There’s a civic disaster brewing in Canada with its news industry. The public doesn’t understand it. Policy makers dare not speak its name.

Many close observers think it is quite likely Postmedia will go into bankruptcy, or some kind of bankruptcy protection, within the next year — if not sooner. In the meantime, the chain is stripping its newsrooms of reporters and editors.

This week, the Columbia Journalism Review remarked that the failure of Postmedia would be the equivalent of the top three U.S. newspaper chains going down at once. Outside of Toronto and Winnipeg, Postmedia controls all the paid daily newspapers in the ten largest English markets, and it controls scores of titles in smaller communities.

Yet in this week’s report on media from the House of Commons heritage committee, there was no direct reference to this looming crisis. Similarly, the recent ‘Shattered Mirror’ report by the Public Policy Forum, commissioned by the government in an effort to figure out what to do, made only oblique references to the dying elephant in the middle of the room.

It’s a problem.

A poll conducted for the PPF report by Earnscliffe Strategy Group suggested that three-quarters of Canadians think — correctly, in my view — that democracy would be threatened if news outlets were no longer able “to fulfill their civic news function.” Yet the easy access we all now have to news online has convinced most of us that we are getting more news than ever before. The fact is Canadian media outlets have shed thousands of workers in recent years.

Many Canadians, the polling suggests, don’t think the loss of local newspapers and broadcast news would affect them. They think online and social media would pick up the slack. Those people are wrong — and they’re wrong in part because few people outside the industry understand how central newspapers are to the local news ecosystem.

When I was a local CBC television reporter in Edmonton at the start of my career, the news director sometimes demanded in exasperation at the morning editorial meeting: “Does anyone have a story idea that isn’t on the front page of the [Edmonton] Journal?”

He may have been exaggerating, but he captured a truth: Most local journalism in any other medium is to some extent parasitic on newspapers.

Even in these straitened times, a metropolitan broadsheet will have several times the number of reporters of any TV or radio station. That means newspaper reporters are much more likely to work steadily at a beat, day after day, whether it is city hall, cops and crime, or education. And it is in the course of that steady work that reporters are most likely to unearth new information and identify new stories.

How do you support local news without subsidizing a failing newspaper industry? There’s really no point in funneling money in that direction just so that Postmedia’s U.S. hedge-fund creditors can siphon off a little more cash before the inevitable crash. How do you support local news without subsidizing a failing newspaper industry? There’s really no point in funneling money in that direction just so that Postmedia’s U.S. hedge-fund creditors can siphon off a little more cash before the inevitable crash.

In the steady coverage of their beats, newspaper reporters don’t only act as ‘watchdogs’ — calling out problems when they intrude. They also function as ‘scarecrows’ — deterring trouble at city halls and legislatures by their mere presence.

In contrast, broadcast reporters are much more likely to find themselves flitting from the scene of a fire one day to a politician’s press conference the next and the site of a school closure the day after that. And online outlets, thinly staffed, are often repackaging what they glean from more established outlets.

Following the release of the committee report, the Trudeau government was quick to dismiss headline recommendation to bolster funds available to Canadian journalism through a 5 per cent levy on broadband internet service providers.

The Conservative dissenting report, predictably, also denounced what it called a ‘Netflix tax’. Somewhat hilariously, the Conservatives referred to John Milton’s “marketplace of ideas” as the way to go. Pro-tip — that idea belonged to John Stuart Mill. (Milton was the guy who wrote a long poem about Satan — you remember him.)

But the fact is, unlike Stephen Harper’s government, Justin Trudeau’s probably cannot just fold its arms in the face of a Postmedia collapse. When the public comes to understand the degree to which the disappearance of newspaper reporters means the disappearance of local news, the Liberals know they’ll be expected to respond.

In the meantime, it is hard to rally public attention to an issue that the government and its advisers are too discreet to name directly: Postmedia is about to go ker-plop.

The reluctance to identify the core problem disguises the key challenge to developing policy: How do you support local news without subsidizing a failing newspaper industry, and particularly a failing newspaper behemoth, Postmedia? There’s really no point in funneling money in that direction just so that Postmedia’s U.S. hedge-fund creditors can siphon off a little more cash before the inevitable crash.

Obviously, the CBC could be part of the answer. Its commitment to core civic journalistic beats at the local level has not been as steady as some of us would like, though that may be changing with pressure from the government. But the CBC always will be a fundamentally national broadcaster in outlook. It cannot be an oilpatch broadcaster in Calgary, a red Tory broadcaster in Halifax and an artsy social-liberal outlet in Toronto. Only an organization whose editorial policies are set locally — as Postmedia’s once were, but no longer are — can fully reflect a community back to itself.

Some people hope that Postmedia’s newspapers will end up being sold off to local ownership. But this is unlikely to happen with every one of the dozens of newspapers it runs. Besides, many of the back-office functions, like ad sales, website maintenance and payroll, have been centralized to cut costs. How will new individual local owners manage all that? That’s not to mention the fact that Postmedia also has centralized many journalistic functions, like opinion writing and coverage of Parliament.

The PPF’s Shattered Mirror report had a number of interesting proposals, including the suggestion that the Canadian Press be funded to hire 60 to 80 journalists to staff city halls, courthouses and legislatures — journalism that would be made available to other news outlets.

Since the report came out, PPF has maintained a working group, including representatives from big media chains, media unions and luminaries like former CBC vice-president Richard Stursberg. My understanding is that it will be submitting further recommendations to the Department of Heritage shortly.

The government likely will make its move this fall, when Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly is scheduled to announce the result of a much broader review of cultural policies.

That is, if Postmedia doesn’t go down first.

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