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A century ago, newspapers were the only fish in the pond, but the industry began contracting in the 1920s when radio came along. This new medium didn’t kill off newspapers despite predictions that it would. Television likewise didn’t kill off either newspapers or radio. Will the Internet prove the meteor that finally kills off the dinosaurs? It hasn’t yet, and it’s been 30 years.
You have to hand it to the suits at News Media Canada, who have pulled yet another lucrative rabbit out their hat by persuading Ottawa to not only extend its five-year $595 million bailout for two more years, but to more than double its allowed payout per journalist. This cash injection likely avoids disaster in the wake of the government’s ill-advised Online News Act.
It’s not often that the prime minister of Canada gets his lunch handed to him by a small-town journalist, but that’s exactly what happened last week in Sault Ste. Marie, where Justin Trudeau sat down for an interview with Village Media Editor-in-Chief Michael Friscolanti. During the interview, Friscolanti asked Trudeau if passing the Online News Act was the right move.
Native advertising, which is so-called for being designed to look like news, first began to surface in the United States about a decade ago on websites like Vice and Buzzfeed. It was so lucrative that soon even newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times were offering native ads. Jill Abramson called it “the industry’s new digital Frankenstein” in her memoir.
We are being made monkeys of by the hedge funds and private equity firms which have scooped up most of our largest newspapers and turned these formidable weapons of mass propaganda on us. The vulture capitalists are laughing all the way to the bank while we shower them with bailout money and blame Big Tech for not sitting still to be similarly fleeced.