For seven years, Ottawa has been subsidizing rats in a maze and calling it \u201csaving journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since 2019, the federal government has pumped hundreds of millions into legacy newsrooms through tax credits, payroll rebates, and \u201ctemporary\u201d support schemes that somehow keep renewing. The promise was reform and innovation. The result is the same old corridors, just with nicer lighting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ask the only question that matters: Audiences kept shrinking. Trust kept falling. Their viewers and readers kept getting older. The product did not suddenly become braver, more transparent, more self\u2011aware, or more technologically literate. There was no visible revolution in how stories were gathered, checked, told, or distributed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If this were any other sector, you would call it what it is: a very expensive refusal to adapt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Legacy outlets did not use the breathing room to re\u2011engineer their relationship with reality. They used it to keep the maze intact. Same formats. Same scripts. Same assumptions. Same on\u2011air personalities soothing the same dwindling audience that already doesn\u2019t believe them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The subsidies weren\u2019t a lifeline. They were a comfort blanket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Politicians got what they wanted: a familiar set of brands limping along, still available to validate talking points and host staged confrontations in prime time. Executives got what they wanted: a few more years before the balance sheet\u2019s rot became impossible to disguise. Maze\u2011runners got what they wanted: one more contract, one more cycle of pretending the walls were permanent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What nobody got was journalism that could survive without a drip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because subsidy doesn\u2019t fix the problem that matters: these institutions trained their smartest people not<\/em> to see the ecosystem changing. They trained them to know internal rules, not external reality. They trained them to take comfort in being a rat that knows every turn, instead of a human being capable of walking out of the lab.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So here we are: audiences fleeing, trust eroded, technology rewriting the conditions of information itself, and the proposed solution is\u2026 another cheque.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another bailout won\u2019t make a newsroom suddenly understand AI. It won\u2019t make a 63\u2011year\u2011old anchor magically appealing to a 23\u2011year\u2011old who gets news from creators and chatbots. It won\u2019t reverse a decade of contempt for independent upstarts who actually live in the environment these legacy outlets are paid to ignore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It will do exactly what the last seven years did: keep the maze running, keep the rats paid, and keep the public out of the room where the decisions are made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you really wanted to save journalism, you wouldn\u2019t shovel more money into a structure that has already proven it cannot or will not change. You\u2019d stop pretending the maze is sacred and start asking who, out in the open air, is actually capable of dealing with reality as it is now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Canada didn\u2019t bail out journalism. And when the money runs out again, they\u2019ll be just as lost as they are today because they never learned how to leave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For seven years, Ottawa has been subsidizing rats in a maze and calling it \u201csaving journalism.\u201d Since 2019, the federal government has pumped hundreds of millions into legacy newsrooms through tax credits, payroll rebates, and \u201ctemporary\u201d support schemes that somehow keep renewing. The promise was reform and innovation. The result is the same old corridors, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[185,186,49,166],"class_list":["post-2748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alexandra-kitty","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-canada","tag-journalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2749,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2748\/revisions\/2749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
What meaningful changes did Canadian legacy media make with all that money?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
It bought a little more time for people who can\u2019t imagine life outside the lab.<\/p>\n\n\n\n