With the implication there’s no alternative solution, Edmonton’s city administration has asked City Council’s Executive Committee to ratify a $3-million sole-source contract with Postmedia today to provide print ad digital advertising to the city for another three years.
After all, says the administration’s report, we’ve been putting ads in the Edmonton Journal for 20 years, so let’s just keep on doing business with Postmedia, which nowadays owns that once-respectable newspaper.
But this lazy proposal not only misses the potential to do good, it could actually use Edmonton taxpayers’ money to do harm. It needs to be reconsidered.
The executive committee should at least kick it back to the administration to answer some salient questions before making a decision.
Now the Municipal Government Act requires that the public must be informed through advertising of public hearings, meetings, bylaws and the like. Edmonton, like most cities, also advertises many other things, including recruitment for city boards, safety campaigns, construction notices and so on.
So, says the administration’s awkwardly worded recommendation to the committee:
“Given that Postmedia 1) is a daily print outlet, 2) has wide reach in Edmonton and also offers digital advertising options and 3) allows the City to use it as a method to meet its obligations under the Municipal Government Act for public notifications. (Sic) For those reasons this is deemed as a sole-source (no alternative competitor can fulfill City’s requirement). A future (2024+) reassessment will be undertaken to evaluate if it is feasible to pursue a competitive procurement process.”
The administration, in other words, is asking the committee to endorse the easiest way for it to sign off on this requirement without really thinking about what’s good for Edmonton, or whether it’s that good a deal.
The promise of a future reassessment, sometime after 2024, sounds like an effort to pre-empt any more objections to the sole-source deal with Postmedia like those raised three years ago when this last came before the committee.
Back in 2018, Taproot Publishing founder Mack Male pleaded with the committee to invest some of that money in outlets “that are building a brighter future for journalism right here in Edmonton.”
He noted that changes in the Municipal Government Act no longer required advertisements to be placed in newspapers, increasingly moribund institutions with a shrinking readership.
And he argued, accurately, that, “given the declining print reach of the Edmonton Journal, and the City of Edmonton’s own substantial digital reach, this spending is effectively a subsidy to a single outlet.” (Emphasis added.)
Male was too polite to note the increasingly negative role played by Postmedia, now owned by U.S. venture capital funders with close ties to the Republican Party, in Canadian political discourse.
How bad is Postmedia? In 2016, business journalist David Olive, never one to mince words, called the corporation “a cancer on Canadian journalism.”
“The malignancy is Postmedia Network Canada Corp., a foreign-controlled, debt-burdened contrivance flirting with insolvency that nonetheless is relied upon by about 21 million Canadian readers,” the Toronto Star writer said. (Postmedia’s readership is reported to be about half that now.)
Postmedia has certainly downsized the Journal‘s journalistic operations, sold off its own press, emphasized right-wing opinion over unbiased news reporting, and rolled the Journal’s operations in with the Edmonton Sun‘s.
The resulting mash-up, it is fair to say, reflects the Sun‘s tabloid sensibility …….