ROTHENBURGER – Mainstream media ponder an uncertain future

THE MEDIA attended its own wake this week. At least that’s what it felt like at the 30^th annual Webster awards in the Hyatt Regency ballroom in Vancouver.

Normally, the event hosted by the Jack Webster Foundation and named after the most famous and beloved journalist ever to take to the airwaves in B.C., is a chance for those in the media to let their hair down and engage in some self-deprecation as they honour the past year’s over-achievers.

Thursday night was all of that, but there was also more than a hint of doom and gloom about it as the industry faces up to the fact the masses just don’t need the mainstream media the way they used to.

That same day’s announcement by industry giant Postmedia — which has been bleeding millions in losses — that it will cut its salary costs by 20 per cent through voluntary staff buyouts didn’t help the mood at all.

Postmedia had already cut 90 jobs and merged newsrooms in Vancouver and several other cities earlier in the year. Torstar, the Globe and Mail and Rogers Media have also done some painful belt-tightening in 2016.

Here in B.C., including in Kamloops, we’ve become all too familiar with small-town newspapers giving up the ghost, and there are no signs of a turn-around. Traditional media are not-so-gradually becoming irrelevant in an online age.

The guest speaker Thursday night was The National’s Peter Mansbridge, who’s given notice he’ll step down from his reported million-dollar salary next July 1. Noting the Postmedia announcement and other cutbacks, he urged his fellow journalists to hang in there.

Trying to offer hope to several tables of journalism-school students among the crowd of more than a thousand, Mansbridge talked of “tremendous opportunities” for mainstream journalists to use new technology to do better and more important reporting than ever.

And Kim Bolan of the Vancouver Sun (a Postmedia paper), who won an award for excellence in legal journalism, suggested that competing media outlets could stem the tide if they co-operated more with each other on big stories, but she wondered how long she’d have a job.

It sounded a little unhappy and desperate. Recently-retired Sun columnist Shelley Fralic, honoured with a lifetime achievement award, spoke fondly of the good old days when working in the industry was “magic.”

It’s not that good reporting isn’t being done. Our own community was well-represented in the room. Jessica Klymchuk of Kamloops This Week won the Webster for community reporting. Another finalist was her colleague Tim Petruk, and former Kamloops Daily News photographer Don Denton, now with the Goldstream News Gazette, was a runner-up in the same category.

The Victoria Times-Colonist was a finalist for best news reporting. Among those who worked on its entry was Jack Knox, a former city editor at the Kamloops Daily News whose columns appear here regularly. The TC’s editor, Dave Obee, was at the dinner — he’s another former Daily News reporter.

The Daily News had several trips to the awards podium of its own at past Websters.

The problem is, people want their news delivered differently than they used to. This is not a revelation — the mainstream media figured it out years ago. They just haven’t figured out what to do about it, and the result is the gradual wasting away of newsrooms throughout the country.

While there’s still enough good journalism to celebrate, one wonders and worries how long it will last.

Mel Rothenburger was a judge in the category for best television reporting in this year’s Webster awards. armchairmayor@gmail.com.