Amid C-18 row, media group urges advertisers to pledge 25% of budgets to local news
Global News
The call to support local media sources comes amid years of declining advertising for Canadian news as ad dollars migrate to tech giants.
Canadian local news providers are set to take a revenue hit amid fallout from Ottawa’s Bill C-18, the head of a national media group warns in a letter to advertisers urging dedicated spending to support smaller players.
The passage of Bill C-18, dubbed the Online News Act, was met with swift retaliation from tech giants Meta and Alphabet in June.
The legislation is meant to force big internet and streaming platforms such as Meta’s Facebook and Alphabet’s Google to compensate Canadian news outlets for content appearing on their platforms. But both tech giants said they would instead block access to Canadian news content on their platforms in protest of the bill.
The move will not only result in a loss of potential revenues that Bill C-18 wants to force the platforms to pay to media organizations, but will also curtail traffic to news organizations’ content.
But in an open letter to advertisers and other stakeholders in the Canadian media industry, Shannon Lewis, the president of the Canadian Media Directors’ Council (CMDC), argues that leaders in the sector can make an impact “independent” of both Ottawa’s legislation and big tech’s ambitions.
The letter published Tuesday calls for media and advertising companies to pledge spending 25 per cent of their online digital marketing budgets through local media. Spending one of every four advertising dollars on local media would work out to $380 million in support for local Canadian journalism, according to Lewis, which she said would eclipse revenue estimates tied to Bill C-18.
The call comes amid years of declining advertising for Canadian news as ad dollars migrate to tech giants, Lewis wrote. Roughly 23.1 per cent of advertising dollars in the country went towards Canadian and local media in 2014; five years later that figure had declined to 5.7 per cent, she wrote.
Over the past 15 years, 473 local news outlets have closed, she added, affecting more than 300 communities across Canada.
B.C. health authorities have announced the first case of a human avian flu infection acquired in Canada, with the teenage patient in critical condition in hospital.
People have been hearing a lot about H5N1 bird flu — or highly pathogenic avian influenza — since a B.C. teen became the first human to get the virus in Canada and is in hospital.
The Liberal government and the NDP negotiated the substance of a pharmacare bill as part of their now-defunct supply-and-confidence agreement.
Kennedy ran as an independent presidential candidate but gave Trump his endorsement with a promise to have a role in health policy in the next Trump administration.
Emergency services are at the scene of a train derailment Thursday morning on Montreal's south shore, where they are urging citizens to stay away from the area.
"I was yelling at them saying get the F** away it’s a wild animal," resident Josh Merrin told Global News. "Sorry about my language."
H5 bird flu is widespread in wild birds worldwide and is causing outbreaks in poultry and U.S. dairy cows, with several recent human cases in U.S. dairy and poultry workers.
The Calgary Zoo announced that one of its lowland gorillas unexpectedly passed away on November 12, 2024.
Edmontonians have had mixed feelings and now the city is asking people to share their thoughts officially. The findings of a survey could bring some changes.
Dr. Anna Wolak, a family physician in Vancouver, said many parents are likely having flashbacks to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite this flu being a single case.
WHO acknowledged that testing for mpox is still not widespread, making it difficult to understand how exactly the virus is spreading.