The Feds Beat Down New Innovative Media

A senior editor at the Ottawa Citizen kindly said that the newspaper considers The Bulldog its chief competitor.

The Citizen top brass are wrong about that though at least one of them was nice enough to pay this publication that compliment. The Citizen’s chief competition is CBC Ottawa and CTV Ottawa which have taken over from the Citizen as the best sources of local news among conventional media. And they’re free … like The Bulldog.

The Bulldog has been a start-up for 15 years now and its readership has skyrocketed from nothing to 186,011 page views a week. This publication has survived because it did what conventional media have been struggling to do. Keep its costs rock-bottom low. The problem is that legacy media can’t cut their costs as much as The Bulldog’s.

Strangely, one would think the Online News Act would have helped old startups such as this publication. But in fact, it has been a hindrance. The Bulldog and many other devoted publications have seen subsidies from the ONA go to our competitors, the major news operations such as city-wide newspapers. As well, the CBC takes advertising and is subsidized by the federal government. Most little publications such as The Bulldog don’t qualify for the ONA.

With some government largesse, The Bulldog could hire reporters to cover Ottawa City Hall fulltime and the like.

Instead, we scramble along on the good help from individuals in the community who, like The Bulldog, think that critical  local coverage (and especially opinion and analysis) are more important than getting rich. We hope we provide a valuable service to the community … at least I’ve convinced myself of that.

But The Bulldog does not compete on a level playing field. There are the subsidies to the CBC and major newspapers which The Bulldog does not receive. The Online News Act also caused Facebook to ban news organizations from its social media thus cutting into our reach.

With the Online News Act, the federal government is trying to help media survive but instead is causing legacy media to hold on … and failing at that. Most damaging is that the ONA is putting small media outlets, surviving on a shoe string, at a competitive disadvantage. Meanwhile networks that automatically provide ads to online publications have seen their payouts to all publishers decline by 70-to-80 per cent from last year at this time. That hurts The Bulldog markedly and so too the subsidized legacy media. Some old media is likely to disappear soon.

One ad network is actually charging a fee to its clients to cover the cost of the ONA. That hurts everybody.

Meanwhile, the ONA has not stopped the hemorrhaging at legacy media and retards the future of little guys by the government tilting the playing field to favour dying media.

Look, The Bulldog isn’t asking for government money to get by (but we’d be happy to accept some if you’re giving it away), but don’t make it more difficult for the future to thrive by subsidizing the past.

All publications such as The Bulldog want is a level playing field so we can compete and thrive. Let the best competitor win rather than restricting its ability to succeed.

The Bulldog has shown it can prosper. Just give us fairness

Ken Gray

Here is Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne’s take on the issue. You’ll need a subscription to read the whole column:

Why aren’t there more? Why aren’t they larger? Why isn’t the future already here? Perhaps because all of the air is currently being sucked out of the system by those subsidized zombies. The startup must compete – for investors, for advertisers, for readers, for attention – with incumbents that are not only more established and better known, but subsidized by the state.

Most important, perhaps, they must compete with them for labour. The working journalist at a big city paper has a choice: stay with his existing, subsidized employer, with the wages, benefits and job security that implies, or take a flyer on an untested, probably unsubsidized newcomer. Which would you choose?

It can’t go on. If the Canadian news industry is to live, some of its existing players will have to die. End the subsidy, and let the industry breathe on its own again.

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