You would have thought that Edward Greenspon had covered the subject. He released his Public Policy Forum report on Canada’s news media recently and we thought that was it. We all hung some crepe for a dying industry, maybe shed a tear and the report was consigned to the recycle bin for things we will not solve.
But now the academics are weighing in. The first were the researchers from the University of British Columbia and University of Ottawa who did Greenspon’s research for his study.
These people should have left all the writing to Greenspon. In the first chapter, they referred to a lack of “VC funding.” After finally concluding that they meant venture capital funding, it was obvious that they had little experience with that breed of vulture.
Despite the limitations of their journalistic skills, they went on to explain why they believe that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio Canada should be refocussed on municipal news across the country. And they wanted it provided under “Creative Commons license.” Since that means free, they want the federal government to pay for it.
What is very annoying in their assessment is that they want the CBC out of digital advertising despite the fact that the CBC has been doing the best job of all its competitors in digital news. Bell, Rogers and Shaw have made a sham of self-promoting news coverage on their major newscasts to the point that they are turning off their viewers and their promotion is bleeding into their digital coverage. The bar is set so low, they make the CBC look good.
It must be only academics who promote Creative Commons licensing. They think that individual citizens and organizations will honour the license conditions and help spread the word. They have never seen the party trick of passing a complex story down a line of people and comparing the changes from the beginning to the end of the line.
It also pays to remember the time in the Ontario Legislature when there would be a lone reporter in the gallery over the speaker’s chair. It was the Canadian Press who covered for all the others. The bar was open.
And the most annoying comment of these academics was that many people they interviewed for the media study referred to the CBC as a “predator.” Everyone becomes a predator when you are fighting to exist.
(Note: As they were research principals for the Public Policy Forum Report, they should be mentioned: Taylor Owen is an Asst. Prof. of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the Univ. of British Columbia and Elizabeth Dubois is an Asst. Prof. in the Dept. of Communications at the Univ. of Ottawa.)
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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry
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