National Newspaper Week

Jeff Green | Oct 16, 2024

The Frontenac News is a member of the Ontario Community Newspaper Association (OCNA) and News Media Canada. These organisations work on marketing their members to advertisers across the province and across the country, provide research for their members, and are a lobby group in our collective interest as news organisations.

Last week, they were promoting National Newspaper Week, to mark the contribution that newspapers, both physical and online, make to their local communities and to the population as a whole, in Canada.

The two groups have been instrumental in advocating for independent newspapers to get a share in the $100 million per year that Google agreed to pay Canadian media outlets in lieu of royalties, for use of their content to generate revenue for itself.

A process to divvy up a small portion of that money to independent publishers is underway. It might provide support to our newspaper, which will be translated into increased news coverage, but the result is not certain. We can say with confidence, however, that without the work that was done by the small, but mighty teams at News Media Canada and the OCNA, we would not even have a chance to be supported by that program.

Notably, Meta Corporation, did not sign an agreement, and instead decided to de-list news reports from Canadian media companies on their social media services,

That practice began in July of 2023, and since then, newspapers like the Frontenac News have been unable to post content on Facebook and other Meta platforms.

Meta is the most powerful social media company in the world, by a lot. It owns four of the top seven social media platforms. According to Statista.org., Facebook is the largest, with 3 billion monthly users around the world. The second largest platform is the Google owned Youtube (2.5 billion users) and the third and fourth are Meta's Instagram (2 billion) and What's App (2 billion). Fifth and sixth on the list, Tik Tok and We Chat, are both owned by companies based in China, and Facebook Messenger is seventh on the list with 1.1 billion users.

The impact of being shut out of Facebook, the social media platform where the Frontenac News posted most regularly, has been to hinder our ability to drive traffic to our frontenacnews.ca and everythingfrontenac.ca websites by linking content to our Facebook site, which has about 3,500 followers.

Our online readers have the same access to our content by navigating directly to Frontenacnews.ca, and thanks to Google deciding to make a deal with the federal government, our archive of well over 10,000 articles published since 2001 is listed on Google and appears in searches around the world. Frontenacnews.ca remains popular with readers, although it has been hit by the Facebook boycott, to be sure.

In early 2023, the Government of Canada imposed regulations requiring Meta and Google to begin compensating media companies for the profits the companies were making through increased ad sales by distributing news reports. Meta’s response to block Canadian news content poses a threat to the spread of credible, factual information to the public.

According to Pew research, 54% of social media users in the United States get their news from social media as opposed to other sources, such as print and directly from news sites.

The numbers are likely similar in Canada. And since July of 2023, that means half of the social media users in Canada are not getting their news from professional, regulated, news sources in Canada. The news they are consuming is either generated from outside of the country, from sources whose primary purpose is to persuade, rather than inform, from communications departments from public and private institutions, and from sources that are nothing more than opinion or deliberate disinformation.

Newspapers and news sites are not the elusive 'truth', far from it, but there are rules governing how we gather news and present it, rules that all of the other sources do not need to follow and may not even be aware of. And, most importantly, our only job is to deliver the news accurately, our newspaper readers read the paper for information and if that information is wrong, they will stop reading and our advertisers will no longer see value in advertising. Communication Departments are larger and more sophisticated than ever, and those working for public institutions strive to be as accurate and reliable as possible, just as newspapers do. But they present information from the stance of the organisation they work for.

For example, a local township will prepare a release announcing a beach closure due to e coli, or a fire ban. This is a public service and will be spread in newspapers and on social media to maximise its public impact. When a municipality announces a new policy, however, or that it has passed its annual budget, it is a different kind of document. The facts need to be accurate, but they will also be selected in a specific way, in order make the policy or the budget palatable to the public.

Any controversy or debate that went into that policy or budget, any disagreement among members of council or the public or another institution, will not find its way into the media release put out by the communication department. That is not the purpose of the release.

But for a news report, those are particularly important. That is why independent news sources such as newspapers are valuable, and why efforts to help the newspaper industry survive in the world of instant electronic communication and social media persuaders, are particularly relevant.

For us at the Frontenac News, the OCNA has been a lifeline, and its partners at Newsmedia Canada have been working nationally, in our interest, and in the interest of our loyal readers, whose support has made us continue to be able to publish for 53 years, and counting,