Western Standard - July 06, 2023


Theft and subsidies won’t save legacy media

Topics
legacy media evolution
MPC Daily Market Update Jul 5, 2023 Just another normal day on transit, somewhere in the world...

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

197.34

Word count

1,068

Sentence count

53

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 At the beginning of the 1990s, I landed a job with a survey company, and they specialized in
00:00:04.400 advanced work for seismic projects. It involved travel and working in isolated areas. The starting
00:00:09.840 pay was pretty modest back then, but I loved it. Climbing the workplace ladder in the survey
00:00:14.480 industry back then was a slow process. I had to put in a few years as a rodman and a chainer
00:00:20.240 before I was even allowed to touch a survey transit as a junior surveyor, so I had to take
00:00:24.320 my lumps and abuse and learn. I had to learn how to make solar observations to determine an azimuth
00:00:30.240 out in the bush, how to double angles in my head to ensure accurate measurements, and I had to
00:00:34.640 process my raw data and to finish survey at night in the hotel rooms or camps I was staying in. It
00:00:39.200 was a big learning curve. Now, shortly after I became a junior surveyor, everything changed
00:00:44.160 as real-time survey systems, GPS systems, came onto the scene. Suddenly, with only a few hours of
00:00:50.480 training, a person could navigate to a location, record the elevation just as accurately as I'd had
00:00:55.760 to learn how to do with conventional surveying. Just a few hours of training. Demand for conventional
00:01:00.320 surveyors dropped dramatically as fewer people with less training could cover more ground in
00:01:05.280 staking out exploration programs. It felt unfair, and certainly annoying to say the least, all that
00:01:10.720 time I'd put in to find my job was obsolete. But it left me with two options. I could stubbornly refuse
00:01:17.120 to change how I work and slowly fade into unemployment, or maybe change trades even,
00:01:22.240 or I could adapt with the changing times. Now, many of the older surveyors opted for the first
00:01:27.200 option. I mean, old dogs can learn new tricks, but it is tougher for them as things go along. As for
00:01:32.080 myself, I was young, I adapted. I learned how to create maps using GPS data, took on more supervisory
00:01:38.480 roles in the field, and being flexible, I kept working and spent over 20 lucrative years working in
00:01:43.680 energy exploration. I left the field eventually as I got tired of being out of the country for months
00:01:47.920 at a time, and the feast or famine nature of petrochemical exploration started to wear on me.
00:01:52.480 But if I'd have wanted to, I could have stayed in the field. I would have had to constantly adapt,
00:01:57.440 though, to the changes in new technology and methods. Now, let's get back to the media. Changes in
00:02:02.720 the media industry over the last decade have been no less dramatic than they were in the survey world.
00:02:08.480 Readership and viewership for conventional media platforms such as television and newspapers dried up,
00:02:13.440 radio stations, they're going to be a thing of the past within a generation. Advertising dollars
00:02:18.160 have followed audiences and headed to platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Every major media outlet's
00:02:23.920 been forced to heavily cut back on staff and resources. They're in a dire position. But the
00:02:29.760 Canadian government has responded by directly subsidizing media outlets, and now they're trying
00:02:34.320 to extort funds from social media platforms to try and prop up these legacy media sources.
00:02:39.680 Now, not only will the efforts to bail out obsolete media outlets inevitably fail,
00:02:44.960 but it will also actually hurt them. I mean, if I, back when I was surveying, had a subsidy
00:02:49.920 lifeline tossed to me while my trade was evolving, I probably would have desperately grabbed to that
00:02:54.800 at the time, too. It would have been easier than changing how I do things, and I could have stuck to
00:02:58.720 the form of the trade I had trained for. For a while, at least. No amount of bailout dollars could have
00:03:04.640 saved my job in its original form in the long run. I mean, for perspective, the first program I ever
00:03:09.360 worked on in the survey field had a crew of about 40 people, and it took us over a month. A job that
00:03:14.800 size today would take eight people about two weeks to do. The old way just wasn't sustainable. If I'd
00:03:21.040 have been protected from change, though, as GPS came along, I would have been employed for perhaps a
00:03:25.600 couple more years, but it would have left me even more vulnerable and unskilled when the dollars dried up.
00:03:30.000 I wouldn't have been inspired to learn modern methods, nor would the companies in the industry
00:03:34.640 have been. We would have been left behind and perhaps would have been replaced by foreign workers 1.00
00:03:39.440 who kept up with new technology. Subsidies actually would have stunted the evolution of companies and
00:03:44.400 workers. Now, the same thing's happening with legacy media. Instead of griping about new upstart outlets
00:03:50.560 and journalists, the old guard and conventional media should be looking at how to emulate them. I mean,
00:03:55.520 if they hope to remain gainfully employed in the field of journalism, they need to accept change.
00:04:00.560 Newspapers are little more than flyers now, and TV news ratings are never going to recover.
00:04:05.360 And the infrastructure required for those old dinosaurs, those models, is too expensive to
00:04:09.600 maintain. A new company like the Western Standard can build a studio or create an online publication for
00:04:15.200 a tiny fraction of the money it would have required 20 years ago. The government right now is
00:04:19.760 keeping a corpse on life support and is doing a disservice to both journalists and Canadian citizens
00:04:25.680 and consumers. New outlets are being choked off while legacy outlets are creating models market,
00:04:32.240 creating products modeled for a market that just doesn't exist anymore. Legacy media dinosaurs are
00:04:37.040 going to go extinct no matter what the government does. When that happens, the information gap will be
00:04:41.920 much harder to fill, though, due to the efforts to fight change and innovation. Demand for news and
00:04:47.440 information isn't going any going away any more than demand for petrochemical products is. But the way
00:04:52.640 we produce and deliver those products has changed. And unless we let companies evolve and stay out of
00:04:57.840 it, we're going to lose our domestic producers to innovative foreign ones or chat GPT things such as 0.81
00:05:04.800 that are going to actually replace a lot of people in media and artificially trying to hold it together
00:05:09.520 like this, guys, is it's only putting off the inevitable and causing more harm.