American media are finally noticing Canada and making nice. It is unclear why they are suddenly so fond of our 37 million citizens, oh I see, they want our subscription money. A chirpy hard-sell American consultant explained it this way …
Continue Reading It’s time to start paying for Canada’s newspapers“If you profit, you contribute—there is no free ride” Heritage Minister Melanie Joly, June 3 2018 The battle for Canadian cultural sovereignty is on. And no, it’s not a battle against Donald Trump. It’s a debate among Canadians. Justin Trudeau’s …
Continue Reading The Battle for Canadian Content (2018-2020)At long last, some common sense in Canadian media policy. On May 31st the CRTC answered Heritage Minister Melanie Joly’s request for its advice on how to sustain Canadian content and local news in the Internet age. With the existing …
Continue Reading This CRTC Chair Ain’t Afraid of No Netflix TaxDoug Ford is now in the news business. The fake news business that is. In a series of Ontario election campaign videos circulated by Ford’s campaign team, the front-running leader of the Conservative party appears as a news subject in …
Continue Reading Ford TV: Fox or Faux?When you get a heated reaction to a common-sense proposition, there is usually something else going on. So it is with the criticism of Fairplay Canada’s anti-piracy campaign launched last week. It’s common sense that stealing is wrong, theft has …
Continue Reading Why the Piracy Defenders Have It WrongThe opposition to Fairplay Canada’s campaign against movie-thievery arrived on-cue, and off-key, as expected. The industry coalition of Canadian unions, guilds, broadcasters, and film studios is asking the CRTC to stop the whack-a-mole game of chasing offshore pirate websites and …
Continue Reading Movie-theft is not a victimless crimeNot only does Canada’s current law, largely written for a pre-digital world, fail to offer sufficient protections for domestic publishers, it also perversely gives foreign competitors a leg up. The extraordinary disruption of global media by online giants Facebook and …
Continue Reading Ottawa should force Google and Facebook to pay their shareOn September 28 when Heritage Minister Melanie Joly announced she was doing nothing for local news, but that local news was nonetheless a “pillar” of her vision for media, I said to myself: it’s going to take bodies, lots of …
Continue Reading Collusion By Any Other NameWhat is needed is a call to action for our federal government to respond to this crisis. This has been one of the most brutal weeks yet in the Canadian newspaper industry. More than 30 newspapers are closing down, and …
Continue Reading It Was A Brutal Week For Newspapers. It Doesn’t Need To Happen Again
