Up to $8 million dollars for Postmedia, the owner of the National Post.
This is our best guess as to the annual subsidy that Canada’s largest private employer of journalists could receive as a result of the Online News Act and the payments it mandates to news outlets.News reports in 2023 on PostMedia layoffs indicated that at that time the company employed approximately 660 journalists. Since then, it has acquired more newspapers. The body distributing the payments legislated by the Online News Act has indicated that eligible digital news outlets could receive up to $13,798 per full-time journalist employee.
The reason we can’t tell you the actual amount is that there’s no stated intention on the part of anyone to disclose this funding, now or anytime remotely proximate to the current federal election. Not Postmedia. Not the Liberal government that created the legislation. And not even the granting body currently disbursing the funds to news groups during the writ period.
Last week, we called on Postmedia and the other news publishers to follow basic journalistic good practices and proactively disclose how much money they’ve received as a result of the federal legislation.
So far it’s been radio silence from Canada’s heavily subsidized news industry. Understandably, they’re embarrassed to find themselves in the middle of covering an election campaign while simultaneously depositing cheques possibly in the millions of dollars made possible by the very policies of an incumbent party seeking a fourth term in government.
It’s a bad look and likely not popular with readers, especially the good folk who look to the National Post and Sun papers in particular for “rock-ribbed” analysis of the perils of statism, corporate welfare, and other shibboleths of Laurentian capitalism.
We get it. When your investors are large U.S. hedge funds who are rightly focused on their returns, it makes little difference what form your revenues take. It’s common sense: for U.S. investors, the more payroll subsidies, mandated payouts by third parties, publishing, and niche employment programs enabled by a foreign government, the better.
But disclosing your government subsidies doesn’t mean you don’t get to keep them.
While The Hub opposes all subsidies for news journalism, we couldn’t care less what Postmedia or any of the other outlets do with the latest lucre Ottawa is showering on them. Ideally, go hire more reporters, or, if you have to, give your investors a few more points of EBITDA. We frankly look forward to the soporific effects of subsidies blunting our competitors’ edge, stifling their ability to innovate, thereby allowing us to grab market share.
Yet, when news outlets refuse to disclose this money in an election where the issue of media subsidies in general and the very future of the Online News Act in particular is a longstanding issue of disagreement between the two parties most likely to form the next government, that isn’t OK.
It isn’t alright because it trashes journalism’s core tenet that you don’t report out on news when your organization is in a conflict of interest without first declaring this to your readers. This is the minimum requirement to meet the most basic of journalistic standards.
It’s also an obscuration that damages the credibility of the press for everyone, including its consumers and other outlets (The Hub!), along with the key, and possibly last remaining, value proposition that all journalism rests on telling the truth, at all times, to the best of your ability.
But this is the upside-down world that Canadian news media lives in. We have a horse-race election underway as the largest private news outlets in the country are seeing millions of dollars in government-orchestrated payments landing in their bank accounts as they report on the campaign, the parties, their policies, and leaders.
So again, we call on all the media outlets that have received payments in the last thirty days as a result of the Online News Act to declare these amounts.
We do this on behalf of Canadian voters who already have high levels of distrust in the press and are trying, to the best of their ability, to make sense of the election by consuming the news and information of the country’s news outlets.
How these media outlets think that they can have their cake and eat it too—and not declare the funding they’re receiving during an election due to the stated policy preferences of the incumbent government—and not fundamentally damage their public credibility, defies belief.
Finally, we appeal to all the fine journalists and editors working at the National Post, Globe and Mail, and Toronto Star, and to their own sense of ethics and what is right for their readers, their papers, and our industry as a whole.
Nothing is stopping you from using your private social media accounts to ask your owners to declare their Online New Act subsidies. Again, no one is saying these monies are not being lawfully disbursed. But if you are a journalist with ethics, you know that not disclosing this funding during the election, when there’s no way for the public to otherwise find out this information, isn’t right. Not by any stretch of imagination.
Believe us when we remark that it’s pretty strange that The Hub, a veritable news newbie, compared to the venerable mainstream press, is currently the only journalism outlet among likely hundreds to immediately disclose (and then donate to charity) its Online News Act subsidy.
Again, back to the case of Postmedia, what strikes us as doubly odd is the company already discloses in its annual report the subsidies that it receives from Ottawa ($11.7 million for FY 2024). Why not similarly declare its Online News Act payments now to “clear the air” around its election reporting too?
Here at The Hub, we’re fortunate to have great journalists with decades of combined reporting experience producing our journalism. As their managers, we felt that disclosing and donating our subsidy during the election was the least we could do to acknowledge their professionalism, ethics, and commitment to truth-telling, above all else.
It’s past time that Canada’s other media owners followed suit.
