Dear Senator Fraser:

TNG Canada (formerly and still informally known as The Newspaper Guild) has made a formal presentation to your hearings on the issue of media concentration in Canada. We have also supplied copies of supporting information, notably a survey that we commissioned of newsroom opinions and attitudes.

At one point, you asked whether there existed statistics to support our contention that there has been a decline in personnel on the editorial or newsgathering side of newspapers whose employees we represent.

Those figures were not readily available at the time, but we redoubled our efforts to obtain them when we learned in May of this year that Richard Camilleri, then president of CanWest MediaWorks, had reported back to you that he was unable to comply with a similar request on newsroom staffing made to him.

We have collated numbers from the three largest Canadian dailies where our union represents newsroom staff: The Gazette (Montreal), the Ottawa Citizen and the Victoria Times-Colonist.

Going through the records of our union locals, we attempted to take snapshots of our staffing levels at five-year intervals. There were some differences in methodology, but the figures should be broadly comparable.

Generally, part-time and temporary staff were included, but not those on maternity or other leaves. Support staff would include librarians and page designers.

Freelancers were not counted.

One observation we can make at a glance is that, despite some fluctuation, staffing levels at the Times-Colonist have stayed remarkably stable. But the two larger dailies, over the past decade, have taken hits of 30 and 35 newsroom employees. If the Times-Colonist has been spared, it is because it is already operating at a bare-bones level.

As for the Gazette and the Citizen, their newsrooms experienced staff reductions of more than 15 per cent and 19 per cent respectively over the past decade, much of that achieved not through attrition but through buyouts and layoffs.

The Gazette's biggest losses were among reporters and support staff; the Citizen lost personnel in those categories and also among its copy editors. Although the Citizen figures lump together reporters and photographers, the former always vastly outnumber the latter. Most job losses in that category were of reporters.

We mentioned in our brief how cuts to newsgathering staffs necessarily translate into poorer coverage of local issues and a diminished public debate.

Wire-service copy can often plug the holes between ads, so the average reader hardly notices.

But simply reporting a national story, without ferreting out the local angle and regional impact, disserves the public.

Losses of support staff have a less obvious but still real effect on the quality of news the public receives. Most papers have already lost the experienced switchboard operators who knew to which beat reporters to direct a tipster; instead, automated ''voice recognition'' systems misdirect callers until they give up trying to contact the newspaper altogether. Losses of researchers, fact-checkers and proofreaders further lower the reliability of the information we supply to the public.

We recognize it may be impossible to hope for a return to the good old days when newspaper owners, and even newspaper-chain owners, consciously chose to reinvest in quality journalism.

But we do worry that nickel-and-diming and dumbing-down of the product will accelerate.

CanWest's creation of an income trust based on its newspaper holdings is one troubling development. If these publications are to be a reliable cash cow, ever more stringent cost controls become even more of a priority. Even as we write this, the Osprey Media Group — another income trust — is laying off employees and contracting out their work to a call centre, the better to maintain the targeted bottom line.

We realize your committee cannot produce a legislative magic wand that will at a stroke reverse these industrywide trends.

It is our hope, however, that your report and its recommendations will recognize the dangers that our current path holds.

Thank you,

Jan Ravensbergen
Vice-President, Canada East, TNG Canada

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