Canadian broadcasters can take lessons from FCC report on local news, critics say

A shortage of local reporting could lead to government waste and corruption and U.S. news media regulations are “out of sync with the information needs of communities,” a new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report says. And Canadian critics say the situation isn’t so different here. The June 9 report by the U.S. federal regulator, entitled “The Information Needs of Communities: The changing media landscape in a broadband age,” says that despite the proliferation of news sources in a digital environment, there continues to be a shortage of “local, professional accountability reporting.” “This is likely to lead to the kinds of problems that are, not surprisingly, associated with a lack of accountability—more government waste, more local corruption, less effective schools, and other serious community problems,” the report says. It describes a paradox in which humans create as much information in two days “as we did from the appearance of Homo sapiens through 2003”—but where reporting shortages nonetheless grow. Still, the report considers the shortcomings fixable. “e find ourselves in an unusual moment when ignoring the ailments of local media will mean that serious harm may be done to our communities—but paying attention to them will enable Americans to develop, literally, the best media system the nation has ever had,” the report says. But for now, newspaper, television and magazine newsrooms are shrinking. In recent years, the number of journalists in the U.S. today has been reduced to about the number that existed before Watergate, the report says. Newspapers, which traditionally bore the largest reporting staff, are seeing shrinking budgets, and the report says local TV news isn’t capable of filling in the gaps. New media, including blogs and websites, base almost all of their content on reporting by traditional media. Peter Murdoch, vice president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP), agreed with the report’s findings and the link between poor reporting and democratic decline. He said the CRTC should start collecting data to better understand the trends in Canada. “That kind of research, to the best of my knowledge, is not going on at the CRTC,” he said in an interview. “We don’t have data from the CRTC about job losses in broadcasting and the decline in local news. The monitoring of this stuff is, I won’t say it’s nonexistent, but it’s pretty sad … I certainly think it’s as great a problem here, both in newspapers and broadcasting, comparatively, as it is in the U.S. We’ve seen job losses in both print and broadcast, and in coverage.” At the CRTC’s licence renewal hearings for large broadcasting groups in April, Murdoch said private, English-language TV stations in Canada had cut local news hours by 37 per cent since 2002. Under CRTC policy, broadcasters must air between seven and 14 hours of local programming per week. The CEP says that lower levels of local programming are part of the reason behind the move of private over-the-air TV stations to reduce their staff by 12 per cent since 2001. The FCC report calls the commission’s public interest obligations system for broadcasters “broken” after court rulings and other regulatory changes have left it “unclear and ineffective.” It says the FCC has only denied four licence renewals in its history on the grounds that public interest programming obligations weren’t met, and hasn’t denied any on those grounds in 30 years. Murdoch said the same is true in Canada, where broadcasters have had their way with the regulator over the past five years. He said quotas contained in broadcasters’ conditions of licence aren’t monitored strictly, and that the requirements for “local” news content should be measured by the number of reporters on the ground. “How many people do they have in these local stations, covering local stories? Because otherwise it’s a charade,” he said. Dwayne Winseck, a communications industry expert and professor at Carleton University’s school of journalism and communication, said in an interview that local news has been “getting gutted” for years, with the emergence of a “new geography of news in Canada where you had a kind of hub and spoke model being implemented at the regional level.” Media chains like CBC and the former Canwest News Service, now Postmedia Network Inc., established reporting hubs in a handful of cities across the country, he said. Winseck said newspapers in Canada haven’t failed due to a lack of advertising, as in the U.S., partly because in Canada advertising hasn’t migrated to the Internet to the same degree. “These guys are going to realize that they are the content engines of the whole kind of media industrial system, and once they get secure in operating across various distribution windows and syndicating their content to other aggregators … new revenue streams for them and they’re going to do OK,” Winseck said. But local broadcast reporting is expected to receive a jolt following BCE Inc.'s acquisition of CTV and Shaw Communications Inc.'s acquisition of Global TV. As part of those acquisitions and their attendant tangible benefits packages, the companies are injecting funding into local news. Bell Canada has committed $28.8 million to enhance CTV’s local news in western markets, and Shaw has allocated $45 million for new morning newscasts in Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax. “It's a very good time to be a broadcast journalist. There's money flooding into the system like never before, thanks to a couple of recent purchases,” Mike Omelus, Shaw's eastern regional director of Global News, said at a conference last month. “Local content is difficult to replicate and you can't get it in many places. Local is going to be a key driver for viewership as the platform models evolve.” The FCC report also suggests that it’s unfair to fault newspapers for their move to online platforms. “From 2005 to 2009, newspapers’ online traffic skyrocketed—from 43.7 million unique monthly users to 70 million, from 1.6 billion monthly page views to 3 billion page views,” the report says. “But in financial terms, that growth was shockingly meaningless. During that period, online advertising revenue—for the entire newspaper industry—grew $716 million, while the print advertising side of the business lost $22.6 billion. This led to the saying in the newspaper world that ‘print dollars were being replaced by digital dimes.’” The report blames targeted advertising and the unbundling of content—where readers can now get box scores instantly delivered through an app rather than buying an entire newspaper that may subsidize city hall reporting, for example—for the decline. While billions of advertising dollars have migrated to the web, advertisers rely less on content to reach eyeballs, the report says. Still, it says local advertising is growing as targeting becomes more sophisticated and could double in the next four years, which would help local media models. The report calls on the U.S. government to direct its billions of advertising dollars—for military recruitment, public health messages and other campaigns—to local rather than national media. “In the past, it may have been more cost effective to buy national rather than local but technological improvements have made it possible to easily buy local media placements on TV, in print and online—so that shifting ads to local news media could prove more cost-effective for taxpayers,” the report says. The FCC report also notes that local public, educational and governmental access (PEG) channels are looking for a “a new mission in an era when self-expression opportunities abound on-line.” It recommends that local access channels teach digital literacy and work to increase the transparency of government institutions. But Cathy Edwards, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations (CACTUS), said local access community channels should be truly independent and run by community members. Edwards said community-run stations reach marginal groups who don’t use YouTube or other new media tools, and that they are an important medium for community communication and reflection. Rather than producing news shows, which require substantial resources, the channels may air an entire community sporting event or host a call-in show with a local politician talking about a community issue, she said. She said CACTUS has told the CRTC that modern, multi-platform community media facilities are needed that can teach digital literacy. “I think there’s a disconnect seeing that the existing PEG channels, modernized, can be these digital centres,” she said. “It’s another reason we’re trying to encourage that the money to go to a community-based model because they can respond to this need for everybody to participate in the digital economy.” mburgess@thewirereport.ca

Canadian broadcasters can take lessons from FCC report on local news, critics say

News | 06/14/2011 7:05 pm EDT

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