Last week, Brodie Fenlon, general manager and editor-in-chief of CBC News, announced that his organization plans to hire up to 30 local journalists in “underserved communities” with the $7 million in new funding it will receive from Google due to the Online News Act.
With newsrooms stretched and strained and others shuttered forever, we should celebrate when new journalism jobs are created. But Fenlon’s announcement raises three problems.
First, the math simply doesn’t make sense. Anyone who knows how to use a basic calculator can see how: if you take the $7 million the CBC is entitled to, and you deduct two per cent to account for administrative fees that can be taken by the Canadian Journalism Collective, that leaves $6,860,000. If you divide that number by 30 journalists, you get $228,666 per new journalist. When I saw that, I said to myself, “Shut the front door, Mr. Fenlon.”
The median salary for a journalist in Canada is about $62,000 per year, according to Talent.com. So, why is CBC offering three-and-a-half times the market rate? Either those journalists are way overpaid, or that money is going somewhere else. Sounds like “fuzzy math,” as George W. Bush once said of Al Gore’s economic figures.
Second, Fenlon’s list of “underserved communities” includes markets that are already getting coverage from long-existing local media. They are not all news deserts.
Plenty of examples can be found in Alberta. Banff and Canmore, where the CBC now plans to open a bureau, have been served for years with award-winning journalism by the Rocky Mountain Outlook. Jasper, where the CBC wants to make its temporary bureau permanent, has two local news outlets including Jasper Fitzhugh. There are dailies in Lethbridge and Medicine Hat, and despite this, the CBC hopes to branch out there, too. The Red Deer Advocate has circulated in that city for more than 100 years, and the Lloydminster Source is published by a second-generation publisher; the CBC hopes to enter both of these markets. I could go on.
Why is the public broadcaster suddenly in expansion mode when the private sector has been serving these markets for generations? Local media is already struggling to compete with Google and Meta for advertising dollars — I literally walk up and down the streets of Blairmore, Alta., and knock on doors selling ads — and now we have to compete with the CBC?
Third, the CBC’s $6,860,000 from Google would be better invested by the private sector. I pulled out my trusty Texas Instruments calculator that my mom bought for me when I was in high school to figure this one out: for local community newspapers, that amount of money would allow us to hire more than 150 journalists. This shows how the private sector is much more efficient than the CBC.
For context, the CBC paid bonuses to 1,194 employees in the 2023-34 fiscal year, including over $3.3 million to 45 executives — averaging more than $73,000 per executive. Those bonuses alone are more than what many of my hardworking readers would earn after an entire year of work. Yes, we need more journalists in Canada, and we need to plug news deserts, but it needs to be done efficiently.
My message to Pierre Poilievre and whoever wins the Liberal leadership is this: the Online News Act is desperately needed. It will make a big difference to community newspaper publishers like me, who have been devastated by Google and Meta. Like omnivores, these companies have been gorging on every Canadian advertising dollar they can find, leaving us with little.
But the Online News Act can be made even better by removing the $7 million earmark to the CBC and redirecting those funds to private-sector news publishers and broadcasters, which would create even more jobs.
Federal leaders need to tell the CBC that it’s up Schitt’s Creek now.
National Post
Lisa Sygutek is the owner and publisher of the Crowsnest Pass Herald.