Recently, Brodie Fenlon general manager and editor in chief of CBC News announced that CBC will dedicate part of the new $7 million in annual funding it will receive from Google under the hiring of up to 30 local journalists in underserved communities, with a focus on Western Canada.
With newsrooms stretched and strained and others shuttered forever, we should celebrate when new journalism jobs are created. But Mr. Fenlon’s announcement begs three simple questions.
First, while I don’t have an MBA, I know how to use a basic calculator, and the math simply doesn’t make sense to me. If you take the $7 million the CBC is entitled to, half of which goes to English language services, and you deduct two per cent – the maximum administrative fees the Canadian Journalism Collective can deduct – that leaves $3,430,000. If you divide that number by 30 journalists, you get $114,333 per new journalist.
When I saw that I said to myself: shut the front door Mr. Fenlon. You see, the median wage for a journalist in Canada is $31.25 per hour. In other words, that’s about $65,000 a year. So, why is CBC offering nearly double the market rate? Either those journalists are way overpaid or that money is going somewhere else…Sounds like ‘fuzzy math’, as George W. Bush once said of Al Gore’s economic figures.
Second, his list of underserved communities includes markets that are getting local coverage from long-existing local media. They are not all news deserts. Banff/Canmore has been served for years with award winning journalism by the Rocky Mountain Outlook. Jasper has two local news outlets including Jasper Fitzhugh. There are dailies in Lethbridge and Medicine Hat. The Red Deer Advocate has been published in that city for more than 100 years. The Lloydminster Source is published by a second-generation publisher. I could go on with many more examples.
Why is the public broadcaster all of a sudden in expansion mode when the private sector has been serving these markets for generations? Local media is already struggling to compete with Google and Meta for advertising dollars (I literally walk up and down the streets of Blairmore and knock on doors selling ads), and now we have to compete with the CBC?
Third, yes, we need more journalists in Canada, and we need to plug news deserts, but would that $7 million the CBC will receive from Google be better invested by the private sector. Again, I pulled out my trusty Texas Instruments calculator that my mom bought for me when I was in high school. For local community newspapers, that amount of money would allow us to hire more than 150 journalists. This shows how the private sector is much more efficient than the CBC.
For context, the CBC paid bonuses to 1,194 employees, including over $3.3 million to 45 executives — averaging more than $73,000 per executive. Those bonuses alone are more than what many of my hardworking readers would earn after an entire year of work.
My message to Pierre Poilievre and whoever wins the Liberal leadership is this: The Online News Act is desperately needed and it will make a big difference to community newspaper publishers like me who have been devastated by Google and Meta who are like omnivores gorging on every Canadian advertising dollar they can find, but the Act can be made even better by removing the $7 million earmark to the CBC and redirecting those funds to private sector news publishers and broadcasters, which would create even more jobs. Federal leaders need to tell the CBC: Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Lisa Sygutek is owner and publisher of the Crowsnest Pass Herald.
