Many of you reading this may be wondering why all the hullabaloo around the Online News Act (Bill C-18) which comes into force at the end of this year. Why are Google and Meta threatening to block Canadian news and what does it all mean to the Western Wheel and its readers?
The first thing to know is that media organizations of all stripes have depended on advertising revenue to pay the bills and the wages of journalists for decades. That’s true for most subscriber publications and all free newspapers like the Wheel.
That business model came under threat with the arrival of the digital platforms which could offer advertisers targeted populations of consumers who, willing (or unwittingly), share every intimate detail of their personal lives with the platforms in return for the ‘free’ use of Google’s Search and Maps, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, etc.
If you’re a company selling baby formula, they will target your ads only to mothers with children under 12 months and within a short drive of your store’s location. The next time you’re online, think of yourselves as cattle in the pasture eating all that ‘free’ grass under the watchful eyes of Google and Meta ‘ranchers’ fattening you for market. You know the saying: If it’s free, you’re the product.
We’re now at the point where these two companies, Google and Meta, share 80 per cent of the digital advertising market and control the process of buying and selling in that market. That includes advertising that appears alongside the news created by journalists, whom they don’t pay. We pay them, Canada’s news media pays them. Except that we can’t anymore, at least not in the numbers we once did. The dramatic decline in media revenues have cost thousands of journalism jobs in Canada and hundreds of thousands across the world.
The Online News Act is modelled on similar legislation in Australia. As it was passing through the legislative process, Google and Meta made similar threats before backing down and doing deals with Australian publishers for their news content. Democracies across the world are considering their own legislation, determined, like Canada and Australia, to save local journalism before it’s too late. There’s a reason why the first order of business for any serious autocrat is to take control of the country’s media.
The Online News Act is meant to level the playing field between the digital platforms and media organizations. It will force the platforms to negotiate with media for fair compensation for their news appearing online. While the large media players are likely to negotiate with Google and Meta on their own, the Western Wheel will join hundreds of independent news organizations represented by News Media Canada to collectively negotiate a deal. We’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, you can rest assured we will continue our coverage of this community just as we have for the past 47 years.
Editor’s note: Great West Media owns the Western Wheel. Great West Media CEO Duff Jamison is a member of the News Media Canada board of directors. Vice president Evan Jamison is president of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association. Both have been engaged with this legislative process for the past three years.
