We represent here more than forty owners of independent for-profit weeklies that bring together more than a hundred media in the province of Quebec and across the country.
We distribute 10.3 million copies per year throughout our territory, while our digital platforms have a total of 20 million page views and nearly 15 million unique visitors per month.
The press is a precious bulwark of democracy and its duty to inform the public with the greatest journalistic rigor must not be enslaved to the hegemony of a few web giants who enrich themselves not only by appropriating content that we produce at great expense, but also spread a lot of fake news devoid of genuine journalistic practices and ethical sense, unverified and inaccurate content.
These web giants, such as Facebook and Google, also give free rein to the content aggregators to which the Internet gave birth.
These have multiplied without producing original content, with very little or no investment in journalistic resources and few rules of ethics in terms of information.
The French-language weekly press in Quebec has also played a fundamental role in delivering information to the heart of several local communities, often in regions with no other local or regional media. In this context, we can say that a weakened press, threatened with abandoning its mission and disappearing after decades of existence, seriously endangers our democracy.
In the landscape for nearly a century
The weeklies, for their part, have been part of the economic and cultural landscape, some for almost a century, and they are essential to democratic vitality. Outside major centers, they are often the only ones to play such a role and their relevance remains just as great as before the advent of social networks.
Our journalists create and produce original local or regional content for each of our information products from our respective newsrooms, which total more than 200 journalists in Quebec.
We can say that it is a very large newsroom that covers all of Quebec.
Every day, they deliver high-quality local news and help erect a wall against the wave of misinformation that has been surging, especially in recent years.
In a poll conducted by Pollara Strategic Insights on behalf of News Media Canada in May 2022, it was reported that 90% of Canadians felt it was important for local media to survive, 79% of Canadians agreed that the web giants must share their revenues with the Canadian media and that 80% of Canadians were in favor of the passage of the bill.
For our part, it is a real “cry from the heart”: we ask you to endorse this bill and allow collective bargaining to remedy the market imbalance between global web platforms and news media publishers local and regional.
Even the agreements already concluded between certain publishers and Google or Facebook present an inequality and an imbalance compared to the others.
These web giants have, in fact, cannibalized our income without assuming any of the social and fiscal responsibilities attached to it by controlling the algorithms.
They have disrupted our business model and diminished the real value of information. Above all, they succeeded in attracting 80% of the advertising investments of local and regional businesses and merchants without there being any tangible spinoffs in the communities.
In just a few years, without tax contributions, these web giants have eroded the income of traditional media which, for decades, have invested time and money in their community, encouraged their traders and professionals, supported their institutions and served the public interest. of their fellow citizens. Google and Meta, to name a few, clearly benefit and benefit from our content. They thus maintain the interest of their users, whose data they collect and process in order to target the advertisements sold.
Basically, that’s their business model.
To top it off, these giants are threatening to block news in Canada if Bill C-18 is passed.
We ask our parliamentarians to help community newspapers by passing Bill C-18 before their summer break.