Send the Journalists Home

To understand what's happening in the world today, leave the halls of power and get back to street level

An earlier version of this column was originally published on A Little Wicked Thinking July 4, 2023. This version has been updated to reflect new information.

It’s been a tough few years for my fellow ink-stained hacks.

Federal Conservative leader and likely next prime minister Pierre Pollivere has promised to end wage subsidies to Canadian publications and public funding to English-language CBC.¹

Edelman’s Perspective on 2025 report predicts that we’ve reached a tipping point on hyper-stimulated short-form content and are looking to disconnect and dive into longer-form stories, like the kind my colleagues and I use to publish and produce for weekend papers, radio programs and TV news magazines.²

However, people aren’t turning back to conventional media as much as they are turning to people who can hold their attention, such as independent podcasters, like Call Her Daddy’s Alexandra Cooper and Pivot’s Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, and writers such as Queen of Substack, Heather Cox Richardson, daily author of Letter From an American.

Then there’s the constant threat of AI either taking over from journalists to create and publish the copy, or sneakily hoovering up all our original work to learn how to replace us. Just this week, the Writers Union of Canada newsletter, usually a delightfully benign read, arrived to warn me the latest version of Microsoft Word opted me into allowing Microsoft to direct all my writing in Word to train its AI features. Add ‘learn the complicated step-by-step process to opt out of letting the $3.3 trillion (US) Microsoft Corporation use my talents for free’ to this week’s to-do list.³

Expect more AI integration, layoffs and contracts as conventional news organizations enter the final phase of transitioning from the 20th-century model of centralized information production and distribution into…something else.

I say send all the journalists home; that’s how we’ll save the news industry and, by extension, democracy.

Why? Because the critical information we need to bring peace and certainty to our world won’t be found in the halls of power; it’s out in our neighbourhoods.

There is one simple rule for great journalism that has been lost as budgets have shrunk and algorithms have taken over: to find the best stories we need to pick up our notebooks and go talk with people. Lots of them. Every day.

I graduated from Ryerson’s (now Toronto Metropolitan) journalism program in 1994. That was the year The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star and The Toronto Sun – newsrooms mere blocks from my classroom – cut their internships for the first but not last time.

That forced my graduating class of 60 to take off for the four winds.

I went 21 hours northwest of Toronto to the Kenora Daily Miner and News for a summer of covering bass fishing derbies, accidents on the TransCanada Highway, layoffs at the local pulp mill, and the precarious balance of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in this small resource town. I have four strong memories of Kenora.

First, it’s beautiful, and the Lake of the Woods should be on everyone’s must-visit list of Canadian sites.

Two, there was significant disparity between the people who lived in Kenora year-round and the wealthy, who flew in on their private planes via an airport that no commercial jet ever visited to summer on their private island estates.

Three, people in Kenora were expert event planners via ‘socials’ because when you live far away from a major urban centre (Winnipeg is two hours away), you make your own fun.

Fourth, underlying all that laid-back bonhomie was a casual racism against Indigenous people born of watching the effects of institutional racism (public intoxication, petty crime and poverty) and the reacting to a growing Indigenous-led movement towards self-reliance and rejection of Canadian institutions (the police, courts, social services, public education, and health care) that intentionally or not, was steeped in racial stereotypes and responses.

My next stop was the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder, the daily paper for another mill town at the other end of Ontario, located one hour west of Montreal and an hour south of Ottawa.

It was a three days’ drive from Kenora but the two towns had a few things in common.

The St. Lawrence River was beautiful; there was significant economic disparity between the locals and the new moneyed class, which in Cornwall meant between those who smuggled and those who did not; Cornwall residents knew how to throw a party; and rippling just beneath the surface was a casual racism and growing resentment that defined local Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations, as well as French/English tensions.

For the past 27 years, I have lived in New Brunswick, one of Canada’s three Maritime provinces. It is undeniably beautiful, there is great economic disparity between the locals and the region’s small moneyed class, it is the land of the legendary kitchen party, and there is an undercurrent of casual racism and resentment embedded in the Indigenous/non-Indigenous relationship and the French/English divide.

This is Canada in 2023: a beautiful place peppered with growing economic disparity and a bonhomie that masks an undercurrent of racism and growing resentments we’d rather not confront. How this story plays out over the next few years will define us as a people and a country for the next generation.

This is the story we need to seek out, analyze and then integrate into a new shared value proposition that reflects the best of who we are today, which should include being willing to confront the sins of our country’s past so we can decide where we need and want to go together.

It’s a story that won’t come to us through page view analytics, fear-mongering clickbait or a fast-moving newsfeed.

We need to turn away from our screens and turn towards real-life people to analyze the historic economic and social inequities that got us here and the widening cultural cracks producing the shock waves that are shaking us to our core.

It’s time for journalists to come home.

1. January 12, 2025 report by Canadian Press reporter Anja Karadeglija. With Conservatives promising to 'defund,' could the next election kill the CBC?

2. Edelman's Perspective on 2025 Trends Report: Tipping Points

3. Hugh Stephens Blog from January 18, 2025 Writers! Do you know your drafts on MS Word are being scooped by Microsoft to build its AI algorithm? But you can stop this from happening (read on).