OTTAWA – With ad dollars and attention moving away from traditional media outlets to the subjects everyone knows and frets about (Google, Facebook, et al) and with those same platforms being used to spread lies and hate and disinformation, it’s time to put away the brickbats directed at the CBC and instead pull together, said the public broadcaster’s CEO Catherine Tait.
“Canadian media companies are struggling. Advertisers are increasingly moving their ad dollars to Google and Facebook. Newspapers are folding and broadcasters have had to reduce local news operations,” she said in her Wednesday keynote address to the International Institute of Communications Canadian chapter meeting.
“Unfortunately, there is still no digital business model to support local news in our communities. We need to collaborate to ensure citizens can continue to be informed on what is happening in their community,” she continued, after outlining the initiatives the CBC has undertaken (investments in technology, local news, investigative reporting and kids news, for example).
“In order to ensure trust, we must work together. Large digital companies like Facebook and Google are taking steps to address the information disorder and we welcome that, but we as Canadian news organizations must take steps of our own.”
However, private Canadian media companies often point to the fact the CBC still chases and wins ad dollars, despite their parliamentary appropriation, as one of the reasons they struggle. If the CBC wasn’t selling TV ad time, or ads on its various web portals, that money would flow back to Canadian companies.
Tait wasn’t buying that. “We need to be clear about one thing. Attacking each other is not a solution. Canadians have told us in studies time and again that they value their public broadcaster,” she said.
“We all have financial challenges, but it’s not public broadcasting that is hurting private media in Canada. Making the public broadcaster smaller or weaker won’t stop the Googles and Facebooks of the world.” – Catherine Tait, CBC
“We all have financial challenges, but it’s not public broadcasting that is hurting private media in Canada. Making the public broadcaster smaller or weaker won’t stop the Googles and Facebooks of the world, or the spread of disinformation. It won’t make Canadian media companies more profitable and it certainly won’t mean better services for Canadians. And it won’t rebuild trust. I believe the solution resides in the approach that the UK regulator has called ‘collaborate to compete’. This means working together to find nationwide solutions.”
Later in a scrum with reporters, Tait was asked for some specifics on how Canadian broadcasters can work together since historically that just has not been done, for the most part, among organizations in competition for news – and ad dollars.
“I think we’re all realizing that the days of straight up competition in the domestic market simply don’t make economic sense – and companies do move when economics are involved,” she said.
Tait added the CBC is open to sharing news coverage and perhaps even equipment when it comes to things like “commodity news” (think about a ministerial news conference where all outlets end up with the same footage and same quotes).
“Sending out seven trucks to the same location – is there a way that we can combine our resources so that we’re not being wasteful and that the really important journalism, which is investigative journalism that takes often months or years even, gets the real resources that each of the organizations needs to devote to.”
