4 ms·
No, but if you're a government seeing your media industry shrinking because they can't make a profit to sustain themselves, meanwhile others are profiting off t
by grf27 3y ago
No, but if you're a government seeing your media industry shrinking because they can't make a profit to sustain themselves, meanwhile others are profiting off their work, then you want to try something, and I guess this is their attempt.
One of the other solutions proposed was taxes on media aggregators. This is similar to the taxes on entertainment aggregators currently in place that pay into a fund that supports domestic entertainers. These approaches have lots of complications.
- mcpackieh 3y agoThe real threat to local news is national/international news. An organization selling a story to the entire anglosphere has an advantage over an organization trying to sell a story to just one town or country. Both stories cost about the same to write and distribute, but the story with [manufactured] international appeal has massively more earning potential. So newspapers with a focus on national news (NYTimes, WaPo) end up killing the local newspapers even in big cities like Chicago. And the same dynamic applies internationally; the organization which is best at manufacturing international interest for their stories will have an advantage over any organization that focuses on national news with national interest. If the intention is to get Canadians to focus more on local news, making Facebook pay to link to local news is completely backwards. Facebook will (and apparently has) simply transition to showing cheap international news. Instead, Canada should be making Facebook pay when linking to foreign news, or paying Facebook when linking to local news.
- delfinom 3y agoI would argue many local papers could just be a monthly town newsletter. Lol.
- wvenable 3y agoThe real threat to local news is Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. Local newspapers were mostly funded by their classifieds section. The news is merely to bring eyeballs to those ads. When the market for classifieds disappeared, there was no longer any financial support for local news. You could even argue that newspapers were only viable businesses because they had a monopoly over the local distribution of information. It was never the news itself that was profitable but being the local gatekeeper of that news. The Internet destroyed that entirely.
- delfinom 3y ago> because they had a monopoly over the local distribution of information Not to worry, several US states still have draconian laws to keep the local newspaper in business. In NYS, when you start a LLC or corp, you have to publish an announcement in 2 papers in the state announcing it and get certificates from the paper proving it. Of course there are ever so convenient "business papers" to leech off it. Some law makers tried to change that a few years ago and queue the lobbyist outrage.
- wvenable 3y agoGovernments pick winners and losers. For all these laws, like this Canadian law and the one you mention, there are plenty of business models that disappear without anyone doing anything about it. I feel that if there is still a market for news then the market will figure it out. We should make laws encourage smaller players and avoid monopolies. Instead of making laws that transfer money from one giant corporation to another giant corporation. But that'll never happen because giant corporations have all the influence.
- EatingWithForks 3y agoI actually don't think the Internet has been a good substitute for a local distribution of information. It's too global and too big. There's people who aren't from a neighborhood talking about it and skewing information about that neighborhood. Portland's supposed to be literally a BLM-flagged wasteland or something, y'know? I'd really love for there to be a local newspaper that tells me a new bakery opened in town, or that the elementary school passed a new measure for students, or that there's going to be an art exhibit presented by some local artists. I want to know when there are some foster kitties looking for temporary homes, and a little articles about people who go all-out on halloween decor. The internet doesn't give this to me, not without a load of muck.
- wvenable 3y agoMy go to solution for that was reddit.com/r/somecommunity which was local enough to have posts about lost cats and dogs. More than once local media near me has literally just published a story that was first posted as text to Reddit.