My first media job was at CBC Radio in Toronto, at the show Morningside with Peter Gzowski. The job was booking interview guests, cold-calling smart people who, as a colleague once put it, “had lives more interesting than our own.” The office on Jarvis Street was shabby-chic and not without charm: manual typewriters, books and reports jammed onto shelves, stacks of audio tape in wire baskets, a hubcap-sized ashtray for the host, and mice.

This was the early 1990s, just before the announcement of $140 million in budget cuts. Soon after came a process known as “creative renewal.” For the brass, it meant panicked restructuring in the face of technological change, doing more with less. For staff, it sounded like something the Soviets used to announce when politburo members were poisoned. I asked a senior producer what it meant. They’re going to change the logo, he said. And fire people. Both came to pass. A streamlined “exploding pizza” logo, new letterhead, and 400 jobs out the door. What to do, I asked. Retire, my senior producer suggested, not entirely joking. I was twenty-nine years old.

The big threat was technology. We were terrified of “the death star,” or direct delivery of satellite TV to homes by way of grey dishes no bigger than a fruit platter. You still spot them in old neighbourhoods or at the cottage. They were affordable. Cable companies were losing their minds over lost revenue. The CBC warned, breathlessly, that “TV is about to change, and quickly.” For journalism, the risk was clear. We’d all switch to flashy American channels and leave Canadian content behind. The trend was always toward bigger as better: media that offered something for everyone, no matter where they lived. News beamed from space.

When more federal cutbacks came ($127 million in 1996, with up to 2,500 jobs lost shortly after), they hit radio and local newsrooms just as hard as network TV. But the CBC survived, like a turtle flipped right side up. The death-star threat fizzled once the internet evolved. In 1993, CBC News began the long, bureaucratic march to “digital first,” another buzz phrase that signalled old media, like radio and television, were on their way out. As things stand, the CBC plans to be fully digital in twenty years, if it survives that long under an expected Conservative government.

News runs on a basic narrative: villains and heroes, an Aristotelian three-act structure. Observers now put the media business well into act three, near the desperate end. The villain, again, is technology. The majority of ad dollars that powered newspapers for generations have been hoovered up by platforms like Google and Meta and X. Media consultant Matthew Goldstein, writing in the Press Gazette, doesn’t mince words when describing what’s coming: an “extinction-level event” for news publishers and broadcasters. In 2023, Bell Canada Enterprises eliminated 1,300 jobs, including a 6 percent cut at Bell Media, which owns CTV. Global News in Canada slashed thirty-five jobs in 2024, and the following month, its parent, Corus Entertainment, announced it was laying off another 300 people. By now, vis-à-vis income and job security, it makes more sense to be a poet or blacksmith than a journalist.

What if this so-called “extinction-level event” isn’t the end of journalism but just the end of a certain kind of journalism? It’s a crisis, yes—for the people losing their jobs, for the old-school media barons, for the hedge funds that thought they could turn news into just another asset class. But for journalism as an institution? Maybe not. The old business model is broken. But another is taking shape: non-profit, or even low-profit of the kind that could make tech entrepreneurs nervous. It uses, but doesn’t depend on, public funding. The something-for-everyone ethos of big media now looks unsustainable; what more and more news consumers will want are smaller media outlets, with smaller scope, and lots of them.

It’s crucial to note that, for nonprofits, the business model is a means to keep the lights on and pay living wages to reporters and creatives. What unites them is a vision of journalism that trumps profit: community comes first. Their readers, they know, don’t care about media hand wringing and the doom-and-gloom “future of journalism” debates. They care about where and how they live, what it costs, who’s left out, who’s telling the truth, and who’s lying.

After all, power benefits most from a “national conversation” which minimizes local interests in favour of oversized, vague narratives, curated by corporate media or what’s left of it. Democracy, meantime, benefits from more local news.

That news ever made money in the first place was a “historic accident,” Sue Gardner says. Gardner was the executive director of Wikimedia Foundation from 2007 to 2014 and, at one time, headed up the CBC’s online service. “It’s not like Israel and Palestine have anything to do with somebody selling a sofa,” she says. “They don’t naturally belong together.” But the publishers of journalism had an expressed commitment to an informed citizenry, and that citizenry also bought furniture. So when newspapers invested in overseas bureaus or investigative stories, they did so for prestige—“because it made them feel good,” says Gardner—not because it made financial sense.

Where did the money go? The short answer is social media demanded more content, to drive more traffic. Legacy media obliged, shifting their focus from serving readers to feeding social platforms—betting on them as a pathway to ad revenue. Then the platforms changed the game. They realized they could cut out the middleman, selling their vast audiences directly to advertisers. The advertisers, in turn, dropped the newspapers and broadcasters. “Now,” says Gardner, “there’s no revenue model for supporting newsrooms of the scope and size and scale that used to exist.”

According to Pew Research in the US, advertising and circulation revenue for newspapers was $49.3 billion (US) in 2006. Six years later, it was down to $25.3 billion (US), nearly half. The estimate for 2022 was $9.8 billion (US). In Canada, according to Statistics Canada, newspaper advertising revenue dropped 9.8 percent from 2020 to 2022. Google and Meta were the new collective death star. Only this time,........

© The Walrus