By John Francis
Every autumn, the Ontario Community Newspaper Association (OCNA) holds an “Independent Publishers’ Retreat”. It’s a chance for the few dozen independent newspapers that are left in Ontario to gather around a big table and compare notes. I think there are fewer of us every year. This year’s Retreat was held on Zoom. I believe that Bruce Peninsula Press is the only attendee from Bruce County; the Meaford Independent attends from Grey. Large chains have snapped up most of the local weeklies in Canada (including those from Walkerton, Wiarton, Saugeen and Kincardine). (The Paisley Advocate is now a monthly newsletter published by volunteers.) Corporate-owned weeklies tend to get hollowed out, tend to run a lot of repackaged material from other “assets”. Reporters are few and far between. Corporate weeklies are not invited to the Independent Publishers’ Retreat.
The OCNA always lines up excellent speakers for the Retreat and this year was no exception. Keynote speaker for the day was Canadian expat Dr Dermot Murphy, who is an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His talk explored the impact of newspaper closures on public finance.
Between 2003 and 2014, weekly newspaper circulation in the USA went down 27%. Over the same period, reporter attendance at state legislatures was down 35%. (One can only guess how much more this would affect reportage at the county and municipal levels.)
“As a result,” he concluded, “the monitoring of local governments has significantly weakened.”
Dr Murphy noted that it’s not just an American phenomenon — for example, “in 2020, Postmedia closed 15 newspapers in Manitoba and Ontario due to declining ad revenues”.
Dr Murphy and his co-authors studied newspaper closures in America and ran economic comparisons of areas that lost their local papers with demographically similar areas that still have a local newspaper. They found an obvious pattern. After the newspaper closed, they found:
“• Higher government wages: $1.4 million per year,
• More government employees: 4 per 1,000 employees,
• Higher taxes per capita: $85 per person (annually), and
• Higher deficits per capita: $53 per person (annually).” [Apparently municipalities can run deficits in the USA.]
Dr Murphy noted that the tax increases alone cost more than a newspaper subscription…
“Takeaway: local newspapers play an important watchdog role for local governments that is not easily substitutable by other sources.”
Competition from TV news has been going on for decades. Dr Murphy cites a 2016 monologue by Last Week Tonight host John Oliver. Watch how often online and TV news are just repackaging the work of newspapers, he suggested. Remember how important it is to have reporters at state and local legislatures.
It has gotten worse since then.
Competition from online platforms is having a devastating effect on news reporting. Craigslist kills classified ad revenues. Facebook and Twitter generate revenue from re-using newspaper content but do not pay for that content.
Even the classier online media are not really doing much actual reporting. Dr Murphy quoted longtime Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon: “The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore Zoning Board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we’ve actually reached some sort of equilibrium.”
It would be easy to think we don’t have a problem — Northern Bruce Peninsula is pretty transparent. They publish their minutes in this newspaper and there is a reporter (me) at most Council Meetings.
On the other hand, I don’t think there are any reporters at Bruce County Council and the County gets about a third of all our property taxes. Is County Council rife with rampant corruption? Probably not. But wouldn’t you like to be sure?
There is also a long-term issue at Bruce County that is not getting any better. You can almost hear the whoosh of our tax dollars flowing south but only a trickle comes back north. This is the status quo; it dates back to when the peninsula was worthless and paid almost no taxes.
MNBP gets a couple of libraries out of County funds. We get a County Road that comes all the way north to Lion’s Head. (It’s the only road in the municipality with proper sidewalks, but I digress.) We get an ambulance, but that’s actually provincial funding that is administered by the County.
All the County employees report for work in Wiarton or points south. County offices are concentrated in Walkerton with a satellite office in Wiarton. Bruce County Tourism has employees in Walkerton and Wiarton. But where is the tourism? Tobermory, Lion’s Head and Sauble Beach. Is there a tourism problem in Northern Bruce Peninsula? Can it be solved by hiring more people in Walkerton?
I have asked Northern Bruce Peninsula Mayor Milt McIver about this many times. His answer is consistent: he never passes up an opportunity to remind his fellow County Councillors about how MNBP is underserviced, but on so many issues, if he demanded action, nobody would even second his motion.
We need a reporter at Bruce County Council, asking the Warden and Councillors the awkward questions about offering proper service to MNBP.
Shall we ask Facebook to send a reporter? Or Twitter? Or Huffington Post?
