CollingwoodToday welcomes letters to the editor. They can be emailed to [email protected], or submitted via the website. Please include your full name, phone number, and town of residence for verification purposes. The following letter was submitted in response to an editorial by VillageMedia's editor-in-chief about the potential implications of Canada's Online News Act.
Editor,
The Online News Act is a good idea because its purpose is to maintain a strong Canadian news media.
The big tech giants, Google and Meta, have been pirating news from the Canadian news media and this is just plain wrong. Producing the news is a business that requires people, infrastructure, and money. News media journalists earn their livings by gathering the news, fact-checking and presenting their opinions. We can trust the news and it's critical to our democracy.
The money comes mainly from advertising and in a small part, subscriptions. With the growth of social media, advertising is being diverted from the news media to social media. As well fewer people are paying for subscriptions. These changes have put the news media business under financial stress with the result that many organizations have had to close outlets, reduce journalistic and editorial staff, and thereby cut back on the news.
All that Bill C-18 asks Google and Meta to do is to negotiate agreements with the Canadian news media companies to pay for their use of the news. Some Canadian news media already have agreements with Google and Meta. This will reduce financial stress and help to maintain a strong news-producing industry. It will take a while for all this to play out, but we’re on the right track. In the interim, it’s easy to get the news online from digital newspapers and broadcast media (e.g., Collingwood Today, Globe and Mail, CBC, CTV).
Nick Pearson
Collingwood, Ont.
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