Shaun Newman Podcast - #455 - Holly Doan

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Holly is an award-winning journalist who joined the gallery in 1993. She reported for CBC and CTV in four provinces, was CTV Beijing Bureau Chief in 1995-8, and produced political history documentaries for CPAC. Now she is the publisher for Blacklock's Reporter. Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast

This is Nicole Murphy. This is Rachel Emanuel. Hi, this is John Cohen. Hey, everyone. This is Glenn Jung from Bright Light News. This is Drew Weatherhead. This is Terracount. This is Ed Dowd, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast.

Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Monday. Hopefully everybody's weekend went along. I had a great little weekend. Watched a little bit of my nephew's ball. Had a niece's birthday. And overall, I can't complain too much. Not that any of you really care when I complain to.

much. Does anyone really care when anyone's complain? Probably not. It's had a great weekend. I hope wherever you're at, you get to enjoy, you know, some time with family friends, maybe kicked it back on, you know, like grads just like piling on, right? Tons of people in grad week. Others finishing up ball, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So hopefully wherever you were at, you got to enjoy the weekend and had a little bit of fun. Either way, today we got to, oh, well, we got blacklocks back on. That's what we got. And a first time from this, Lady. Either way, before we get there, let's get to today's episode sponsors. Canadians for

Truth, non-profit organization consisting of Canadians who believe in honesty, integrity, and principled leadership in government. They've been doing live shows. Of course, Joseph Borgo has his own show. Theo Fleury, Jamie Saleh, each have their own shows. I don't know why I spaced on that for a quick sec. And then, of course, they do their live events.

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But once upon a time, we had, you know, we had a nightclub, we had a strip club, and we had a cowboy bar. and they've since been all renovated and taken out. And now Prophet River sits in the cowboy bar right now it's gun. And it's a beautiful showroom and everything else. So if you're in town, make sure you stop in. And then in the strip club nightclub, now there's Medi Chair and I think it's a weed shop. It's a weed shop.

Anyways, we're having a chuckle. You know, if you could go back 10 years and see what that corner of the woods would become. I don't think you could have predicted it. Anyways. So all I'm saying is if you're in town and you want to stop into Profit River, they got a brand new building. Well, brand new they've renovated it all. So about a year now, a little over a year, I think, if memory serves me correct, it was last year. So once again, that's Prophet River for everything, wherever you're at in Canada.

If you're looking just to hop online and see what they got, Profitriver.com. Finally, let's get on to the tale of the tape brought to you by Hancock Petroleum for the past 80 years. They've been an industry leader in bulk fuels, lubricants, methanol, and chemicals delivering to your... farm, commercial or oil field locations for more information, visit them at Hancock, petroleum.ca. She's an award-winning journalist who joined the gallery in 1993. She was reported for CBC and CTV and CTV in four provinces and was at the CTV Beijing Bureau Chief in 1995 to 1998.

She's also produced political history documentaries for CPAC. She's now the publisher with BlackLox reporter. I'm talking about Holly Donne. So buckle up. Here we go. This is Holly Donne from Blacklocks Reporter. You're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today.

I'm joined by Holly Donne. So first off, ma'am, thanks for hopping on. Delighted to meet you. Now, we've exchanged different messages on Twitter. I've had Tom on, and for the listener, that's Tom Korski. I'm sure that I don't need to say that aloud. But I've had him on multiple, multiple times to talk about different things with Blacklocks. and certainly some different stories happening in Ottawa and that type of thing.

But before we get into Blacklocks and Bill C-18 and different things, I want to start with you and just letting my audience and even myself get to know a few different things, Holly, if you're willing to share and how you maybe got to Blacklocks in the first place. Oh, that's a long road of winding, Sean. I'm from rural Manitoba. That's where I started my career at a little television station in Brandon. I worked in four provinces, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta. In Alberta, because that's where you are, right?

In Alberta, I worked for, I was an anchor, the local CTV affiliate, and then I spent five years at CBC, Alberta, as a reporter, including the legislature during the Don Getty era at the start of Ralph Klein's period. After that, I worked for CTV National News in Ottawa on Parliament Hill for Craig Oliver at the start of the Kretchen era. Following that, I was CTV's Bureau Chief in Beijing, China for three years, when they had foreign bureaus. Sadly, you heard about the news last week. They'd closed almost all of them.

And then I was with CTV in Toronto. After that, my husband and I, maybe you know this, maybe you don't. Tom is my husband. He's the editor of Blacklocks, but he's also my business partner and my husband. So when we left Toronto, or I left CTV anyway, we incorporated. And for 10 years, our company produced political history documentaries, biographies, profiles of legislation, of premiers, prime ministers, with the wars. And those were sold and aired on CPAC, the CABETHO, cable public affairs channel. So around 2012, when we were told news was going online, this was the future,

We had decided to do all this vast years of experience. By the way, Tom had been a Calgary Sun reporter at the legislature. He had also worked for the South China Morning Post when we were in Beijing. So we decided to take everything we knew and had been taught by all the old timers in mainstream media to create our own company. We didn't have to stay with troubled and failing news companies, maybe be promoted to management, maybe not. we decided to take our experience and run our own company online, which you could do now. No printing press was necessary. No great amount of startup money necessary.

So we used our personal savings from our time in mainstream media to launch Blacklocks in 2012. No benefactors, no charitable contributions, no political affiliations. Just hang up your shingle and ask for subscribers. try to do news in Ottawa differently, like we had learned in the old days, fact-driven, and see how that would go. So that's my history anyway. You come with a very decorated career, you know, when you talk about all the different places you've been. Could you see the proverbial writing on the wall of what was coming down the pipe for mainstream media?

or you didn't think it would happen this way? No, I don't think anybody could see it coming. I mean, if the publishers could see it, could have seen it coming, they wouldn't have messed up their business models for 10 years by giving it away for free. Some didn't. The Wall Street Journal didn't.

The Times of London didn't, but the rest of them did. I first got an email account when I was living in China. So that was my introduction to computers, which were more, almost more advanced in how they were being used than they were back at CTV back in Ottawa and Toronto. So none of us could have seen. And my goodness, in 2012, if someone had told us what a rough ride it would be

to start your own online media company, I'm not sure we would have been crazy enough to do it, except that it seemed like a natural progression. It felt a little bit like everything else was stale. Like we'd been everywhere, done everything. and this was the future. So that's why. But no, we couldn't have told you. When you say rough ride, what do you mean? What was starting blacklocks like in the very beginning? Well, okay, so here's what happened. We said, okay, we'll take, instead of buying a new

minivan to haul the kids to hockey, we'll take a 20 grand or so of our own money and we'll, create a website and we'll start this company. We'll see how it goes. We thought the biggest problem would be getting people to pay for it, getting people to be interested in it. And of course, that has been a problem. What we didn't really understand was that an entire generation of publishers had taught Canadians

that journalism had no value. They had given it away for free. And now a hostile public who sometimes wanted to read our content because, say, we'd break a story, would be upset with us for having a paywall. They didn't accept that journalism ought to be paid, Even our colleagues in the business when we started in 2012 told everybody told us we were all wrong.

Reporters from the Toronto Star I knew said, oh, paywalls aren't the way. Other independents said, no, you have to give it away and you're going to make it on hits. You're going to make it through advertising. Well, what happened to advertising? You know, Joe's Cheval's dealer can now go right to the public on his own website or on the Internet. He doesn't need to buy a $40,000 ad in the newspaper anymore. So advertising is gone. So the hostility that greeted us was one thing.

The second thing was almost immediately when we started, the stealing began. Institutions, particularly public institutions, would buy a single subscription online, and I'm talking about the government here. They would share the password multiple times for the cost of at that time $148 subscription, and then shotgun our content, hundreds of stories throughout the public service without payment or permission. And since 2013, we have continued to be in litigation with the federal government, getting them to acknowledge that a password protected paywall is protected by the Copyright Act that they wrote. So expanding, despite we have had success, our company is doing really well,

particularly since 2019 and through pandemic. but the cost of business that is hiring lawyers to defend our product against the people we are reporting on has been so onerous that we have not been able to expand in the way we would have liked to. You know, it's interesting. I have a couple thoughts there. One is, it's funny, on this side, I just have obviously a giant different story. I don't have the decorated career of being in journalism. But I was able to go make this a full-time venture in 2022 because of advertising. And it's funny, the advertising came because I assume people were looking for places they could trust. And that's one of the things that me and two's on the mashup always talk about with Blacklocks

is you've come synonymous with like trust, like one of the places you can actually trust again. And you've built it on a model entirely by, I think entirely by, maybe you can clarify that. with people paying to get behind a paywall and actually see what you're writing? Entirely, yeah. So that's the business model, is a hard paywall at $314 a year, which is now apparently a crazy price, although I seem to remember that's what my parents paid to have the newspaper delivered. And the other part of the business model that was really important is that the content had to be original.

Forget going to news conferences or writing news releases. that all the others are doing and then trying to sell that. So what does that mean? That means you have to break stories. So you have to find a different way to cover federal affairs in Ottawa. So what is that?

That is access to information, government reports, federal court rulings, tribunal rulings, committee coverage, people, most reporters ignore most of the committees, legislation, regulations. These are the,

fine details of how we're governed. And in the beginning, it was institutions who understood, oh, yeah, we have to pay for that. We need that. I'll give you one small example. So during the last years of the Harper government, they had two bills. I still remember them. They were 325 and 277. And they were nicknamed the big union bosses bills because the conservative government wanted to get union executives to declare their financing for campaigns, their executive bonuses, pensions, etc. So those bills, as they wended their way through committee, and we were covering every step of the way, as we do with legislation. So we were covering constitutional experts who would come to the committees and say these bills are unconstitutional. The liberals have since repealed

them, right? And we would cover every step of the way through second reading all the way to royal assent. While the night the bells were ringing and the Senate was going to legislate those two laws, there was a group of reporters finally gathered around and somebody said to a senator, so why are these bills important anyway? And we thought, well, that's a little late to be telling Canadians why these bills are important now as they are on the edge of becoming law. But throughout all those steps that a bill requires to become law in Canada, guess what happened? The unions started to subscribe to Blacklocks with institutional rates. As the librarian at Uniform told me, we don't see this anywhere else.

We're not seeing news coverage anymore of these issues, these serious issues in the Ottawa citizen. We have to subscribe to you. And all the largest private and public sector unions subscribe. Eureka, a business model is born. Now, does that mean we're a labor publication? No, it means that people who work for Uniform or the Petroleum Producers Association or the Atlantic Salmon Federation or the Taxpayers Federation, they have an interest in knowing all the details of what is going on in government that they're not getting from Canadian press or CBC.

And what's wrong with that? What's wrong with us having a small niche that serves this specific group of people? But then over time, as media began to erode and struggle, individual Canadians started to realize that, okay, we're not getting the full picture. And as of 2019, the election of 2019 through pandemic, subscriptions took off individuals. So now we are at a position where we enjoy not no one subscriber. represents larger than 1% of our total revenues. So the institutional subscribers are still with us, none of them left,

but now it's individual Canadians who are subscribing and paying the 300 bucks when they can afford it. Yeah, it's, if I didn't know any better, right, like if I'd never talk to you or Tom, I would assume you're one of the biggest media organizations across Canada, the way you guys break stories and get to the bottom of, you know, things people want to know about.

Instead, I don't know, how many people actually work at Blacklocks? Oh, as terms of full-time employees, just Tom and I, and then we contract for information sometimes. You know what happens? This is a thing that happens in the news media industry. Why are you laughing? Because I laugh because you have these, like, big institutions. I'm talking about all the mainstream.

and they're begging the government to save them. We've been so poorly done by, and we got all these people working for us, and they can't produce anything that people wanna be a part of. And then you got, you and Tom are the only two. I assume. Okay, well, first of all, we have, between us,

between Tom and I, we have 80 years in the news business. I understand, it's true, Holly. I just think it's amazing. Like, I'm laughing because it's awesome that two people can create so much value, right? like businesses should be taking stock of that. Like I think of where I sit. I sit in a 12 by 12 room and I create a ton of value.

That's why I get to do what I get to do. And while small little independent little nodes or, you know, little islands or whatever you want to call them are showing a new way to do business and you guys have been doing it for a lot longer than me, the big giants are still trying to bend government to save them. And that's interesting to watch. Okay, but I can explain to you why. And now this goes back into the nuts and bolts of what's happened to the news industry.

Now, I know that a lot of your viewers will like to say, well, they're all bought off by subsidies. And there might be something to that. They like to say that they're just woke or there are narratives or they're all political partisans. And there might be something to that. But there's a far more serious problem. When years ago, when people like us started in the business, We had jobs that gave us an introduction to journalism. Journalism is an apprenticeship system.

You can't go to Ryerson or Carlton or the University of Regina, get a journalism degree and say, I'm a journalist. I know what I'm. They can't teach you everything you need to know in any post-secondary institution. You have to learn on your feet in the field. So, for instance, in my first job in Brandon, Manitoba, I was assigned to cover the city council budget deliberations. By the way, there is no TV station in Brandon anymore.

It's closed. Consolidation has killed all those small jobs. But about journalism, and this is important. So I was assigned to cover City Hall. So I sat there for a week. I was maybe 19 or 20 years old. I sat there for a week dutifully taking notes about, you know, raising swimming pool rates or, you know, parking fees.

and they were talking about something called the mill rate the whole time. After seven days, I had my interview with Mr. Mayor wearing his chain of office. I'm 19. And I said, my first question was, so what's a mill rate? Seven days of covering budget deliberations, I didn't know, Sht from Shinola. He patiently explained to me the mill rate was how much we were going to raise taxes and that the people in the city of Brandon would have to pay. All right.

So there were many more jobs after that, you know, at CFQC and Saskatoon, at CFRN and Edmonton, and then the CBC trained me for five years. I was 11 years covering hotel fires and highway wrecks and the school board trustee meetings before I ever sat foot on Parliament Hill. And even then I felt over my head. Even then I struggled to understand how a bill became a law in, arguably the most intimidating and most difficult beat in the country. Well, it's not uncommon now for journalists to come out of those universities and go straight to their first job on Parliament

Hill because the jobs that would have employed them and trained them on the ground don't exist anymore through consolidation, layoffs, closures. So what does that mean? You'll have a 23-year-old starting at a small outlet on Parliament Hill, and they're asked to cover a budget bill that maybe talks about a farm subsidy program or a subsidy program for small business. Well, they might not even know any farmers. They might never have lived outside of Southern Ontario.

And here they are trying to report things they don't understand for an audience becoming increasingly frustrated. What's wrong with this reporter? just putting in woke narratives. When you don't know how to pursue facts or understand the facts you have, and there's nobody left, there's no old nicotine-stained Lou Grant-style editor in the newsroom telling you, like, that's a stupid lead, Holly. Go back to your desk and rewrite it.

We did that story six months ago. There's nobody doing that. So these reporters begin to replace the place where facts used to go in the story. they start to put in adjectives to explain their understanding of the story. So that's one of the things that we do, for those of your viewers who subscribe to Blacklocks, we go through the copy and strip the adjectives and put a fact in there. From background, from an old story, from a new access to information request, it's all document and fact driven.

So that's one thing about the reporters. Remember, the beach system was killed by consolidation. In the old days, you would have the desk in Toronto, let's say, call you up in Edmonton and say, tell us what's going on there today. And if you were, let's say, a court reporter, you might have had a little cubby, an office at the courthouse in Edmonton where you would hang around and you would talk to the cops and you would talk to the defense lawyers, you would talk to the registrar, you would get to know everybody and you would get to know what's, going on and you could through learning become a pretty good court reporter. Well, now you don't have that. You have the desk in Toronto where the law of the consolidation has happened telling the reporter in Edmonton what the story is today. Well, how does the guy who might himself be 30 years old on the desk in Toronto know what's going on at Edmonton City Hall or at the Commons Public

Accounts Committee? They don't. But the reporters don't know either. So they'll be tool. But what they do know on the desk is there's this news release here today that says the Prime Minister will be taking his son to an ice cream shop or a Tim Hortons. Well, we better get a shot of that. And then that works its way into your daily news feed. Next time you want to get mad about woke or narrative, ask yourself about whether this reporter looks like they have been able to get any facts today. And if they couldn't, there's every chance they wrote that out of the press release because you've got to feed the beast. You got to fill the white space. I mean, so then what is your suggestion on how you fix that?

Well, I think somebody smarter than me told me when we started that, you know, I think it's possible to be a small outlet and maybe get big. It's not possible to be a big outlet and get small. They don't know how to retool that way. Their go-to place is to continue the models they have. and then go to committee and beg for government intervention through subsidies or through C-18, the Online News Act. So I think the answer has to be a complete retooling.

Canadians have to accept that just as Eaton's department store died, and when we died, we worried about, well, where am I going to buy my bowls and my panty hose? Well, there was a lot of little outlets that took. their place and now you know where to go to buy pantyhose and mixing bulls. So I don't want to compare journalism exactly to that because of course it's more important to democracy than mixing bulls. Except a hundred years ago in Canada, we had three times, four times the number of media outlets that we have now. Every small community in Toronto there was the Bloor Watchman that served the citizens who lived on that kind of bluer downforth corridor. There's a lot of

them. I don't remember all the names. I looked it up at one point. And they were all little outlets that served a specific community and were able to get those people to pay for that product. I think in some ways, as the big companies are unable to get smaller to focus, which is what I think they have to do. So, for instance, if you're going to be a municipal paper, why not be the best municipal paper you can be? Cover City Hall like the do. You probably don't need a sports. Department or a Bureau in Ottawa. Leave that to somebody else. All right. So, but they don't want to give up the Eaton's model. They want to continue to be all things to all people. At the same time, while the government wants to preserve that model, government is not famous for understanding media,

by the way. I mean, listen, the publishers in our own business don't understand what to do. How are bureaucrats in the Canadian Heritage Department going to figure it out, right? It's really vexing. So I think that we have to accept that for a time of this reimagining of the news industry, and let's face it, no industry has been more disrupted by the internet than media, probably, bar none. It's going to be painful. We're seeing it now.

There's going to be layoffs. There's going to be closures. There already has been. We have to accept that while this process is taking place, that there will be other outlets, and you can see independent media starting here and there to try. Now, some viewers might say, well, I don't like all of them. Those ones are too partisan or they're not real journalists.

They come from a political spin background as activists. I agree with you. As a 40-year journalist, I agree with you. I don't like that either. But if you want to believe in free speech, you've got to like throw it out there. You've got to let everybody try and see who can succeed. But the problem is that new sprouts cannot grow until the old tree. dies die. The old trees are blotting out the sun. So what does that mean? Some small outlets will grow,

some big ones will hang on, some will die. Some small outlets won't last. We have to be patient with this process. And when I see people angry at journalists on Twitter, you know, I wish they'd be a little more patient. You're watching, you're watching a wholesale depression and upheaval in an industry that's trying to figure itself out. I don't think government intervention is the answer. In fact, it's made it worse if you want to talk about the subsidies and what's happened with those. But I'll stop there if you want to interrupt. Well, I just thought in your Blacklock submission about Bill C-18, when you were talking about all the different, just kind of the history of journalism and different things like that, I found 0.28 you guys made,

and I'll read it off here. Pointing to the financial losses of large news corporations as a barometer of freedom is contrived. Has democracy declined since 1939 when Toronto had seven money-making dailies? Have freedoms faded since 1920 when Manitoba had 91 newspapers serving a population of 610,000? Isn't that incredible? Yes, it's like when you think everything's been consolidated. And so now there's less of it and while the big ones are failing. And to me, it shows like when you look at those numbers, you go, oh, there's a way for

There's a way for media to really thrive here. It just has to get back to small and nimble and focus on things that are really tight to their communities. And there will be something there that will make a lot of sense. But insofar as saving democracy, which is one of the reasons that one of the things that the government has said is that we have to save democracy. That's why we have to save the press. Well, the point you made from our brief to the Senate. By the way, we presented a brief to the Senate, but we didn't appear in person. Because unique among all the media organizations that rushed to Ottawa,

to get a chair to present. We are the only ones who are actually working reporters on the hill and have to cover the damn bill. The rest of them go back to their corners in various provinces. We are reporters. We're not lobbyists and we didn't wanna show up because we're not.

But so it is true with democracy that as you said, we used to have more media than we have now. Is our democracy worse? Church attendance is down in Canada. Union membership is down. All those things that we considered good things are not that way anymore. Is our country any worse off? Is our democracy any worse off?

When the former Minister of Heritage, Melanie Jolie, said in 2017, well, we will not be in the business of bailing out failing business models. That's a quote. She also said media is important. We want to be held to account. That's the Heritage Department. Right up until the moment, Heritage is out. asked to explain why they hired an anti-Semite, then they don't want to be held to account

anymore and never did answer that question. The succeeding heritage minister, Mr. Rodriguez, has said journalism is important to democracy. I want the tough questions. They want the tough questions. Right until Sam Cooper asked the tough questions about Handong, MP Handong's connection with the Chinese embassy. then it's block and obfuscate and bully him at committee. What they want is a stand pat compliant media

that rocks the boat enough to make it look like democracies in good shape, but not too much. The impact of the subsidies, NC-18, has not only will they fail, but the impact is also to suffocate smaller media, which terrifies the federal government. They are terrified of independent media. I'm curious then, you know, for the last, you know, 15 minutes I got you kind of thing. If we could talk about Bill C-18 because I think, well, I assume the public knows about this Internet regulation bill. But maybe you could give your thoughts on it. I mean, you created the submission.

You guys had this submission. There's a whole bunch. So why don't I just start here with point five? It said the bill rests on misrepresentation, specifically that no Canadian newsroom thrives without federal intervention. Failing newsrooms are victims of cruel circumstance. Federal intervention helps little publishers. Intervention is fair and effective. Intervention will save democracy.

These claims are false. And I don't know if you want to explain maybe just a bit of what C-18 is kind of like this overarching. And I'll let you run with it. Well, C-18, the idea behind it is that the tech giants, Facebook, meta, Google, will be forced to, every time a news link is included anywhere on their platforms that they will be forced to pay the news provider a fee to be determined to pay for those links. Well, the bill itself was designed to save the failing publishers. But the irony of that is, is that the greatest beneficiary of C-18 will be the CBC, followed by the other broadcasters, followed by post-media. Why is that? Well, that's because those platforms, those news creators, on the mistaken idea that they would somehow be able to make money from it, shotguned their free content across the Internet.

And hopefully they would somehow get the money back through advertising. Now, that didn't happen. So does that make them of the cruel internet or does that make them bad business people? Because the smaller outlets, like ours, say, and we're paywall, we're locked. So our content is not as easily seen or linked to on those platforms. So in other words, we would get fewer compensations from the, the tech giants. Let me give you an example.

And I'm going to check my notes here just because I want to get the numbers right. So the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which I worked for CBC, I am CBC trained. I support public broadcasting. Let me say that first off. I don't support the CBC in the form it's in now.

It makes me sad. So the CBC has, according to its own estimates, tabled with Parliament and Committee, it has an average of 24.2 million unique visitors a month. And from those visits, it estimates revenues in 2021 or at about 85.6 million. So if you do the math, that many visits, that much money, that amounts to about $3.50 per visit per per visitor. All right. Now take Black Locks reporter.

Small. We have maybe 50,000. I haven't looked lately. We have maybe 50,000 unique visits a month. But for our visits, we charge, if you want to log through and subscribe, $315 per visitor. So our business model is actually proportionately more lucrative than theirs. But they are also feeding the web with, according to CBC, a thousand employees. We are competing with 1,000 CBC employees, shotgunning their content for free,

and saying the internet has been cruel to them. same with post media so you see that smaller outlets who don't aren't going to have that kind of traffic are punished the money that would come to us if any at all would be crumbs it would make no difference in my business at all and even so with the publishers after the broadcasters get all most of the dough it is estimated that the publishers the newspapers the amount of money that would come to them. And now the parliamentary budget office has said it, the whole deal is worth about $329 million a year. Out of that, about $60 to $80 million will come to the publishers to be split between them. So even if, and Bill C-18 will pass, has passed, maybe by the time we finish talking,

and it will do nobody any good, it will not save the business. And if anything, it does detriment to small producers who have relied on the, you wouldn't know about Blacklock, Sean, if the internet hadn't introduced us to you. Whether you subscribe or not, the internet has given me access to potentially 33 million Canadian eyes. That's a lot of door-to-door sales I didn't have to do.

Well, I would say this. If news links are cut off, it's going to hurt all of us. I think we'd know about people. blacklocks, maybe not as fast because social media obviously allows it to happen real fast. But when you do as good a work as what you and Tom do, people share that. That's how I've grown. Certainly social media has helped. Nobody can knock that. I can't. But like when you do good work, the word of mouth and how quickly people spread it, it's faster than like, there's this underground railroad of people sharing good information. That's how I stumbled on blacklocks.

Yeah, sure, but we've been in business for 11 years. I understand, but the reason you see such an uptake in it is COVID happens and everybody goes, what the heck is going on? And then they search out truth because until then nobody's engaged. You mentioned that, you know, up until that point, it's different people that are paying attention to Ottawa. And so many of us didn't pay attention to anything. You know, like it was the hockey game and, you know, and kids sports and whatever else. Now people are paying attention. Life was good. It was. It is true that after 2019, after that election, we experienced a bump. That was the S&C. Lavalin election or the blackface election, I suppose conservatives would call it. And then when the pandemic hit, it's funny because

we were told people weren't, you know, had lost their jobs, but the subscriptions it was an avalanche after that. And the reason is because at the same time, mainstream media was struggling and doing a poorer job of covering the fine details of how we're governed, right, as I described, that's exactly what we were doing. And so they started to understand that, oh, I guess it isn't free. I guess there is no free lunch with media. And if I want to know about that piece of legislation that affects the sale of my farm property and the taxes and the beneficiaries of my family, which was a real piece of legislation that nobody covered but us, they would have to pay for that. And it's interesting that people disproportionately, maybe you'll find this interesting,

I don't know, disproportionately, we have a very, we have subscribers in all 10 provinces and three territories. And of course, the largest number of our subscriber base is Ontario just because of the sheer size. But we have a very disproportionate number of subscribers in Saskatchewan. and followed by Alberta. Why is that? Well, somebody in Saskatchewan explained it to me. They said, Holly, we don't have any newspapers here anymore. The Leader Post and the Star Phoenix are empty shells,

and we don't know what's going on in Ottawa, and this legislation affects us. It affects my farm, affects my family, affects my business. But this is, in a way that we should be heartened. This is what media is supposed to do. This is our job. and I think I if you want to think

something positive I think we will get back to this one day unfortunately Bill C-18 and the subsidies are only delaying the inevitable which is collapse and rebuild the subsidies if you don't mind me saying something about that commonly known as the

media bella which was introduced in 2019 it expires already in 2024 the figure set aside was $595 million. And that would be distributed through the Income Tax Act, where publishers would be paid per head, per number of employees in their newsroom, $13,500 per employee. So in April, the assistant associate deputy minister of heritage testified at committee and said, and I quote, journalism remains in decline. In other words, the subsidies didn't help.

How do we know, well, is your local paper any better than it was in 2019? Did it get better? Did it start doing more news now that they got the subsidies? No, probably not, right? And the other thing, the reason we know is, guess what? The program is undersubscribed. That means that there are so few employees left in newsrooms that they're not even soaking up all the money they're entitled to under the $595 million program, which is about to run out next year. So subsidies delayed the inevitable, and C-18 will do the same.

The thing with C-18 is that it's potentially going to cause even a bigger mess, because what happens if the tech giants start to limit Canadian access or block Canadian access to links? I have heard the Canadian representative from META say that the business of Canadian news links is worth about maybe 300, million dollars a year to us. But the potential for international precedent is awful for them. If they allow this to proceed here, then well, how do we know that Great Britain won't want the Canada deal or that Germany won't want the Canada deal? And then their business model will be dead. So what they're saying is, we don't make any money off Canadian news. Why would we pay you? We'll just kill the links. That's not what people on Facebook want anyway. So either watch this summer, it's going to be interesting.

Either we're going to see them block or we're going to see some agreement in the future that provides with a cap on how much money can go to the publishers, which will not help them. It won't save them. It won't delay the inevitable. And it will hurt the independence. It will hurt the small sproats. Well, you've given me a ton to think about this morning. I appreciate you giving me some time.

finally getting to meet you, Holly, after we've shared different messages and everything else. And I look forward to, well, whether it's Tom or Holly, having Blacklocks back on, you know, to share some insights into Ottawa and different bills and everything else. It's truly appreciated out here in the West. Well, we're Westerners. We're Westerners working here in Ontario. We provide a Western perspective, only not exclusively. Legislation affects all of us as Canadians.

It's, there is no particular Western perspective, but you could read it that way. But, you know, probably a lot of what I've told you today sounds pretty depressing. Certainly, you know, we, there's a lot of doom and gloom around. But, you know, I do believe the Phoenix rises. I do believe that media will rebuild. I'm actually optimistic. And all I can tell your viewers is if you want that to happen, you have to support independent media. And ask who they are.

Are they journalists? or are they, do they have agendas? Ask yourself that. Put your own partisan politics aside. Just think about information. And think about what information means to your life, your children, your family. And that's the meaning of journalism.

So, you know, Katie, don't be upset with reporters. Try to think of ways to support them. Well, thanks again, Holly. And look forward to chatting with you in the future. Nice talking to you, Sean. Hey, thanks for tuning in today, guys. Hope you enjoyed it. Today's episode brought to you by Calrock Industries here in Lloyd Minster.

With new used and refurbished oil and gas equipment in stock, Calrock is your best bet when it comes to finding equipment that fits your needs is within your budget and is ready as soon as you need it. Just go to calrock.ca. You can find out all the information and you can see exactly what all equipment they're dealing with and you can find out their inventories, all that good stuff. And of course, contact them directly. So thanks to Cal Rock for supporting the podcast.

And I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Look forward to the rest of the week. We've got some interesting names coming up. And certainly not going to spoil any of that here. And I don't know about everybody else. I got summer holidays coming up. And I know everyone's, oh, what are you going to do? It's like, well, we're going to head down south with Mel's family,

or two Mel's family, I should say. But no worries. The podcast is going to keep rolling along. We've got some different. different people that are going to be coming on looking forward to all that either way no worries through the summer we're going to have you covered and uh certainly i hope everybody enjoys the rest of the week and we will catch up to you tomorrow well i mean who my kid in the mashup is going to be hot and heavy this week i'm i'm sure it's going to have some uh some interesting stories there

can't spoil any of that of course either way we'll catch up to you uh tomorrow