BY JANET E. SILVER
There appears to be no end to the rocky road of broadcast news in Canada.
Shrinking newsrooms have been a feature of the media landscape in Canada for the past two decades but the decline has accelerated in recent years. The trend leaves Canadians increasingly ill-served by major corporations that own broadcasting networks but see news programming as a costly extravagance.
On Oct. 25, Corus reported that its fourth-quarter revenue had declined 21 per cent year-over-year and that it had reached a deal with lenders giving the media company time to reduce its $1 billion debt.
Days later Bloomberg reported that Corus Entertainment Inc was working with Jefferies Financial Group on a potential sale of its operations.
If Corus – which owns Global Television Network – is looking to sell its operations or fails to meet a deal on its debt, it will be forced to make additional cuts across the country including newsrooms that serve both national and local audiences.
Meanwhile, BCE which owns CTV through Bell Media also continues to struggle on its debt repayment, and cost cutting remains the watchword. This fall, its parliamentary bureau replaced all in-studio manned cameras with robo-cameras. On Oct. 31 Bell Media announced that it was pulling the plug on MTV.
Employees are bracing for hundreds of job cuts to BCE by the end of the year though it’s unclear how those cuts will impact newsrooms across the country.
Last February Bell announced that it was cutting 4800 jobs including the sale of 45 of its 103 regional radio stations. These cuts across the country left many news vacuums including Atlantic Canada where all weekend local newscasts were eliminated.
While CBC has not announced any layoffs this fall, it also struggles with shrinking ad revenue, smaller audiences and threats from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre to defund the CBC if his party forms government in the 2025 election.
While Canadians can get news elsewhere – including from small, online sources – the declining fortunes of the country’s national broadcast platforms is resulting in a more parochial news ecosystem, where people are increasingly retreating into regional sites that reflect their existing political biases.
