Bell Is Laying Off People And Killing Off NEWS

Bell Canada Enterprises apparently owns a lot of the news. They have been laying people off though. Apparently last spring 6 percent of Bell Media jobs were cut and nine radio stations were shuttered or sold. The same article says the yesterday round has 4800 jobs cut (9%) and only 10 % of them are at Bell Media directly. A whole lot of news shows and radios are taking big L’s. 

The Star says they also laid off 1300 jobs in June 2013. I’m sure a lot of people are big mad and big sad because of the impact of all this. CTV (privately owned by Bell) will no longer have lunchtime broadcasts. My first reaction to that is, “Who watches the News on TV?”, then I remembered our older population still exists.

I think it’s safe to say Bell cut all these jobs because frankly we don’t support their media. I, like many of you, don’t go check for the news as frequently with the Facebook ban. We don’t pay to support it. Now we are going to lose it. I know I know, I’m making assumptions based on my anecdotal experience. 

The FB connection

Let’s get this one out the way. Meta as a company banned Canadian news over Trudeau trying to be a big man. At one point Bill C-18 went live and well part of that bill is social media companies would have to pay news sites for posting the news content. Often what happens is people read the headlines and comments and don’t click back to CTV.com or whatever. 

The impact of all this is Meta gets all the ad dollars from the attention garnered from the story. The news company is not getting that web traffic and thus, is losing big in the exchange despite creating the content. Mack daddy Trudeau stood glorious and tall and told the giants that his David-ass would slay their Goliath selves. Meta was like, oh Canada, the country with less people than California, is trying to be cute and just banned the news on their platform. 

Now we don’t have the news on FB and the news clearly took a giant hit since then. I saw someone act like this was a conspiracy theory to control what you think. I would counter with, we had 6 months to protest C-18.  I remember when YouTuber J.J. McCullough went before the folk at Parliament and everything to fight C-11 (similarly concerning), I don’t remember a lot of people rah raging over C-18. 

I remember a lot of talk about bike paths in my neighbourhood, no one talks about Bell Media’s behaviour much. None of this was the cool story of the week and got slept on.

I’m sure when FB told you to fight the passing of C-18 (popups and stuff), you were like, oh no FB is evil and ignored it. I don’t think for a second most people gave a shit about C-18. Yet here we are. I can’t say definitively that these two things are related but I promise you Bell Media took a hit over this. 

Normal corrupt CEO stuff seems to have happened.

That Toronto Star article I linked earlier says that Bell’s CEO is the 38th highest paid CEO in Canada. He’s doing real well despite the layoffs. Apparently when the government approved whatever mergers they approved to let Bell gobble up all the smaller news outlets, Bell promised to protect the integrity of local news. 

Turns out they are not doing that. That’s a real problem. A lot of local media and smaller establishments that hustled reputations were struggling. A lot of those brands weren't profitable enough in this landscape, where everyone wants free shit, and then Bell showed up. They postured like the record label man with the Hawaian shirt and sunglasses of yesteryear. And just like that sleazy record label man, the artist (local media outlet) got rightfully screwed in the process. 

All of this happened and I’m sure the majority of people didn’t care. I found out Bell owned CTV yesterday. Apparently a lot of people check for news daily. I’m tempted to pay for a Statistica account for better data. If y’all finance the 200$ a year I will and use it regularly in this blog. I question how many people who consume the news watch for things like media acquisitions. I believe the news consumed is related to Trump, Elon Musk and other buzzwords like Kanye West or AI. 

I think we as people should become more aware of these top level moves. If Bell hadn’t eaten the industry, perhaps some beloved outlets would have died sooner, but Bell’s CEO would have gotten way less of a bonus. 

People find Canadian news boring and that’s scary

There is a belief that producing a high quality product, over time is all it takes to make it in content. While this is true for products and many services, entertainment has flip turned upside down. While people may not like it, news is actually entertainment given how the company is structured. You either capture attention (and ad/subscription dollars) or you don’t (and fail/produce mid content).

The New York Times was in a bad place with free news. The ad model had failed. The quality of their reporting was suffering with the intense stress that chasing virality had on reporters. Then they gated the news, made more secure money from loyal fans and can make the content they want to make. High quality reporting to the NY Times standard returned.

The key part of that equation is that in order to get high quality reporting, it costs a lot of money. Vice made incredibly well made docuseries. They educated us so much, we all loved it. We did not love it enough to give them money though and now Vice is in a bad place.

I think people have this nostalgia for a glory era like when Rolling Stone could pay Hunter S. Thompson stupid money to go do wild things. The people would pay big money for this. Now we want it for free and use ad blockers. The problem with high quality news reporting is it costs money we don’t want to pay. 

Media needs to capture a lot of attention to justify the cost. No one does this for free at scale. Unfortunately Canadians aren’t necessarily showing the interest required to generate the revenues required to sustain it. Nor are we subsidizing it. There’s also not a lot of us relatively speaking, we each need to pay more than we see other countries paying. 

Now we are left with a lot less media being made in Canada about Canada, and it gets worse the more local you go. Alex Montagano and I literally started a new NDG (Montreal) podcast to help fill a void. Still, we are already down about 300$ with more expenses to come.

Are you willing to pay for better media?

I love CBC Marketplace reports where they go and investigate fraud stuff. They stuck it to the glasses folk debunking blue light lenses. That crew has a bunch of people that need to get paid. Good media is not free.

I know when I was younger people paid for The Gazette. Even my parents, while on welfare, paid for it. Then somewhere around Napster and YouTube a lot of us stopped paying for it. At least the masses. Specialists and business people tend to pay for better news. I’m tempted to start signing up for some premium business news myself. Following things like business mergers and global business news is a good idea to make more money. 

Maybe people are just suffering financially these days, but I don’t see people paying for the news in my circle. Sometimes they support their favourite creators on sites like patreon.com/behindthatsuit (I will update it soon for a non album review focus), but there are so many subscriptions now I find most people avoid them.

Then you add in tools like ChatGPT which can summarize information from all the websites bypassing your need to go read them and it’s going to be a weird future for media, independent or big scale. The one thing that will hold true is the democracy of the dollar. If you want better news, you need to be willing to pay for it.

Anyway, I think that’s enough for today.

Live Long and Prosper Everyone