• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, August 27, 2024

Kelowna, British Columbia, the city I live in -- with a population of about 250,000 -- just ran its last locally produced TV news show. That marks the end of a 67-year streak. Our local station, CHBC, first signed on the air on Sept. 21, 1957.

That streak was not without some hiccups. There have been a number of ownership changes. The trend in those transitions was away from local ownership and toward huge national spanning media conglomerates.

Since 2009, when the station became part of the Global network,  my city  also essentially lost its daily newspaper, which is a mere ghost of its former self: an anemic online version and a printed paper which is little more than a wrapper for a bunch of grocery flyers.  The triweekly paper has suffered a similar fate. Radio stations have gutted their local news teams. The biggest news team in the region works for a local news portal. They are young and eager, but few of them are trained journalists.

CHBC started as an extension of local radio. At the time it was launched, only 500 households in the city had a TV set. Broadcasting was “over the air,” and I live in a very mountainous location, so it was impossible to watch TV prior to the station signing on.

Given that the first TV stations only signed on in Canada in 1952 (CBFT in Montreal and CBLT in Toronto), it’s rather amazing to think that my little town (population 10,000 at the time) had its own station just five years later. Part of the rapid rollout of TV in Canada was to prevent cultural colonization from the rapidly expanding American TV industry. Our federal government pushed hard to have Canadian programming available from coast to coast.

For the decades that followed, it was local news that defined communities. Local was granular and immediately relevant in a way networks news couldn’t be. It gave you what you needed to know to knowingly participate in local democracy.

For that alone, CHBC News will be missed here in Kelowna.

This story probably resonates with all of you. The death of local journalism is not unique to my city. I have just learned that I probably will be living in a news desert soon.  The  importance of local news is enshrined in the very definition of a news desert: “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.”

The death of local news was recently discussed at the Canadian Association of Journalists Annual conference in Toronto. There, April Lindgren, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism and the principal investigator of the Local News Research Project, said this: “I think one of the things .. people don't think about in terms of the mechanics of the role of local news in a community is the role that it plays in equipping people to participate in decision-making.”

We need local news. A recent study by Resonate  said that Americans trust local news more than any other source. And not just by a little margin -- by a lot. The next closest answer was a full 15 percentage points behind.

But there are two existential problems that are pushing local news to the brink of an extinction. First of all, most local news outlets were swallowed up into corporate mass media conglomerates over the past three  or four decades. And secondly, the business model for local news has disappeared. Local advertising dollars have migrated to other platforms. So the fate of local news had become a P&L decision.

That’s what it was for CHBC. It’s owned by Corus entertainment. Corus owns the Global Network (15 stations), 39 radio stations, 33 specialty TV channels and a bunch of other media miscellanea. 

Oh, did I mention that Corus is also bleeding cash at a fatal rate? On the heels of an announced $770 million loss (CDN) it cut 25% of its workforce. That was the death knell for CHBC. It didn’t have a hope in hell.

Local news doesn’t have to die. It just has to find another way to live. Like so much of our media environment, basing survival on advertising revenue is a sure recipe for disaster. That’s why the Local News Research Project is floating ideas like supporting local news with philanthropy. I’m not sure that’s a viable or scalable answer.

I think a better idea might be to move local news to protected species status. If we recognize its importance to democracy, especially at local levels, then perhaps tax dollars should go to ensuring its survival.

The scenario of government supported local journalism brings up a philosophical debate that I have ignited in the past, when I talked about public broadcasting. It split my readers along national lines, with those from the U.S. giving a thumbs down to the idea, and those from Australia, New Zealand and Canada receiving it more favorably.

Let’s see what happens this time.