Yes, This Has Been A Month of Very Bad Media News. But We Still Have Reasons to be Hopeful
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Ruth Young
On March 20, 2020, Buzzfeed News (RIP) ran a simple but powerful headline: “The Coronavirus Is A Media Extinction Event.” According to then-Buzzfeed News editor Craig Silverman, though journalists were “performing an essential business” and both readership and subscriptions were on the rise, advertising had all but dried up. The decline in revenue would likely be worse than the 2008 financial crisis, when newspapers saw a 19% drop in revenue, and many outlets would not survive. Then, a laundry list of cuts: “alternative weeklies in the US and Canada have laid off staff and curtailed print editions. In the UK, the Time Out and Stylist magazines announced a temporary halt to print editions. So did a group of 19 local papers in Michigan, and one in Rhode Island. In New Orleans, the merged Times-Picayune and Advocate newspapers furloughed a 10th of their staff and have the rest working four day weeks. A newspaper in Vermont laid off 20 of its 42 staffers, and papers in West Virginia, California, and Florida also had layoffs. Even the New York Times warned in early March that its ad revenue would take a hit. On Monday, Digiday reported that 88% of legacy and digital publishers surveyed expect to miss their business targets this year.”
Back then, this analysis made a lot of sense. Everyone was uncertain about pretty much everything—but as every journalist can (and will) tell you, media is in crisis because of ever-declining revenues, so it seemed pretty likely that a global pandemic would only make things worse.
And honestly, it still kind of makes sense now. Aside from a relatively good 2021, when U.S. outlets saw the lowest number of media layoffs in years, we’ve been inundated with bad news about the media industry. This year has seen a record number of layoffs in the U.S.—at least 17,436, according to Axios—including 13% of the journalists at the L.A. Times and the last remaining staff writers at National Geographic. And things are not much better in Canada. On June 14, Bell Media announced it was laying off 1,300 employees and shuttering six radio stations and two foreign bureaus in response to the “prolonged advertising slump, fracturing audiences for traditional TV news and expanding tech rivals” media organizations have been struggling with for years. Then, on June 23, the company asked the CRTC to “drop the spending requirements and dedicated airtime imposed on the company's local television news programming,” because it has been losing “tens of millions of dollars” producing and broadcasting local news, according to CBC. As of this week, both Google and Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta have confirmed their companies would be “end[ing] news availability in Canada” due to Bill C-18, which mandates tech companies pay news outlets for the content they host. Functionally, this means links to news outlets’ content won’t show up on Facebook, Instagram or in Google search, which will likely be pretty devastating for any outlet that’s publishing digitally (that is, almost all of us). Oh yes, and then there’s the news that Toronto Star parent company Nordstar and Postmedia are in talks to merge, in “a bid to create greater scale so they can respond to the ‘existential threat’ facing the media industry”—which would almost certainly lead to layoffs, diminished coverage and weird political implications (the Star is pretty liberal, while Postmedia skews conservative and tends to platform the likes of MRA fave Jordan Peterson and residential school denier Barbara Kay).
There’s also longer-term bad news, including the slow demise of lifestyle media in this country, the shrinking budgets, the rise of AI and its attendant devaluation of creative work in general and the fact that layoffs and hiring freezes disproportionately affect people of colour and white women. I’m a hopeful person—and I’m about to spend the next several hundred words making an argument for why you should be, too—but even I can’t deny that things don’t look very good in media.
But what if our premise is wrong? What if the problem isn’t fractured audiences, declining revenue, a business model that we’ve known doesn’t work for like, two decades now? What if those are symptoms, and the problem is actually what we’re trying to save, and who we’re expecting to do it?
How did we get here, exactly?
Don’t get me wrong—I am just as prone to industry-specific pessimism as anyone else. When I first started in magazines, Chatelaine attracted so much ad revenue that we published two October issues, and while neither of them were as hefty as a Vogue September issue at its peak, they were still pretty big. We paid everyone $1/word, and ‘star’ writers more. We had busy days (and nights, especially during production), but it also seemed like people mostly had just one job. And while I personally didn’t experience the boozy lunches and taxi chits more senior editors remembered fondly, we weren’t that far removed from those seemingly glamorous days.
… Things have changed since then, to put it mildly. I definitely can’t cover every single nuance of today’s media landscape in one newsletter, but here’s the Cole’s Notes version: Conventional media wisdom says that the rise of the internet broke journalism, and tbh, it definitely did played a role in creating the mess we find ourselves in now. Pre-internet, the media revenue model mostly depended on selling advertising based on the size of our audiences. To be blunt, the content we created wasn’t the product; our audiences were. But the internet changed that entire dynamic. I still remember an exec at one of the media companies where I worked early in my career explaining how the industry didn’t take the internet seriously when it first emerged; we’d post some of our stories on our websites for free as an afterthought, but it took us too long to invest in that space, and we never taught readers that they should pay for online content. At the same time, we had way more competition for audiences’ attention, so readership declined, and since advertisers could now reach their customers directly through their own websites, social media channels, etc., they no longer needed to rely on us to reach people—or at least, they were incentivized to split their budgets between traditional advertising and their other marketing efforts. So: there were fewer people to sell to advertisers, who were less interested in using us to reach people anyway, which meant we had less money to work with. Cue layoffs, and a desperate search for new revenue streams (remember when the Star’s parent company announced it was launching an online casino?).
Re-reading that, the demise of traditional media feels kind of inevitable, and also impossible to solve. There are always going to be new demands on people’s attention (hello, TikTok), and it’s hard to get people to pay for content, especially when they’re used to getting it for free. Conventional media wisdom also says there’s also a limit to who will pay (even the most mass market publication doesn’t appeal to everybody) and what they’ll pay, all of which means it’s not likely audience revenue could ever really replace advertising revenue for every outlet.
But there’s more to this story. First off, it’s not that journalism can’t be profitable anymore. It’s that it used to be more profitable, but those profit margins have shrunk. According to a 1994 article in American Journalism Review about why newspapers made so much money (I know), at the time, “newspaper operating profit margins (the percent of each dollar of revenue remaining after operating expenses are deducted) ranged from a low of 7.1 percent at Times Mirror Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore's Sun, Newsday, the Harford Courant and smaller newspapers, to a high of 34.6 percent at the Buffalo News, the sole newspaper owned by Berkshire Hathaway.” Put another way, “these companies’ newspapers kept 15 cents out of every dollar they took in before taxes. By contrast, the Fortune 500 companies together earned about 5 cents.” By 2001, the average newspaper’s profit margin was 22% to 29%. Today, it’s about 20%. For comparison, the profit margin for a full-service restaurant is between 3% and 5%. So: it’s not that there’s no money in media! It’s that media conglomerates would prefer to make more, ideally with year-over-year growth. That’s not new, obviously, but since media companies have increasingly looked to investment from venture capital firms as a source of funding, there’s even more pressure to deliver growth, which further incentivizes cost-cutting and exploitative labour practices.
The future of Canadian media is independent
Also, audiences are still interested in journalism. Last fall, I had a long conversation with Nicola Hamilton, a graphic designer and art director who recently founded Issues, an indie magazine retailer on Dundas West in Toronto. (As an aside, if you like magazines, you will love Issues.) Technically, we were talking for a Club Friday Q&A, but we spent a lot of our conversation catching up and chatting about the state of Canadian journalism. Refreshingly, and totally unlike most of the conversations I have with fellow media folks, Nicola firmly rejected the idea that print was dead or dying, and the general hopelessness that tends to pop up whenever we start talking about our industry. And she had the numbers to back it up!!! (Journalists love evidence, okay?) Specifically, she showed me a presentation she’d recently given featuring charts tracking the number of magazines in Canada and the U.S., and the numbers of magazine readers in each country. And wouldn’t you know, those numbers have remained relatively steady over the past 20 years? Yes, publications fold—but new ones pop up every year. What’s more, if you take the long view, a pretty consistent number of people still want to read the stories we’re telling.
But the thing that really makes me feel hopeful is the small but growing independent media community that’s taking root in Canada. The people behind outlets like the West End Phoenix, The Narwhal, The Local, The RepresentASIAN Project, The T-Zone, Sisimag, Serviette, Geist, Maisonneuve, This Magazine and Friday Things, among many others, are producing award-winning journalism on a variety of topics, exploring different business models and helping one another figure out how to actually do this in a way that aligns with our values—and doesn’t repeat the mistakes legacy publications have made. And it’s not just the outlets themselves. In her Club Friday Q&A, Nicola talked about wanting to make Issues into a hub for this community, saying, “I'm hoping that we become a bit of a catalyst, to be honest. I'm hoping that the exposure to what is happening in the independent media elsewhere in the world sparks inspiration for people here who have an idea for a magazine but haven’t realized that it's doable. I hope that we can be a bit of a connector for folks, like an art director who really wants to start something on their own but doesn't know where to start from a writing perspective, and we can connect them to a customer who really wants to do something themselves and comes at it from an editorial perspective.” (Can confirm, this is exactly what is happening.)
It's also not just about the journalism; so many of the conversations I’ve been having recently have been about what kind of businesses we want to run, and often, they’re the exact opposite of the big publications where we got our starts. We want to tell the stories that matter most to us, especially about the communities and people who don’t usually get mainstream media attention. We want to be less tethered to a 24-hour news cycle, and more thoughtful in how we tell stories. Also? We want to pay people well. That topic came up a few weeks ago at the first-ever in-person Friday Things event, a panel called The Future of Canadian Media is Independent. Nicola, Sisimag founder and culture writer Tayo Bero and health- and equity-focused reporter Olivia Bowden and I commiserated about the hard parts of trying to build a career in Canadian journalism, our respective journeys to media entrepreneurship and the way we want to see this industry evolve. One point that Tayo made brilliantly (and which she reiterated later in her newsletter) is that, even if we lack the budgets of our more established counterparts, we need to pay people something. But it actually goes beyond just the rate we can afford to pay writers, photographers and illustrators. “What young writers need is money. And mentors. And jobs. And benefits. And employers who are invested in their growth,” she wrote. And that? Is us. So, if we’re going to make media outlets, we have to think about more than copy and art direction and marketing. We have to figure out how we can create sustainable, equitable working conditions, so we can do things differently than the mostly old, mostly white, mostly ultra-rich men who run the rest of Canadian media.
No one thinks it’s going to be easy—but it doesn’t have to be so hard
That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. For a long time, I never really questioned the idea that success meant robust, consistent growth, but I’m increasingly convinced that this isn’t the approach for me—and maybe shouldn’t be the approach any of us are taking, indie or not. Going back to what I said at the beginning of this newsletter about what we’re trying to save and who’s going to do it, it feels pretty clear that there are ways to run sustainable, profitable media outlets. They just can’t be conglomerates that are constantly scaling to deliver larger and larger profits.
All of that being said, I’m not trying to pretend that that’s an easy switch to make, or that indie publishing is better than, or a replacement for, legacy publications. I am quite open about the fact that Friday Things still costs me more money than it makes, so I personally depend on those legacy pubs as clients so I can pay my bills. And, I know that I can only make this brand what it is because of the opportunities and experience I got at those outlets—for the first decade of my career, I was able to learn from brilliant writers, editors, fact-checkers and copy editors at some of the biggest magazines in Canada with the increasingly rare comfort of knowing I could expect a too-small, but nonetheless regular paycheque to land in my bank account every two weeks. It’s also really hard to run an independent publication! I miss the resources and infrastructure I used to have access to every single day, not to mention editorial budgets that aren’t self-funded and colleagues to collaborate with. I even kind of miss meetings.
But I really do believe that if there’s a version of media that’s dying, it’s one that focuses on generating revenue at the expense of the content it’s creating, and the people who actually do the hard work of creating that content. I also really do believe there’s another way.
Maybe I’m being too optimistic. Maybe I’m just saying this because I need to hear it myself. (Entirely possible!) But even though this month has been one bad news story after another, I still think Canadian media has a future. I just also think we’re going to have to make it ourselves.
And Did You Hear About…
The replies to this Twitter thread. (I… am not sure how to feel about how many I agree with.) (But not the top reply, just for the record.)
Rolling Stone’s oral history of Miguel’s “Sure Thing,” which became a mainstream hit 13 years after its original release because a sped-up version went viral on TikTok. Sort of relatedly, this week the NYT profiled Meghan Trainor and how she has used the platform to reignite her career.
How Frog and Toad became queer anti-capitalist cottagecore icons.
This thoughtful take on Lewis Capaldi’s Glastonbury set and disability in the music industry.
The Cut’s ode to messy celebrity divorces.
Also: I love this song.
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