Innovations in the Financial Services Sector in the USA and Canada

The Canadian news media is in turmoil. To date, policy solutions have failed to provide citizens with the knowledge they need to make educated judgments regarding crucial topics and debates. The Future of News series brings together prominent practitioners, scholars, and thinkers to envision new business models, policy solutions, and journalistic content that might help Canada's news industry thrive.Next Tuesday marks the fifth anniversary of the Trudeau government's fourth Fall Economic Statement, which included, among other things, approximately $600 million in tax breaks and other assistance for Canadian journalism organizations. With the exception of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's annual subsidy, this five-year infusion was one of the largest public-sector investments in Canadian media in history. Coincidentally, the Trudeau government's tenth Fall Economic Statement will be released on Tuesday, despite rising calls to expand the spending initiatives introduced five years ago. In terms of industry advances and government policymaking, the last half-decade has been quite busy. The legacy media has undergone severe contraction, with a 14% decrease in the number of professional journalists between 2016 and 2021 alone. These job losses have been partially mitigated by the rise of start-up stores such as The Hub, but there is no doubt that the industry as a whole is smaller and has less capacity than it did in 2018.  

Government policy has also evolved during this time, including the controversial

Online News Act, which sought to mandate payments from Meta and Google to Canadian news outlets but instead drove the former out of the market and is reportedly on the verge of doing the same with the latter. The combined effect of these events has left the industry in a highly uncertain position. The legacy media still faces significant structural issues. The start-up media has lost access to crucial growth drivers. It provides quite the backdrop for Tuesday's Fall Economic Statement. "We are convinced that this process will work. The market will generally sort itself out.We're not interested in speculating about the Fall Economic Statement or resolving the argument for or against the Online News Act. Our goal is to look forward. Its goal is to restart the public policy debate about the future of news with a thorough grasp of the nature and scope of the problem, and to eventually lay forth specific policy proposals that would help Canada transition to a viable news media sector. That is why we are excited to introduce a new series at The Hub called The Future of News. Over the next few months, we'll publish a steady stream of opinion commentary, long-form reporting, and podcast episodes featuring a diverse group of practitioners, scholars, and thinkers from Canada and around the world who will focus on a set of key questions: what is the problem to be solved in the news media, what are the relative roles of the market and government in solving it, and what is the best mix of public policies to ultimately solve it?  Contributors to The Future of News series will be free to interpret these topics using their own experiences and perspectives. We'll try to bring a variety of perspectives to bear on the matter, including legacy media speakers and voices from the startup sector, those who favor a more interventionist response and others who prefer to defer to market forces, and even supporters and detractors of the CBC. 

After co-founding and leading a start-up news company for more than 

two and a half years, we've reached some of our own conclusions on these issues. While we do not intend to influence the analysis and comments of the series' authors, we believe that as we begin the series, we owe The Hub's readers an explanation of how we came to think about these topics. Our starting assumption is that news and information are critical components of Canada's civic and democratic life. We have a common stake in the quantity and quality of news material in our community, which is distinct from most market-provided goods or services. There is no public interest in how many luxury handbags the economy produces. These are substitutable products that, although reflecting individual choices, cannot be considered public goods. News and information are not the same thing, especially in a democracy. It is an important tool for holding democratic governments responsible and exercising our rights and responsibilities as citizens.  The news media industry is experiencing major disruption, owing to the fact that the previous business model, which relied significantly on advertising income to fund operations, has been supplanted by larger market trends and changing consumer preferences. 

This isn't a typical "market failure" in the sense that the market hasn't actually malfunctioned

Nobody caused the sector to become overly reliant on a single revenue source, leaving it extremely vulnerable to market shifts. That was the outcome of industry decisions that, in retrospect, were narrow and shortsighted. However, this does not change the fact that the implications have been severe and should not be a source of concern for policymakers or the Canadian public in general. Even yet, there is a tendency to overemphasize the destructive aspect of the "creative destruction" process while ignoring the creative. This risks missing out on a lot of interesting experimentation and innovation that is presently taking place within news sites like The Hub, which will eventually be responsible for lifting the industry out of its current slump. Several industry-led initiatives are currently ongoing to determine how to supply high-quality news and information in the new market climate. They range from advances within established media companies to new start-ups with business models that include subscription-based finance, sole proprietorship, venture capital, and even charitable funding.