Durham College has suspended its journalism program and is no longer accepting intakes. This is another blow to the viability of local news amid growing news deserts and the shuttering of independent news across Durham Region and Canada.
Protecting independent community media was one of the main themes of the CAJ Unplugged Voices in Durham conference held on November 15 and 16 at Durham College, Oshawa.
Students, faculty and community organizations were joined by media professionals and academics, all gathered under the shadow of shrinking newsrooms and unprecedented challenges for the industry. And, as presented in the literature review titled ‘Academic News Partnerships in Local Journalism,’ it all boils down to money, or rather, the lack of it.
Regulations lax as platforms corner ad revenue
Gabriela Perdomo, Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies at Mount Royal University, Calgary and editor of J-Source, was a keynote speaker at the conference.
Perdomo identifies the evisceration of advertising revenue as “the main driver of the drying of funds for journalism, and especially for local journalism.”
Statistics Canada says that in just two years, from 2022 to 2024, newspapers saw advertisement income drop by over a third and digital ad revenues by 12 per cent.
Perdomo’s comments speak to the tussle between news organisations and U.S.-based ‘Big Tech’ companies like Google and Meta has been ongoing for more than a decade.
The virtual duopoly of these companies on the online advertising market and people’s attention in general gives them immense leverage over not just news outlets but policy as well.
Using Canada’s Online News Act, 2023 as an example, Perdomo says, “because we have allowed these companies to be so strong,…we are actually becoming really inefficient at fighting against them.”
The Online News Act makes digital platforms larger than a defined threshold liable for sharing revenues they earn from the work of news publishers.
Meta responded to the Canadian legislation by simply blocking links to news websites on its platform, a move described as “devastating” by John Cook from Durham Radio, one of the guests at the conference. Julie Cashin-Oster from the Weekly Orono Times has also panned the ‘news ban’ for its impacts on publishers like herself.
Google settled with the Canadian government in 2024, and agreed to pay $100 million annually for five years starting in 2025.
The first payout from this settlement was made in January to the Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC), a federally incorporated nonprofit comprising news publishers. But whether this reflects the actual value of news, in the market and the community it serves, is up for debate.
And while it may have conceded somewhat in Canada, its response to similar legislation proposed in New Zealand in 2024 was just like Meta’s, underscoring the incentives of tech companies, which have left news publishers no choice but to adopt other forms of generating revenue and staying afloat.
Funding journalism as a public service
Brent Jolly is the president of the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) and has been a journalist for over 15 years.
Referring to federal programs like the Local Journalism Initiative and the ‘Aid to Publishers’ component of the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF), Jolly says the existence of these programs and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), “is bringing us more towards that [position] where people are definitely reliant on public dollars, whether directly or indirectly, rather than just leaving it to laissez faire, open market capitalism where the business case just doesn’t seem to work anymore.”
Jolly says the present moment is an opportunity to “transition” from the American to the “Nordic model” of funding journalism. This support can come from “Ottawa or their provincial government, or even their municipal government, for that matter,” he says.
“It’s not necessarily the state intervening and subsidising content; it’s the state helping news organisations transition through a large societal and technological shift,” he says.
In the present political climate, where trust in institutions and public figures is either polarized or depleted, this can be hard to sell. The federal government has remarked that “the relationship between government and public media is becoming increasingly fraught,” in the context of discussing the future of CBC funding.
Jolly pointed to Conservative leader Pierre Polievre’s rhetoric on defunding CBC and the Trump White House’s “attack” on PBS and Voice of America as a caution against political pressures.
Pending a major boost in public support for media and creatives at a large scale, the alternatives that currently exist are either value-added subscriptions like The Greenline and The Logic, or soliciting donations as a charity like Ricochet Media, which recently announced itself as a Registered Journalism Organisation (RJO), the fourth such English-language outlet in Canada. However, it has described this model as “completely unsustainable.”
Perdomo used Village Media’s crowdfunding campaign to file Freedom of Information (FOI) requests as another example. ‘Crowdfunding’ is an informal way of public investment that creates a sense of involvement with a cause, and can galvanise contributions by reframing them as a collective effort instead of payment for a service.
Noting the “long process” it takes to be registered as a charity in Canada, Perdomo says, “there’s no easy way of getting money. All of these require a lot of work and a lot of dedication.”
Interconnected funding issues
If journalism is to be seen as a community and public service, its issues cannot be isolated or siloed away as a ‘media problem.’
The Chronicle at Durham College is facing the axe in the same way as other journalism programs and fields of study in Ontario and Canadian colleges. This has spillover effects on news coverage in local communities and the circulation of professionals from classrooms to newsrooms.
In effect, choking funding is a restriction on an institution tasked with keeping an eye on authority.
Even as conferences like Voices in Durham bring heads together to discuss stopgap strategies like partnerships between academia and newsrooms, and learn from success stories like the National Community Newswire at the University of Vermont, they operate in a paradigm where our collective investment in a well-informed public sphere is not keeping pace with the rapid changes we see today.
“More people should be paying for news, and more people should be doing what they can to support legitimate sources of news and especially making sure that we are supporting original reporters,” says Perdomo.