surveying, had a subsidy
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lifeline tossed to me while my trade was evolving, I probably would have desperately grabbed to that
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at the time, too. It would have been easier than changing how I do things, and I could have stuck to
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the form of the trade I had trained for. For a while, at least. No amount of bailout dollars could have
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saved my job in its original form in the long run. I mean, for perspective, the first program I ever
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worked on in the survey field had a crew of about 40 people, and it took us over a month. A job that
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size today would take eight people about two weeks to do. The old way just wasn't sustainable. If I'd
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have been protected from change, though, as GPS came along, I would have been employed for perhaps a
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couple more years, but it would have left me even more vulnerable and unskilled when the dollars dried up.
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I wouldn't have been inspired to learn modern methods, nor would the companies in the industry
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have been. We would have been left behind and perhaps would have been replaced by foreign workers
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who kept up with new technology. Subsidies actually would have stunted the evolution of companies and
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workers. Now, the same thing's happening with legacy media. Instead of griping about new upstart outlets
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and journalists, the old guard and conventional media should be looking at how to emulate them. I mean,
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if they hope to remain gainfully employed in the field of journalism, they need to accept change.
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Newspapers are little more than flyers now, and TV news ratings are never going to recover.
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And the infrastructure required for those old dinosaurs, those models, is too expensive to
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maintain. A new company like the Western Standard can build a studio or create an online publication for
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a tiny fraction of the money it would have required 20 years ago. The government right now is
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keeping a corpse on life support and is doing a disservice to both journalists and Canadian citizens
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and consumers. New outlets are being choked off while legacy outlets are creating models market,
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creating products modeled for a market that just doesn't exist anymore. Legacy media dinosaurs are
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going to go extinct no matter what the government does. When that happens, the information gap will be
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much harder to fill, though, due to the efforts to fight change and innovation. Demand for news and
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information isn't going any going away any more than demand for petrochemical products is. But the way
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we produce and deliver those products has changed. And unless we let companies evolve and stay out of
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it, we're going to lose our domestic producers to innovative foreign ones or chat GPT things such as
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that are going to actually replace a lot of people in media and artificially trying to hold it together
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like this, guys, is it's only putting off the inevitable and causing more harm.