BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or submitted via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to 'EDITORIAL: Your local news will soon vanish from Facebook and Google, but BarrieToday is here to stay,' published July 5.
The Online News Act is a good idea because its purpose is to maintain a strong Canadian news media.
The big tech giants, Google and Meta, have been pirating news from the Canadian news media and this is just plain wrong. Producing the news is a business that requires people, infrastructure and money. News media journalists earn their livings by gathering the news, fact-checking and presenting their opinions. We can trust the news and it's critical to our democracy.
The money comes mainly from advertising and, in a small part, subscriptions. With the growth of social media, advertising is being diverted from the news media to social media. As well, fewer people are paying for subscriptions.
These changes have put the news media business under financial stress with the result that many organizations have had to close outlets, reduce journalistic and editorial staff, and thereby cut back on the news.
All that Bill C-18 asks Google and Meta to do is to negotiate agreements with the Canadian news media companies to pay for their use of the news.
Some Canadian news media already have agreements with Google and Meta. This will reduce financial stress and help to maintain a strong news-producing industry. It will take a while for all this to play out, but we’re on the right track.
In the interim, it’s easy to get the news online from digital newspapers and broadcast media (e.g., CollingwoodToday, BarrieToday, Globe and Mail, CBC, CTV).
Nick Pearson
Collingwood
