Dear Reader,
We’re writing to you today because we want to highlight – while we still can – the impossible situation we find ourselves in as an independent Canadian media platform.
The truth, up-front and unvarnished, is that we don’t think we have much time left.
We’ve spent over a decade building NowMedia. We’ve invested an enormous amount of money and time into hiring one of the largest, most experienced and most diverse news teams in the Okanagan. We’ve sought to bring something different to the region: a modern, youthful, adventurous news site with an emphasis on the things we think really matter. Much of our focus has been on connecting with our readers through social media.
<img alt=” Photo credit: NowMedia ” src=”https://www.kelownanow.com/files/files/images/kelownanowmedia.png”>
But now, as a consequence of a dispute between the federal government and an American technology company, all those years of effort count for very little, and we find our existence seriously imperilled.
How did we get here?
In August of 2023, Meta banned Canadian news platforms from Facebook and Instagram. In our own case, that meant the loss of about 200,000 followers. More than 10 years of growth, achieved at great personal and financial cost, simply vanished in a moment, with nothing but a curt press release for an explanation. No appeal, no conversation: just gone.
Mark Zuckerberg’s company justified itself by referring to the Online News Act (Bill C-18), a piece of legislation the federal government said would improve the lot of small media outlets in Canada by forcing Meta and Google to pay for news that appears on their platforms.
Though Google has since come to a much-criticized agreement with the government, Meta has not.
The company has said it will not budge, claiming that it has provided news outlets in Canada with hundreds of millions of dollars in “free marketing.” Last month, Meta said it wouldn’t be renewing news funding deals – which is the outcome Canada is striving for – with governments in the US, Germany, UK, Australia and France.
Announcing the move, Meta said “people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content.” It added: “News makes up less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed, and is a small part of the Facebook experience for the vast majority of people.”
It might well be true that Meta doesn’t need news – but news needs Meta. Since the Facebook and Instagram bans, dozens of news outlets have closed down across the country. According to Toronto Metropolitan University, 36 platforms shuttered in Canada in the first 11 months of 2023. Of those, 29 were community newspapers.
In our own region, we’ve already seen the sad death of Kamloops This Week, whose publisher said the Bill C-18 affair had reduced the site’s traffic by half. This year, meanwhile, Black Press filed for creditor protection, while Bell Media announced 4,800 layoffs.
Without the option of promoting stories on Facebook and Instagram, small media outlets lose a huge chunk of their traffic. Without that traffic, it’s harder to persuade advertisers to sign commercial deals. And without advertisers, news companies can’t pay their journalists to write stories. That’s precisely what’s happening to independent outlets across Canada; and as this feud between Meta and the federal government continues, its effects will become more and more corrosive, until it reaches the point where few outlets can survive the damage.
What’s the government doing?
Not all media companies are in quite the same predicament as NowMedia, however. That’s because many of our rivals and comrades in the news world are being subsidized by the federal government through, among other schemes, the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit. Outlets that qualify for the credit can claim as much as 35 per cent of their employees’ pay, up to a maximum salary of $85,000.
It’s been around for several years now, and if you’ve ever wondered why certain people often complain about “state-funded media,” the answer is they’ve likely been inspired by this tax credit.
<img alt=” Photo credit: 123RF” src=”https://www.kelownanow.com/files/files/images/FaceyB(10).jpg”>
NowMedia, though, has twice been rejected by the federal government when applying for this subsidy. In one review explaining our rejection, which was authored by an academic whose first language is not English and who lives thousands of kilometres away from our company, we were told that, based on an assessment of a small selection of our stories, we do not qualify as a producer of original news content. The primary evidence adduced to support this conclusion was that some of our stories were based on press releases from the RCMP and provincial government.
When we pleaded with the government that every news outlet on the planet writes, from time to time, stories based on police press releases, our concerns were dismissed. When we pointed out that the stories reviewed by the self-described journalism expert were chosen arbitrarily, our concerns were dismissed. Even when we cited the official government guidance for the legislation, which states that there is no “amount of original news content that must be produced by an organization in order to be considered engaged in the production of original news content,” our concerns were – you guessed it – dismissed.
We have been left simply to accept that this individual acting on behalf of the federal government, who last worked as a journalist in the late 1980s and early 1990s (and then only briefly), has decided that we are not a news outlet, and that’s the end of the story. We must therefore fend for ourselves while our peers are propped up with taxpayers’ cash.
Stuck between a rock and a hard place
But, given the above, why does Meta block NowMedia on Facebook and Instagram? If the federal government doesn’t consider us to be a news outlet, and Meta has chosen to block news on its platform, why are we, who are apparently not a party to their dispute, being caught in the middle of it all?
Well, it’s a bitter and demoralizing irony. Meta has explained that it identifies news outlets in Canada based on “legislative definitions and guidance from the Online News Act.” In other words, from the federal government itself.
That means we’re being blocked on Meta – having our reach, and therefore revenue, cut to shreds – because that company has consulted the federal government and determined that we are a Canadian news organization. But the federal government, after dispatching an obscure academic from Quebec to review a small number of our stories, has determined that we are not, in fact, a news organization, and has refused to provide us with any assistance.
We’ve tried to speak to Meta about this peculiar catch-22, but Meta, of course, doesn’t speak to people: it simply issues proclamations.
We’ve also tried to speak with Pascale St-Onge, the minister responsible for the federal government’s relationship with the news industry, but we were told she is too busy for a conversation about Bill C-18.
Where, then, does that leave us? To return to the beginning: we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, and we don’t know how much longer we can survive. We’re trying new things – including an ambitious attempt at producing video content – but they are, to some extent, Hail Marys.
If we’re banned by the most important social media platform in the world, and denied the help that other media companies are given by the federal government, then we are at a distinct disadvantage in an already ruthless and beleaguered industry.
It means that our unique platform, which has produced many hundreds of stories that any news outlet in the country would be proud to have published, is at risk of disappearing forever. It also means that our trained and experienced journalists – who do the unglamorous work of sitting through council meetings, the often hazardous work of reporting on live incidents and the crucial work of telling the stories of people who don’t have a voice – could be lost to the region. They could even be forced to abandon their profession for something more stable.
What do we want?
Trapped as we are in this Kafkaesque quagmire, we don’t have many options. Meta thinks we’re a news organization, but the federal government doesn’t. Neither will speak to us. No compromise between the two parties appears to be on the table, particularly since the federal government has repeatedly said it won’t exempt Meta from the law, and Meta has said it won’t pay for news to be posted on its platforms, not even in countries where it has previously done so.
In an ideal world, the federal government would privately accept that it has lost the argument with Meta and conjure up some sort of face-saving deal that allows both sides to claim victory. That way, news would return to Facebook and Instagram, and independent media companies across Canada would see their traffic return to August 2023 levels. It would be a boon to the public, too, and would come at an important time: as both the prime minister and premier of British Columbia said last year, news being banned from Meta platforms during wildfire season is really quite dangerous. The federal government could even claim the moral high ground by explicitly linking any compromise it made to wildfires and the need to ensure that people at risk are aware of evacuations and air quality alerts.
<img alt=” Photo credit: Pascale St-Onge/X The ever-busy heritage minister, Pascale St-Onge.” src=”https://www.kelownanow.com/files/files/images/pascaletwitter.png”>
Alternatively, the federal government could get serious about the assessment process for the journalism tax credit and acknowledge what is obvious to everybody, including Meta: that NowMedia is indeed a news platform, and therefore qualifies for financial support. Ideally, we wouldn’t need, or accept, any help from taxpayers, but if Ottawa is going to intervene in the news industry and pick its winners and losers, then we should never be arbitrarily excluded.
If we, and other platforms like us, are brought down by this struggle between the federal government and Meta, then the already eroded and often stale Canadian media landscape will be left even worse off. It will create two types of media: on one side, the decaying old brands, which are trusted by only a tiny minority of Canadians and which have in recent times shown a dire lack of interest in, and respect for, their audiences; on the other, untrained citizen journalists and commentators with profiles on X, TikTok and YouTube, clumsily reporting on events they do not understand, adopting extreme partisan positions to attract controversy and, by design or not, spreading false information that could have disastrous real-world consequences.
That’s not a world we want to live in. If you agree, we ask that you help us in any way you can. Write to your MP, the heritage minister or the prime minister himself, and demand that a deal is made with Meta. Write to Meta, for all the good that might do, and ask them to allow news to return to their platforms.
In short, we’re asking you to raise your voice for us, while we’re still here to defend. Because we might not be around much longer.
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