The 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 AgainThere is probably one thing about Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly’s re-boot of Canadian media regulation that few anticipated: her September 28th announcement did not make the slightest effort to save Canadian journalism. Canadian journalism is built on a foundation, namely …
Continue Reading The Day the Liberals Walked Away from Canadian JournalismThere is probably one thing about Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly’s re-boot of Canadian media regulation that few anticipated: her September 28th announcement did not make the slightest effort to save Canadian journalism. Canadian journalism is built on a foundation, namely …
Continue Reading The Day the Liberals Walked Away from Canadian JournalismTwo weeks ago, American media giant CBS announced it was launching its new video streaming service “All Access” in both the US and Canada in 2018. More pointedly, CBS gave notice it would phase out the time-honoured practice of big …
Continue Reading Is the fate of CanCon worse than imagined?In a sea of American TV news and entertainment, airing our own local news and Canadian programs preserves a little corner of Canadian life. This has been a Canadian fact of life since television was invented: two national audiences that …
Continue Reading The ISP Levy is a No-BrainerYou know that a public policy idea’s time has come when it can take the best punch from the smartest critics without any harm. Such is the case of the $350M government aid proposal tabled last week by News Media …
Continue Reading Andrew Coyne, Canadian Journalism, and the Great Unwashed
