It’s about trust. Our relationship with our readers is built on transparency, honesty and integrity. As such, we have launched a trust initiative to tell you who we are and how and why we do what we do. This article is part of that project.
Every day, our journalists are out in our communities looking to tell the stories of the places we call home. Sometimes they’re happy stories, other times sad, and sometimes they’re stories that make you want to yell at your newspaper. Sure, there may be others who will bring you some local news, but when it comes to our local communities, nobody does it better.
Of course, that commitment to local journalism costs money, and to earn that money we sell ads, distribute flyers and work with local businesses to help them to grow and succeed. It’s a community-first model that worked well for a long time.
Unfortunately, those days are gone.
These days, many advertisers have shifted their business away from printed newspapers to online sites such as Google and Facebook. While I could give you a whole bunch of reasons as to why newspapers are a better choice, this isn’t a sales pitch. Nor is it a whiny complaint that those big, bad tech companies are eating all the candy and leaving none for us. This is about how they’re using the local news content, that we’ve produced and paid for, to enrich themselves while giving very little back in return.
Google and Facebook are multi-billion-dollar companies, in spite of the fact that their core services are free for users. They are able to do that through a combination of online ad sales and selling access to data gleaned from their users. However, did you notice what’s missing from their business plans? Neither of them actually produce any original content, meaning that in order for their businesses to work, they need to rely upon others to freely provide their unpaid labour so these companies can earn a profit.
Many willingly make this exchange as having a platform to easily share photos of grandma’s 75th birthday outweighs the small amount of ad revenue that an individual could receive from them. The same cannot be said for newspapers which write the local news that is searched for on Google and shared on Facebook. Here the papers do all the work and incur all the costs, while the duopoly make the money.
It doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?
That’s why Canada’s newspaper publishers have banded together to press for the federal government to adopt the so-called Australian model to allow for those who do the work to share in the rewards of that work. This model would allow news organizations to join together to collectively bargain with Google and Facebook to create an equitable revenue distribution that would not only ensure the continued profitability of those online services, but ensure the ability of newspapers to continue to afford to report the news. Everybody wins. The consumers get the same free services that they currently enjoy, the big tech companies get to continue to earn large profits, and newspaper companies get to continue to producing the news we all rely on.
The sobering truth is that without some sort of agreement between news publishers and Google and Facebook, papers will go out of business, putting an end to the sort of quality journalism that we know is so important in a functioning democracy. And when that happens, you can be sure that neither Google nor Facebook will be swooping in to provide you with the local news that you once received from your local newspaper.
— Gordon Cameron is the group managing editor for Hamilton Community News and a member of Metroland’s trust committee. gocameron@hamiltonnews.com. We welcome your questions and value your comments. Email our trust committee at trust@metroland.com.
It’s about trust. Our relationship with our readers is built on transparency, honesty and integrity. As such, we have launched a trust initiative to tell you who we are and how and why we do what we do. This article is part of that project.
Every day, our journalists are out in our communities looking to tell the stories of the places we call home. Sometimes they’re happy stories, other times sad, and sometimes they’re stories that make you want to yell at your newspaper. Sure, there may be others who will bring you some local news, but when it comes to our local communities, nobody does it better.
Of course, that commitment to local journalism costs money, and to earn that money we sell ads, distribute flyers and work with local businesses to help them to grow and succeed. It’s a community-first model that worked well for a long time.
Unfortunately, those days are gone.
These days, many advertisers have shifted their business away from printed newspapers to online sites such as Google and Facebook. While I could give you a whole bunch of reasons as to why newspapers are a better choice, this isn’t a sales pitch. Nor is it a whiny complaint that those big, bad tech companies are eating all the candy and leaving none for us. This is about how they’re using the local news content, that we’ve produced and paid for, to enrich themselves while giving very little back in return.
Google and Facebook are multi-billion-dollar companies, in spite of the fact that their core services are free for users. They are able to do that through a combination of online ad sales and selling access to data gleaned from their users. However, did you notice what’s missing from their business plans? Neither of them actually produce any original content, meaning that in order for their businesses to work, they need to rely upon others to freely provide their unpaid labour so these companies can earn a profit.
Many willingly make this exchange as having a platform to easily share photos of grandma’s 75th birthday outweighs the small amount of ad revenue that an individual could receive from them. The same cannot be said for newspapers which write the local news that is searched for on Google and shared on Facebook. Here the papers do all the work and incur all the costs, while the duopoly make the money.
It doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?
That’s why Canada’s newspaper publishers have banded together to press for the federal government to adopt the so-called Australian model to allow for those who do the work to share in the rewards of that work. This model would allow news organizations to join together to collectively bargain with Google and Facebook to create an equitable revenue distribution that would not only ensure the continued profitability of those online services, but ensure the ability of newspapers to continue to afford to report the news. Everybody wins. The consumers get the same free services that they currently enjoy, the big tech companies get to continue to earn large profits, and newspaper companies get to continue to producing the news we all rely on.
The sobering truth is that without some sort of agreement between news publishers and Google and Facebook, papers will go out of business, putting an end to the sort of quality journalism that we know is so important in a functioning democracy. And when that happens, you can be sure that neither Google nor Facebook will be swooping in to provide you with the local news that you once received from your local newspaper.
— Gordon Cameron is the group managing editor for Hamilton Community News and a member of Metroland’s trust committee. gocameron@hamiltonnews.com. We welcome your questions and value your comments. Email our trust committee at trust@metroland.com.
It’s about trust. Our relationship with our readers is built on transparency, honesty and integrity. As such, we have launched a trust initiative to tell you who we are and how and why we do what we do. This article is part of that project.
Every day, our journalists are out in our communities looking to tell the stories of the places we call home. Sometimes they’re happy stories, other times sad, and sometimes they’re stories that make you want to yell at your newspaper. Sure, there may be others who will bring you some local news, but when it comes to our local communities, nobody does it better.
Of course, that commitment to local journalism costs money, and to earn that money we sell ads, distribute flyers and work with local businesses to help them to grow and succeed. It’s a community-first model that worked well for a long time.
Unfortunately, those days are gone.
These days, many advertisers have shifted their business away from printed newspapers to online sites such as Google and Facebook. While I could give you a whole bunch of reasons as to why newspapers are a better choice, this isn’t a sales pitch. Nor is it a whiny complaint that those big, bad tech companies are eating all the candy and leaving none for us. This is about how they’re using the local news content, that we’ve produced and paid for, to enrich themselves while giving very little back in return.
Google and Facebook are multi-billion-dollar companies, in spite of the fact that their core services are free for users. They are able to do that through a combination of online ad sales and selling access to data gleaned from their users. However, did you notice what’s missing from their business plans? Neither of them actually produce any original content, meaning that in order for their businesses to work, they need to rely upon others to freely provide their unpaid labour so these companies can earn a profit.
Many willingly make this exchange as having a platform to easily share photos of grandma’s 75th birthday outweighs the small amount of ad revenue that an individual could receive from them. The same cannot be said for newspapers which write the local news that is searched for on Google and shared on Facebook. Here the papers do all the work and incur all the costs, while the duopoly make the money.
It doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?
That’s why Canada’s newspaper publishers have banded together to press for the federal government to adopt the so-called Australian model to allow for those who do the work to share in the rewards of that work. This model would allow news organizations to join together to collectively bargain with Google and Facebook to create an equitable revenue distribution that would not only ensure the continued profitability of those online services, but ensure the ability of newspapers to continue to afford to report the news. Everybody wins. The consumers get the same free services that they currently enjoy, the big tech companies get to continue to earn large profits, and newspaper companies get to continue to producing the news we all rely on.
The sobering truth is that without some sort of agreement between news publishers and Google and Facebook, papers will go out of business, putting an end to the sort of quality journalism that we know is so important in a functioning democracy. And when that happens, you can be sure that neither Google nor Facebook will be swooping in to provide you with the local news that you once received from your local newspaper.
— Gordon Cameron is the group managing editor for Hamilton Community News and a member of Metroland’s trust committee. gocameron@hamiltonnews.com. We welcome your questions and value your comments. Email our trust committee at trust@metroland.com.