The Unseen Muzzle: How Timidity, Self-Censorship and Libel Chill Work Their Magic. It’s probably fate; like James Minifie, I was raised on the slimy and sluggish River Trent in the English Midlands. He was from downriver - Burton-on-Trent; I’m from Stoke-on-Trent, upriver but, like Minifie, I came to Canada and lived on the prairies for a while before ending up, like Minifie, for a long spell as a CBC Correspondent in Washington. But there the resemblance ends; he had an illustrious career. Nowadays, I’m not sure any of us has anything as grand as a “career.” I sometimes quote Jim Munson, now a Senator but formerly of CTV News, who coined this immortal phrase shortly before he left CTV: “First, I had a career; then I had a job; now I have a shift.” These are words to ponder in the gloomy environment we face today. Now this may sound like the start of yet another rant from an old-school journalist about the brutish gutter of the modern media: the collapse of standards, the brain-dead blogs and the bad grammar - don’t get me started on the bad grammar. But, we’re not doing that speech tonight. Nostalgia is no use because the good old days weren’t that good and they’re not coming back. They can’t come back. The business model that drives our industry, journalism, is now skidding into history with all the grace of a gas-guzzler heading over a cliff with a sleeping drunk at the wheel. This is why they do these Minifie lectures: to encourage a bright new generation! 2 But it would seem absurd to whine about the timidity and self- censorship in our business without first whining about whether we will have a business at all. The truth is that scarcity is going to cramp our style severely in the days ahead. Obviously, you’re less likely to take risks if your job’s at risk. Already, our bosses can barely afford journalists to gather the news, let alone plane tickets to send them where they need to go or lawyers to defend libel suits. But the challenge of generating real, aggressive reporting on the world is not just a problem for publishers, but for citizens who want to see a well-informed and civilised world. So we had best begin by understanding that the crisis in our industry is accelerated by, but is not a function of, the crisis in the financial markets. Revenues were in decline before the crash; CanWest Global was loaded with debt before the crash; the CBC’s revenues have been dropping for years. Now, we’re just heading over the cliff faster – and we have to face the prospect that some cities won’t have their own newspapers or TV stations. Commenting on CTV’s recent decision to close a couple of stations in Ontario, Bell Globemedia spokesman Paul Sparkes said, “The traditional economic model for Canadian television is broken.” As for newspapers, the “traditional economic model” is hacking down trees, mulching them into newsprint and splattering it with ink, then hauling the result in stinking trucks to homes and boxes and corner stores. I think we know that’s broken, too. We also know that we are not living in a mere cyclical downturn, to be followed as night follows day by a corresponding upturn. This is not a temporary slump but a deconstruction of our industry. Just as GM won’t scarf up billions of taxpayers’ dollars and come back just like before to crank out gas-guzzling dinosaurs, the old media dinosaur is roadkill, too. The information 3 world is going to the internet – heck, it’s gone - and it’s not coming back. So, why don’t we just be bold, not timid, and move our business to the internet? Of course, we have already moved – but, more precisely, we have moved our product to the net without moving the business - unless you think it’s a business to give away your product for free, which is what most newspapers do. Don’t kid yourself that the online ads are sufficient to pay for the content. It does not. Furthermore, putting it on the web for free means nobody needs to buy a subscription and it also allows aggregators like Google News to cash in on content for which they paid precisely nothing – and Google News is now planning ads. And giving it all away on the web leads readers to believe that content should be free. “Information wants to be free,” they say. No, it doesn’t. Information that’s worth having wants desperately to be paid for. So, first, we have to provide a product worth having and then we have to figure out how to get online customers to pay for it. One way to approach this might be to ask this question: does anyone here not have an iPod? You may have noticed the new feature on recent models, called Genius, which surveys your library of music to learn your tastes and then tries to sell you more songs it thinks you’ll like. Now, many people have said that the new model for journalism should be iTunes – click on Rex Murphy’s rant on The National, pay 99 cents, and away you go. But, with due respect to Rex, you might not hum along to it for weeks afterwards. Now, some sites 4 already do fine with a subscription model: the Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports – these are sources of high-quality, specialised information which you’re not going to get anywhere else. But what about high-quality news and commentary? My own theory, for what it’s worth, is that people will only fork out money for news on the internet if the experience is as simple and as satisfying as the one which drew us to iTunes – plus, it should offer something more, like Genius. It should remember, like Amazon’s Kindle reader, where you left off reading the last time. It should remember not to offer articles you’ve already read. It should skip all sports except the ones you follow. It should completely skip anything about Hollywood and celebrities and their crack-ups, and about golf, and any section called “home design” or “lifestyle.” It should alert me to updates on stories I care about and it should know which I care about, as Genius does. And it should definitely have a full daily roundup on the latest gadgets. So, let’s say it knows that I also like to read pungent commentary by Margaret Wente and Christie Blatchford or Andrew Coyne and Don Martin – or, in the U.S., by Christopher Hitchens, or the big guns at the New York Times like Frank Rich, Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd. Surely these are all writers who tell it like it is and command a loyal audience who just might pay them to keep writing. Notice that I didn’t mention any mere news reporters because it’s not clear that people will pay for us grunts who actually go and get the news as opposed to bloviating about it. Everybody wants to rant about the news; nobody wants to gather it. But will customers even pay for those fancy columnists? Problem: the New York Times famously failed to make a go of charging for its big-name pundits with a paywall experiment called TimeSelect. 5 It made $10million a year – but the Times dropped it anyway, figuring it could make more money by taking down the wall and thereby generating more traffic to its site - so as to sell more ads. But the ads still aren’t enough to pay for the content – so they’re also interested in the subscription model. If you try the TimesReader version of the paper, you just might think of buying a subscription. But that’s one of the world’s truly great newspapers, struggling to make all this work. Now – do you think your local paper measures up to that challenge? Let’s face it, in local news, there’s a problem of scale. Will there be enough readers willing to support everything the Regina Leader-Post does now? Perhaps not. In Vancouver, a few pathetic junkies like me will read the National Post and the Vancouver Sun and the Province – all CanWest papers – but for how much longer? Think of the waste. Most of all three now go in the recycle bin – because they are broadcasting, not narrowcasting – giving me all kinds of junk about golf and recipes and fashion and lifestyle and pop concerts which are for other readers, not for me. I’m sorry, that’s a dead model. So, now, newspapers and TV networks alike are moving to national sites like CBC.CA and adding local pages so that you can get a dose of local news and weather – although far less of it than you’d get in a standalone local product. And maybe those local products are not going to survive except as sections of a national online product. And maybe geezers like me who want to hold an actual paper and use it to mop up spills or swat bugs will just have to adjust. There’s no other way if you consider the awe-inspiring growth of the Internet. Think about the numbers recently posted by the Senior VP at Google, Jonathan Rosenberg: nearly a quarter of humanity - 1.4 6 billion people - now use the Internet, with more than 200 million new people coming online every year.