My first media job was at CBC Radio in Toronto, at the show Morningside with Peter Gzowski. The job was booking interview guests, cold-calling smart people who, as a colleague once put it, “had lives more interesting than our own.” The office on Jarvis Street was shabby-chic and not without charm: manual typewriters, books and reports jammed onto shelves, stacks of audio tape in wire baskets, a hubcap-sized ashtray for the host, and mice.
This was the early 1990s, just before the announcement of $140 million in budget cuts. Soon after came a process known as “creative renewal.” For the brass, it meant panicked restructuring in the face of technological change, doing more with less. For staff, it sounded like something the Soviets used to announce when politburo members were poisoned. I asked a senior producer what it meant. They’re going to change the logo, he said. And fire people. Both came to pass. A streamlined “exploding pizza” logo, new letterhead, and 400 jobs out the door. What to do, I asked. Retire, my senior producer suggested, not entirely joking. I was twenty-nine years old.
The big threat was technology. We were terrified of “the death star,” or direct delivery of satellite TV to homes by way of grey dishes no bigger than a fruit platter. You still spot them in old neighbourhoods or at the cottage. They were affordable. Cable companies were losing their minds over lost revenue. The CBC warned, breathlessly, that “TV is about to change, and quickly.” For journalism, the risk was clear. We’d all switch to flashy American channels and leave Canadian content behind. The trend was always toward bigger as better: media that offered something for everyone, no matter where they lived. News beamed from space.
When more federal cutbacks came ($127 million in 1996, with up to 2,500 jobs lost shortly after), they hit radio and local newsrooms just as hard as network TV. But the CBC survived, like a turtle flipped right side up. The death-star threat fizzled once the internet evolved. In 1993, CBC News began the long, bureaucratic march to “digital first,” another buzz phrase that signalled old media, like radio and television, were on their way out. As things stand, the CBC plans to be fully digital in twenty years, if it survives that long under an expected Conservative government.
News runs on a basic narrative: villains and heroes, an Aristotelian three-act structure. Observers now put the media business well into act three, near the desperate end. The villain, again, is technology. The majority of ad dollars that powered newspapers for generations have been hoovered up by platforms like Google and Meta and X. Media consultant Matthew Goldstein, writing in the Press Gazette, doesn’t mince words when describing what’s coming: an “extinction-level event” for news publishers and broadcasters. In 2023, Bell Canada Enterprises eliminated 1,300 jobs, including a 6 percent cut at Bell Media, which owns CTV. Global News in Canada slashed thirty-five jobs in 2024, and the following month, its parent, Corus Entertainment, announced it was laying off another 300 people. By now, vis-à-vis income and job security, it makes more sense to be a poet or blacksmith than a journalist.
What if this so-called “extinction-level event” isn’t the end of journalism but just the end of a certain kind of journalism? It’s a crisis, yes—for the people losing their jobs, for the old-school media barons, for the hedge funds that thought they could turn news into just another asset class. But for journalism as an institution? Maybe not. The old business model is broken. But another is taking shape: non-profit, or even low-profit of the kind that could make tech entrepreneurs nervous. It uses, but doesn’t depend on, public funding. The something-for-everyone ethos of big media now looks unsustainable; what more and more news consumers will want are smaller media outlets, with smaller scope, and lots of them.
It’s crucial to note that, for nonprofits, the business model is a means to keep the lights on and pay living wages to reporters and creatives. What unites them is a vision of journalism that trumps profit: community comes first. Their readers, they know, don’t care about media hand wringing and the doom-and-gloom “future of journalism” debates. They care about where and how they live, what it costs, who’s left out, who’s telling the truth, and who’s lying.
After all, power benefits most from a “national conversation” which minimizes local interests in favour of oversized, vague narratives, curated by corporate media or what’s left of it. Democracy, meantime, benefits from more local news.
That news ever made money in the first place was a “historic accident,” Sue Gardner says. Gardner was the executive director of Wikimedia Foundation from 2007 to 2014 and, at one time, headed up the CBC’s online service. “It’s not like Israel and Palestine have anything to do with somebody selling a sofa,” she says. “They don’t naturally belong together.” But the publishers of journalism had an expressed commitment to an informed citizenry, and that citizenry also bought furniture. So when newspapers invested in overseas bureaus or investigative stories, they did so for prestige—“because it made them feel good,” says Gardner—not because it made financial sense.
Where did the money go? The short answer is social media demanded more content, to drive more traffic. Legacy media obliged, shifting their focus from serving readers to feeding social platforms—betting on them as a pathway to ad revenue. Then the platforms changed the game. They realized they could cut out the middleman, selling their vast audiences directly to advertisers. The advertisers, in turn, dropped the newspapers and broadcasters. “Now,” says Gardner, “there’s no revenue model for supporting newsrooms of the scope and size and scale that used to exist.”
According to Pew Research in the US, advertising and circulation revenue for newspapers was $49.3 billion (US) in 2006. Six years later, it was down to $25.3 billion (US), nearly half. The estimate for 2022 was $9.8 billion (US). In Canada, according to Statistics Canada, newspaper advertising revenue dropped 9.8 percent from 2020 to 2022. Google and Meta were the new collective death star. Only this time, the news media aimed to play the same game, by mimicking social media values: chasing traffic, baiting clicks, going viral. At this point, newspapers and broadcasters had lost some sense of the community they were serving and were putting their eggs in the basket of metrics.
In her 2021 book All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists, Rutgers University professor Caitlin Petre recounts a 2012 Gawker initiative where a rotating staffer was tasked with “traffic-whoring” duties—pushing content designed to attract the most clicks without crossing into pornography or overt racism. Videos of Burger King bathroom brawls, for example, proved especially effective. It all came down to economics: more views meant higher ad rates. By 2017, even the CBC had installed flat-screen monitors near elevators to display real-time audience engagement via Chartbeat—an “optimization tool” that reinforced the illusion that demographic math equalled sound public broadcasting.
But just because people were clicking didn’t mean they read what they clicked, nor that they cared where it came from. They didn’t care whether it was good journalism or bad—or even true. And they weren’t paying attention to, or clicking on, ads. The click-through rate (how often users clicked on advertising) was only 1.59 percent on Facebook in 2024. Metrics measured the online equivalent of people stopping to tie their shoes.
Another problem is well known: when you chase clicks, you soon find news value in stories about Dancing with the Stars over, say, the notwithstanding clause. In my time at the CBC (I left in 2004 but still freelance for it), we mostly judged engagement by instinct and what we could gather by phone, calling sources around the country and getting to know regional differences first hand, not by blinking at monitors where a story about “12 exotic pets you’ve probably never heard of” counts as triumph. Editorial decisions were human, not machine based.
Clickbait and complexity do not travel well together, although there is an argument that they impose a kind of democracy on the process of publishing. Should we ignore what lots of people seem to like? It’s a sound argument if that’s how metrics are being used in newsrooms, but Dean Starkman, who has reported extensively on journalism, has a darker assessment: metrics have led to hamster-wheel reporting. Unlike the “12 exotic pets” story, which is an eye-catching one-off, the hamster wheel is a constant rewrite of the same story, over time, with no added value: a journalist live-blogs a press conference, later adds video, then interviews another journalist who was at the conference and adds different video, and so on.
Sadly, nothing happened at the press conference, but there are, over the day, a dozen updated stories. “[It] isn’t speed,” he writes in Columbia Journalism Review, “it’s motion for motion’s sake. Volume without thought.”
The outlets less bound by metrics and the old business models are the ones, I think, most likely to succeed in the long run: good editors appreciate data, it’s true. They want to see their numbers. They want to know they have readers and viewers. But then good editors interpret data and work it into their subjective decisions about what stories to tell. Clickbait may generate more traffic in the short run, but stories on homeless encampments may show more consistent engagement over time and therefore call for deeper reporting.
Consider The Local, an online publication in Toronto whose focus is right there in the title: local news, in detail, beyond just crime reporting and restaurant reviews.
Their origin story is unconventional. Tai Huynh, as creative director of OpenLab at Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN, the group of teaching hospitals), launched a study of neighbourhoods like Thorncliffe Park, a collection of high-rises of mostly new Canadians. The study involved journalists, documentary filmmakers, and storytellers, with the goal of informing the city on how education, income, and other factors affect health.
From this light-bulb moment The Local grew: in September of 2018, Huynh pitched The Local as a community, non-profit news outlet to a group of potential funders, including the Wellesley Institute (a Toronto charity), the YMCA, and United Way. The idea was to focus on the corners of a huge city mostly ignored by legacy media, retuning the UHN project to journalism (Huynh has an MBA from York University and a master of design from Ontario College of Art and Design University but no previous experience in news). “We wanted local journalism to not just thrive, but be great,” he wrote in The Philanthropist last May. “We wanted to jettison the ad-dependent business model, but avoid putting up a paywall, because residents should be able to freely access it. It was a compelling cause, and a terrible business idea that only charities could find a reason to support.”
Which they did: $100,000 a year, for three years, in start-up money. “A terrible business idea”: it’s a joke, but it betrays a near-Freudian admission of a simple fact: advertising, if it’s available, pays for journalism. It pays salaries and production costs. Would Huynh turn down a massive payday from Tesla if it were willing to advertise in The Local ? It’s a hypothetical example, but most media outlets would take the money and use it well. The trouble is, the money has gone elsewhere. In any case, if your focus is local, the bills are by definition smaller than at the big outfits. At the CBC, $100,000 won’t cover a single middle manager’s salary.
According to Huynh, the funders made it clear: they were not interested in saving journalism but in “strengthen[ing] communities,” and so that became The Local ’s goal too. Now it includes an editorial staff of four and a large freelance pool. In 2021, The Local qualified federally as a “registered journalism organization”—or RJO—which means it can issue receipts to motivated readers who opt to donate. They have 50,000 readers a month and are approaching 1,000 donors, who account for 15 percent of a $450,000 operating budget.
It’s small change compared to the budgets of giants like the Toronto Star, but within The Local, there’s a model that might inform the future of the news business. It knows the communities it serves by spending time in them. It has reported deeply, for example, on Toronto’s crumbling school system, where belt tightening has led to mice and inadequate ventilation systems and windows that don’t close. Last August, it told the story of how the city was using environmental projects as cover to displace homeless camps: tree trimming, installing “pollinator gardens” on church property—green initiatives on the surface but with the not-so-hidden agenda to get rid of the tents. The stories require attention, though the writing is fluid and the design attractive. “You can’t cheat your content,” says Huynh. What they’ve given up with this model is immediacy. The Local does not do daily news.
Just 5 percent of Canada’s digital local news outlets are nonprofits—only thirteen out of 269, according to Project Oasis, a database of digital news organizations. Among them are The Local, BC-based The Narwhal, Montreal’s La Converse, and Vancouver’s The Tyee, now in its twenty-third year. By contrast, 24 percent of online local outlets in the US are nonprofits.
The Narwhal, founded in 2018 on a $400,000 budget by Emma Gilchrist, a former environment reporter at the Calgary Herald, has no paywall, no advertising, and is, like The Local, an RJO. It has a staff of twenty-eight and their current operating budget is $3.6 million, 42 percent of which comes from readers who buy memberships (of the 8,500 readers who contribute, I’m one). Grants from fifteen different foundations make up 30 percent of revenue, and a federal labour tax credit of $600,000 underwrites labour costs to the tune of $29,000 per full-time journalist. They share a reporter with the Winnipeg Free Press and have done co-operative pieces (where two outlets print the same story) with the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the Weather Network. “The thing with the non-profit model,” says Gilchrist, “is it’s all based around impact, right? Putting up a hard paywall, you’re going to have less people that are reading the work, so we wanted as many people as possible to read it.”
The non-profit model isn’t new, but what’s unusual—given the mania for consolidation, competitiveness, traffic—is that The Narwhal and The Local aren’t afraid of being modest. Maybe your daily news diet includes the local CBC or the Toronto Star newsletter. But imagine this: instead of relying on a legacy operation for news, one pulling out all the stops for ad sales or hedge-fund revenue, you collect, on your devices, The Narwhal or High Country News (which covers western US) or The Tyee. None casts a wide net: they are all intensely local or tight focused, having done the hard work of figuring out their audiences.
For The Narwhal, that audience includes diehard environmentalists but also energy-industry types and people invested locally in stories about mining and agriculture, including those with jobs at stake. The Narwhal, says Gilchrist, has made it a value not to wave an environmental flag at every conflict but to report fairly, “to emerge,” she says, “from the cracks of a broken relationship between ordinary people and the journalists who serve them.” This means, for example, reporting on climate change from inside a coal workers’ union hall. As with The Local ’s mandate for reporting on complex issues, it makes for long pieces.
Are we looking at a renaissance of long-form journalism? We’ve been told our attention spans have been worn dull by social media, and that media resources have become scarce, with layoffs and closures, and yet here we have nonprofits making a go of it with long and deeply reported stories, some of which (see The Narwhal ’s nuts-and-bolts story, co-published with the Toronto Star, on the political dance behind Ontario premier Doug Ford’s attempt to open the Greenbelt to development) call for a comfortable chair and a stiff drink.
There’s a “fork in the road” in journalism, Gilchrist says. One way is to invest in quality long-form content with arresting visuals, and the other is to shelve quality in favour of bright and shiny objects that catch the attention of many but offer little in the way of context. “Not feeding the outrage algorithm,” says Gilchrist, “not over-simplifying”—or, as Huynh at The Local would put it, publishing what strengthens community rather than what simply distracts it.
As for public money acting as some kind of saviour in tough times, it makes sense: journalism is more than just a business; it’s a utility, like fresh water and hydro. But Gilchrist makes it clear that “we never felt we had a God-given right to subsidies, or money from tech companies, for that matter. We try to be mentally prepared for those going away.”
Like The Local, The Narwhal isn’t designed for real-time coverage. For day-to-day reporting on crime, traffic, and municipal affairs, start-ups like Overstory Media offer a compelling model. Overstory, which owns online papers like Capital Daily in Victoria, Burnaby Beacon, and Fraser Valley Current, among others, once seemed intent on ruining a good idea by over-leveraging itself (it promised to be the “Chipotle of news”). But according to Tyler Olsen, who runs Fraser Valley Current, Overstory now aims for “simple sustainability” and “to have money to gently grow.”
It’s a safe bet they’re not teaching “gentle growth” at the Rotman business school in Toronto, but it’s the smart move right now. Fraser Valley Current, launched in March 2021, puts out a free newsletter every day. Olsen has two staff reporters and 30,000 subscribers and launched a $100-a-year membership program: “a tip-your-waiter type of thing,” he says. Currently, 1,256 people have signed up.
“News outlets need to be pretty focused on what readers find value in, not pursue the latest baubles,” says Olsen. “And they need to do that fairly, rigorously, and judiciously. I think we’re going to see news outlets stopping trying to be the one-stop shop for everything.” Recent Fraser Valley Current stories include analysis of glass recycling in Abbotsford, aging schools that are “old and seismically unstable,” funding for mobile doctors’ offices—all stories which would go unreported if Fraser Valley Current didn’t exist. They sell ads. “Not a lot,” Olsen says.
The challenge for local news is in human resources: not enough journalists with craft and chops and either with roots in small-town Canada or willing to live outside the big cities. “A lot of reporters left for other careers and other jobs” after the crash of 2008, Olsen says. “The local news model is dependent on producing a high quantity of high-quality work,” he says. “It takes a certain amount of productivity that is not super easy to find and not super easy to train up.”
As for full-on nonprofits like The Local, “I’m highly skeptical that they can provide the scale needed to replace disappearing local news in smaller cities without huge professional classes,” Olsen says, “where there aren’t a bunch of super rich people and so the survival of news outlets depends on getting self-interested people and business owners to advertise.” Places like Abbotsford, Lethbridge, and Brandon would not have the donor base to support a news organization that invests in the kind of labour that regularly generates long-form, investigative journalism.
For many small-scale, local operations, the old advertising model actually still works: while the big companies are fishing for sizable catch at the social networks, there are still bed frames and cars to sell to living, breathing people in local small towns. One old-school online outlet called Castanet publishes rural BC news and has over twenty journalists on staff who make $45,000 to $70,000 a year in salary. The website, whose design looks straight out of 1995, is loaded with local ads for Watkin Motors (Ford), Vernon Wellness Fair, WorkBC Job-A-Palooza—clients with no interest in or reason for advertising on Google or Meta—and stories like “Jail For Man-Purse Pistol” and “Kittens Found On Highway.” Everything is aimed at people who want to know what’s going on today at city council or with wildfires: survival information, nothing fancy.
The outlet allnovascotia.com, which started in 2001, has 13,000 subscribers and a full paywall. It covers local politics and business, with newsrooms in cities across the Atlantic provinces: again, the reach is deliberately limited and local, not one-size-fits-all.
I can’t remember a golden age of journalism, old as I am. It’s always been in decline, at least when it comes to economics. Layoffs were always around the corner. I’ve been asked by parents if it makes sense for their kids to go to journalism school, and it calls for a throat clearing. Sure, I say, the world needs storytellers to make sense of the place in light of a corrupt and corrupting manufacturing of consent by those who lie about “fake news.” Just don’t expect job security.
When it comes to the future of journalism in Canada, however, I’ll follow Tai Huynh and declare that its future is irrelevant compared with the future of the communities it has served and will serve. This means certain legacy media can be made to cede ground by news consumers being more selective and opting for the smaller players—nonprofits or near-profits—over the big ones. This also means the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, Postmedia’s network of print papers, and the CBC need to reassess their relationships with their audiences: Are they businesses competing for attention, advertising, and government subsidies? If so, the business model is broken, and they will decline or disappear.
Even the CBC, which for over fifty years understood this country better than any government that funded it, has lost its way, with its focus on the technologies of delivery, on metrics, on narrow, academic ideas of Canadian identity, and on its own bloated bureaucracy. It is facing an existential crisis that could hit if the government changes. They don’t have a backup plan.
From the fertile soil of old media will grow nonprofits, or employee co-ops (such as the UK’s New Internationalist) designed to be more embedded in the lives of the people they cover, and grounded old business–style networks of online papers like Castanet and Fraser Valley Current, which can draw revenue from local businesses that have no reason to shift their advertising to big platforms. Thinking smaller is, oddly, what good editors do best. Detail, minutiae, the hidden cogs that drive machinery: editors are trained to sniff them out. What editors are not so good at is guessing clickbait. Do iguanas make good pets? The community doesn’t much care, really.
Meantime, publishers would do well to delink from social media. Meta, as widely reported, no longer allows the sharing of Canadian news—a huffy-pouty move in response to Bill C-18, which called on both Meta and Google to offset local losses in ad revenue by paying into a fund to support Canadian journalists. Google agreed and will invest $100 million in a fund. In any case, in 2024, Facebook (part of Meta) said it would “deprecate” its own news tab, once a go-to space for politics and business stories, in favour of more user-generated video or chatter.
X (formerly Twitter) is bloated with disinformation, undermining its value for amplifying credible reporting despite its reach. According to Nieman Lab, TikTok, designed to keep users within its platform, is “hostile” to news. Finally, the marketing firm Gartner found in 2023 that 53 percent of consumers felt that social media had “decayed” in quality, compared to the previous year, and that they were “actively trying to limit their use” of such apps.
When it comes to state funding for Canadian media, as Gilchrist says, the tap can be shut off at any time. It only makes sense to plan to live without it—through donations, either institutional or individual. But it would make sense for a public pool of money, not unlike the Google $100 million oops-we-stole-your-revenue initiative, to underwrite journalists’ salaries. There is already a $58.8 million federal Local Journalism Initiative that does just that, but it could—and should—be bigger. This kind of fund could also save a scaled-down, all-news-and-information CBC to preserve the storytelling and visual talent in its newsrooms. It would be the kind of creative renewal that matters more than another new exploding-pizza logo.
