The horse-and-buggy days of news media are over

KAMLOOPS — Any time there’s a tremor in a local media outlet, it rattles news junkies.

Kamloops is full of news junkies. We worry about where our news is coming from.

According to a report this week, much-respected sports reporter Rick “The Bear” Wile is the only newsroom casualty among recent layoffs at NL, which was acquired earlier this year by Nova Scotia-based Newcap Radio.

So, it looks like it’s news as usual at 610 AM. But changes in the news industry as a whole are picking up speed.

I read with interest a tweet from former Kamloops Daily News publisher Tim Shoults a couple of days ago. He is now the operations manager of Aberdeen Publishing, which owns Kamloops This Week, and is also a VP at Glacier Media, the company that shut down the KDN.

One Man's Opinion

COLLINS: 'Fairness' is not a word I would use to describe the federal budget

21m ago

Sound Off

SOUND OFF: The NDP's mishandling of drug use in B.C. hospitals

14h ago

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: Who would survive if we had a recall law for City councils?

Apr 18, 2024

Tim tweeted that KTW has been talking “quite a lot recently” about the use of social media in the newsroom.

He’d better not waste any time. People aren’t reading newspapers any more, and the federal government isn’t buying the idea of subsidizing them.

Twenty years after newspapers began publishing websites, they still haven’t gotten the hang of social media. When the last newspaper reader — about my age — expires, so will the last newspaper, because young people have gone digital.

The coffee shop I hang out at subscribes to three daily newspapers and a couple of freebies. I and one or two other old farts read the papers as we sip our medium roast; everybody else is glued to their phones.

It’s all about the web, especially Facebook. I’m betting that when Shoults thinks of upping KTW’s social media game, the paper’s homely, outdated website design comes to mind.

Ditching it for one that’s custom made, more attractive and easier to get around in would carve a path to beefing up KTW’s Facebook numbers, which lag far behind the leader, CFJC Today, as well as Castanet, InfoNews Kamloops, and KamloopsBCNow, in that order.

The foundation of media Facebook pages is media website content. The latter is fed directly into the former. While website traffic is proprietary, Facebook stats are freely available.

According to an Abacus Data survey earlier this year, Facebook is now second overall only to TV as a source for breaking news, and is the leading source for Canadians under 45. (I never thought I’d say this, but my own main news sources currently are TV, then radio, then Facebook. Then those newspapers in the coffee shop.)

According to the survey, Twitter serves largely as a gateway to Facebook for news. Other surveys show that vehicles like YouTube, Snapchat and Reddit are also on the rise.

Despite all this, there hasn’t exactly been a stampede by local mainstream media to jump on the social media train.

Radio NL recently made some small changes to its website but has yet to be dragged kicking and screaming into social media in a serious way. It’s Facebook “likes” trail the pack behind KTW.

The Broadcast Centre, on the other hand, undertook a major upgrade to its CFJC Today website a couple of years ago, and it’s the best one of the lot, which shows in its massive Facebook numbers. It has the advantage, of course, of access to plentiful video.

Yes, I’m biased, but there’s a reason I now write for that news outlet, and it’s because it’s investing in local news and views.

So what of radio? It’s still an important news source for many. Social media users also like radio news, for example.

Being entertainment as well as news mediums, TV and radio don’t have to rely on news for survival, but any temptation to short-change news would be a mistake.

Despite the challenges facing the industry in general, and the loss of its daily newspaper three years ago, Kamloops can count itself lucky that it has a lot of quality journalists.

Doug Collins at CFJC, Shane Woodford at NL, and Chris Foulds at KTW know how to run newsrooms. On-the-ground reporters like the ageless Angelo Iacobucchi at NL, Chad Klassen at CFJC and Tim Petruk at KTW — to name a few — do exceptional local journalism. (It was Petruk who broke the story about NL.)

A lot of horse-and-buggy salesmen lost their jobs because they didn’t think the car would become a thing.

It’s tough making money online, but it’s the future. Those who use it best will survive, and hopefully thrive.

POST SCRIPT: Turns out that former Kamloops Daily News sports editor Gregg Drinnan, who now writes on his TakingNote.ca blog, actually had the Rick Wile story first. Drinnan wrote that Wile’s departure was part of a reduction in sports coverage by Radio NL. Tim Petruk of Kamloops This Week picked up on it from there and called Drinnan for help in trying to get hold of Wile.