A short autopsy

A Canadian community paper closes, on average, almost every week. Not all of them make it onto the wire. Most of them don't. A weekly in northern Ontario, a daily in southern Manitoba, a French-language hebdo that served three counties in Estrie for sixty years. The mast is rolled up, the office is emptied, and the people who used to cover the local hospital board now sell life insurance or have moved to Calgary.

The story we are told about this is comfortable: the internet killed it. Google ate the classifieds. Facebook ate the eyeballs. Newspapers were dinosaurs that didn't adapt. It is a story that locates the cause of death somewhere out there, beyond anyone's reach, and assigns no blame.

It is also, on inspection, mostly false.

What actually happened

The internet didn't kill local newsrooms. Concentration killed local newsrooms, and the internet provided the alibi.

Here is the part of the story I want to be very clear about, because it tends to vanish in the polite version. In the early 2000s, when print revenue was still strong and digital was still cheap, Canadian newspaper chains — Postmedia in particular, but not only Postmedia — borrowed enormous sums of money to buy each other. They piled debt on properties that had thrown off cash for a century. The interest payments on that debt then had to come from somewhere, and the place they came from was the newsroom.

Reporters were laid off. Bureaus were closed. Wire copy was dropped into the slot that used to belong to a city hall reporter. The product got thinner, the audience drifted away, the cash flow shrank, and the next round of layoffs followed. It is not a mystery. It is a private equity operation, and it had nothing to do with the internet.

By the time the internet "killed" newspapers, the newspapers had already been hollowed out for fifteen years by people who treated them as financial instruments.

The subsidy story

Then came the subsidies — because nothing dies in this country without first being subsidized.

Ottawa now writes cheques to the same companies that strip-mined the industry. A labour journalism tax credit, an aggregator levy, an "online news act" that produced, after a great deal of theatre, a one-time payment from Google and a complete withdrawal by Meta. Hundreds of millions of dollars have moved from public coffers into private chains.

Some of that money keeps reporters employed. Some of it absolutely does. I know good reporters whose jobs exist because of those programs and they do real work.

But the structural question — who owns this newsroom, and what are they doing with it — is never asked. The cheques flow to the same boards of directors that decided in 2009 to cut the legislative bureau. They flow to executives who collect bonuses while masthead positions go unfilled. They flow, in some cases, to chains majority-owned by American hedge funds whose primary interest in Canadian democracy is the cap rate on the building the newsroom used to occupy.

If you wanted to keep journalism alive in Canada, you would not write the cheques the way we are writing them.

What we lost that we won't get back

Local newsrooms were not just delivery mechanisms for content. They were the only entities in a community whose full-time job was to know things about it. They went to council meetings nobody else went to. They read the planning department's documents nobody else read. They asked the school board questions nobody else thought to ask.

When that infrastructure disappears, the most powerful actors in a town — the developer, the police chief, the regional health authority, the largest employer — operate without any sustained, professional scrutiny. They self-report. They write their own press releases. They become the source.

This isn't a hypothetical. We have lived it for a decade now and we can measure the result. Voter turnout in municipal elections drops in news deserts. Local corruption prosecutions decline (not because there is less corruption, but because nobody is watching). Building approvals get faster. Bond ratings get better. Property values rise. Nothing nefarious has to happen. The absence of attention does the work.

A town without a newsroom isn't a town in mourning. It is a town the powerful prefer.

What now

So when the next round of grants is announced and the next press release lands explaining how Ottawa is saving local journalism, ask three questions.

Who actually receives the money — the reporters, or the holding company that owns them?

What conditions are attached — anti-concentration? Editorial independence? A floor on staffing? Or just a cheque?

Who is left out — the worker-owned co-ops, the non-profit local startups, the Indigenous-led outlets that have been doing real journalism on small budgets while the chains shrank?

The fact that those questions are almost never asked, even by the people writing about the policy, tells you something about what kind of journalism the policy is actually meant to preserve.

Local newsrooms didn't die. They were quietly suffocated, then publicly mourned by the same people who turned off the air. The funeral was paid for by everyone. The estate went to the shareholders.

Maxime Marquette is a Quebec columnist and the editor of doyou.ca, the English edition of the MadMax Média Group. He has spent twenty years inside Canadian newsrooms and is, on most days, still angry about it.