Annual revenue for newspapers is down something like 70% since 2006. I always hear that Facebook and Google are largely to blame but isn’t it more just the internet at large?
In the 90s the internet became just another publishing platform when newspaper revenues were at a high.
They were cash-cow investments for large corporations. It followed a similar pattern to SV companies now—buy up high revenue properties promising ever-increasing returns.
As soon as that started to level off investors will obviously darken on the large corps they have shares in.
Large corp needs to keep finding ways to find profit in their properties so they started cutting, which put publishers in worse situations for affording and producing content. That started a vicious downward cycle. Couple that with falling advertising prices (in part because of Google and Amazon, but not solely) and it’s a race to the bottom for these corps in managing their properties.
One I worked for [the parent corp] had enormous amounts of money from their main ventures but had us at a continually reducing hard-capped headcount in spite of increases in revenues after a lot of hard work. Every year saw mass layoffs for several years in a row in the order of 1/3 to 1/2 of the entire publishing company’s staff at a time including writers, editors, designers, managers, videographers, researchers, sales staff, marketing staff, you name it.
[edited for detail: in one instance taking a fully-staffed heritage political and analysis magazine down to a couple of desks in a corner of a floor they once filled with passionate, talented people. With contractual obligations made by former executives for volume of content.]
Basically crippling the [publishing] company every year a little more because of fixed numbers they had to serve to shareholders based on previous, naive promises made by long-gone executives.
So the internet—not directly. Greed, primarily.
(I’ll leave this with an old protest sign I spotted in a book in the City Lights Bookstore in SF—paraphrasing—“free the press from their corporate masters”.
If only)
The internet's made it so anyone can open a media outlet, and say what they like to pretty much anyone else, so we're in an endless race to the bottom where outlets are only able to get traffic by offering their content for free, and being competed against by legions of others who don't need to charge at all.
So it's true to say that newspapers used to have a viable business model because they were "the only game in town", but what they were gatekeepers of was not content but ad space.
[0] https://www.jgsullivan.com/2012/11/14/google-ad-revenue-vs-p...
But I guess the ad revenue made up more of their income. That's definitely been hit by Google and Facebook.
Still, not sure what can really happen there. At the end of the day, Google and Facebook are better for advertisers than newspapers are. They let you track impressions, clicks, stats, etc better, they let you target users in a more fine grained way, etc. Oh, and users visit them more often too.
Simply reporting on the same events after another outlet has does not make them a scam.
The CBC is a valuable public service that produces heaps of quality content.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/tristin-hopper-really-want-...
https://www.canadalandshow.com/cbc-often-reports-competitors...
>If a reporter scores an important scoop or completes a lengthy investigation, within hours that story will be quickly rewritten and posted to CBC.ca for free, and often without attribution (watch for the phrase “CBC has learned” to spot these types of rewrites).
Of course this is common practice to rewrite articles, but you're supposed to give credit, and it's especially shady when you have a taxpayer funded budget to feed off private industry with an army of interns to snatch content and post it for free. CBC is supposed to cover stories the national media won't bother with, but instead for a couple of years now they've just been "repurposing content".
Edit: AP is also doing a trial with blockchain tagging to try and end copy paste journalism
For what it’s worth I do work in the media and with some people who’ve been working in it as long as I’ve been on this earth. (And no, not for the CBC) [edited: thought I should clarify I’m not a reporter or writer, but I do work closely with editorial and arts teams]
I’ve never once heard anything like anything you’ve said.
News organizations have long done this kind of thing. Right in the candaland article they reference The Canadian Association of Journalists’ Ethics Guidelines which states that once it’s in the public domain there is no copyright if the publisher comes to the same story. That’s typically referred to (at least in some copy as “independently corroborated”). As a best practice the CBC probably should still be referencing the other outlets that covered the story, especially the original. But there’s nothing unique about this, nor especially rendering it as a practice or the CBC as a scam.
As a side note I don’t favour NP opinion pieces as qualitative evidence. Hopper clearly just wants the CBC to crumble.
The Canadaland article is better, but is mostly tweets and complaints. The CBC is not the reason the press and media in general is struggling business-wise.