First, the news. There’s not a lot left. We’re misled in Toronto because we still have four functioning newspapers but everywhere, newsrooms are pared or closed, journalists fired or bought out, stories go untold. This is wretched for democratic health. Other things, like shattered careers or profits, matter less. It happened because ads, the main source of news media income, migrated massively to internet giants like Google and Facebook. So the government has introduced a bill (C-18) modelled on an Australian law, requiring big platforms that conscript stories from news outlets to “compensate journalists when they use their work.” News media did an often wretched, but also often enough useful, job of filling that need, and to do it you need big resources, not piddly ones. No number of earnest, honest journalists with independent voices on Substack can properly dig into urgent subjects like Doug Ford and the Developers. They can comment on those but can’t generate them.
