As an entrepreneur and the very proud third-generation owner of Le Courrier de Saint-Hyacinthe — founded in 1853 and the oldest French language newspaper in North America — and several other newspapers in Quebec, I and my family are personally and professionally invested in the future of news media in Canada. A year ago, after careful deliberations, parliamentarians passed the Online News Act . The premise behind the act is that huge online search and social media companies benefit from the news content our journalists produce and they should pay us fair compensation for the value of that original news content.
Meta decided it didn’t want to pay, so it walked away. Google, on the other hand, took a more professional approach. As a result, Google will pay Canadian news businesses $100 million annually, indexed to inflation.
That money is not insignificant, and it will help entrepreneurs like me and countless others in small communities across Canada keep the lights on and allow us to hire more journalists. C’est bon, as we say in my mother tongue. Hebdos Québec, which I chair, represents more than 40 owners of independent, for-profit weekly newspapers in Quebec who employ more than 200 journalists.
We were part of a larger group of publishers and broadcasters that expressed interest being the Single Collective to manage the $100-million pool. While our group represented something like 95 per cent of news businesses that are entitled to the money, Google decided it wa.
