'We gave away our own collective work for free, as convinced as the local crack dealer that customers will crawl back once we began charging for it. Unfortunately for us, crack is far more addictive.'

Way too many years ago, I was one of about a dozen year-long interns at the Toronto Star.

Every year, about a dozen of us lucky souls were plunked on the floor of the country’s largest newsroom and made to do what journalists do alongside real journalists while being paid a living wage.

I remember attending a morning meeting (another perk of the job) during which the paper’s many editors discussed stories and placement for the next day’s edition. Instead, a panicky conversation about the future of journalism broke out.

America Online, the giant Internet online portal, had just made a move on Time Warner, then one of the largest media entities on the planet. The worry around the Star table was what this sort of “convergence”— the buzzword du jour, almost always uttered with the appropriate scare quotes — would mean for papers such as the Star.

Did survival mean tethering itself to a massive Internet property? If so, would its storied journalism be reduced to “content” created solely to feed the burgeoning and hungry Internet goat? Would the Toronto Star, one of the most recognizable media brands in the country and beyond, become just another cog in someone else’s convergence wheel?

As history has shown, the worry over convergence was entirely misplaced. Yet it was also instructive, in that newspaper types high and low were aware, even in the early naughts, that something was about to take their place — or at least starve them to the point where journalism itself was near-impossible to practise.

The fear of losing the ability to properly inform readers has proven entirely real. It is such a preoccupation that the Liberal government has announced $600 million in aid for the media industry. It will do so in order to “protect the vital role that independent news media plays in our democracy and in our communities,” as Finance Minister Bill Morneau put it last week.

For the dwindling number of media-related content producers, tax subsidization of our craft is a grapefruit-sized pill to swallow. The idea that it can’t survive on its own merit, despite a massive appetite for what we produce, is frustrating beyond belief. It is all the more so, because, as journalists themselves are compelled to admit, it is essentially rewarding failure.

I’m certainly not singling out the Toronto Star, which — now, as then — remains a must-read voice when it comes to Canadian politics, and which continues to produce some of the best journalism in the country. (Torstar, the paper’s parent company, also owns iPolitics, which is kind enough to publish my words on a regular basis.)

In fact, nearly every news media entity on the planet reacted in roughly the same manner in the face of drastic change over the last 20 years. Our business model was simple and lucrative. We took money to put ads in our newspapers, then used that money to pay for the more interesting bits in between those ads. Complacency set it, understandably so. Hubris, too. We didn’t believe our own fallibility until it was too late.

Consider how the industry as a whole has reacted to the onslaught of the Internet. We worried about convergence, while Craigslist, a bonkers-simple, instantly ubiquitous website gave away classified ad space, one of our core revenue streams, for free.

We then gave away our own collective work for free, as convinced as the local crack dealer that customers will crawl back once we began charging for it. Unfortunately for us, crack is far more addictive.

We as an industry engaged in a sort of panicky groupthink, listlessly hopping on successive trends in hopes of dislodging a silver bullet. We blogged. We pivoted to video. We podcasted. We wrote short. We wrote long. We tried lists. We “@”ed and hashtagged everything in sight. We downsized, again and again. We made a cringe-worthy attempt to sell young connected types on the print media’s cool factor. We released tablet applications just as people stopped buying tablets. When nothing worked, we appealed to better angels beyond the pernicious reach of capitalism.

I’m wholly, utterly conflicted by this. The news media in this country are facing an investment-banking-style collapse. The cynical bastard in me, the same one the Star helped to cultivate so many years ago, says “too big to fail” is less mantra than dare. Given how we’ve mismanaged our own industry, maybe some of us deserve to go the way of Lehman Brothers.

Then again, what we pleaded to government remains true. We need proper journalism in this country in order for it to function. Sadly, we are at the point where the very practice of this journalism in Canada would be extremely difficult, and even impossible, without the intervening hand of government. That certain politicians gleefully applaud the eminent death of the industry is reason enough to keep it a going concern.

Still, I’ll admit: hypocrisy is even worse when you finally get to taste it yourself.

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