By Kenzie Love
With the recent round of cuts to the Washington Post, attention has been drawn once again to the ongoing challenges facing North America’s news media. While the role of a free press is as vital as ever, a shrinking number of understaffed news outlets is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few corporate owners, with the prospects for change often seeming limited.
So what solutions, if any, are on the table? Co-op news outlets aren’t an entirely new idea, and as the closure last year of the Saskatchewan alternative newspapers Prairie Dog and Planet S demonstrates, they aren’t immune to the forces impacting conventional news enterprises. But despite these challenges, there’s reason to believe they can still play an important, if modest, role.
Many of those involved in co-op journalism are frank about the scale of the challenges they face. “Being worker-owned and -operated is not a silver bullet for saving journalism or righting the wrongs of American capitalism,” observes Jasper Wang of US news co-op Defector to Neel Dhanesha, “but it is one of many pathways that could use real funding, so we can see how big a part of the solution it could potentially be.”
How to obtain such funding is one of the obstacles confronting these outlets. In the traditional news model of decades past, news outlets sold space to advertisers, who then sold in turn to the audience. But with the collapse of advertising as a revenue source — which was what brought down Prairie Dog and Planet S — outlets have to look elsewhere.
While this opens up the possibility of greater editorial freedom for the outlets in question, it can also mean operating with limited resources. This was the case for publications such as The Dominion, a national worker co-op newspaper which published “News from the grassroots” in Canada from 2007 – 2018 but found the model was ultimately unsustainable given the enormous demands on its under-resourced staff. It continues today on a much smaller scale as a website, featuring stories underreported by the mainstream media, a model similar to that employed by New Brunswick Media Co-op.
But amidst these struggles, there are also some bright spots. In Quebec, six newspapers on the verge of closure in 2019 came together to create a multi-stakeholder co-op, CN2i that allowed them to remain open. And new entries continue to appear on the scene, among them BC’s recently launched Freshet News, which was founded by journalists laid off after the shuttering of a series of newspapers in the Lower Mainland. Freshet’s cofounder, Cornelia Naylor, a veteran journalist, is cautiously optimistic about the nonprofit worker co-op model they’ve adopted, observing that while the co-op will still need to make money, “the fact that we don’t have to be beholden to corporate shareholders, the fact that we don’t need to be servicing corporate debt, that is helpful.”
While the future for co-op journalism is uncertain, the present at least is grounded in the fact that these outlets, as Dhanesha notes, value their members over their profits, the same as with any other kind of co-op. To what extent the public will value and support the outcome of this philosophy remains to be seen, but an alternative model is indeed possible.