Our Digital Mandate

Thereare some who would rather never see CBC News evolve.

Whenwe began operations in the 1930s, a scene like you see in the pictureabove was pretty common. Given the intense look on some of their faces, theymight very well have been listening to Lorne Greene convey some bad news fromthe early days of the Second World War. By the 1950s, that family would havegathered in front of a black-and-white television set, at a prescribed time, tofind out what was going on in the world. But in the 21st century,a typical Canadian family gets news from multiple sources: desktops, laptops,tablets and mobile phones, whenever it's convenient for them.

At CBCNews, we have embraced that reality wholeheartedly. Our digital offerings areworld-class: informative, creative and interactive. CBCNews.ca is immenselypopular. It is the market leader in Canadian news. It's spawned its owncommunity of voices and perspectives. Going digital has allowed us toexperiment with formats that wouldn't even be options on radio or television -take as just one example our popular feature, Vote Compass, which has turnedinto a valuable resource for voters in five different federal or provincialelections. There are many other examples of different ways we serve Canadiansuniquely online.

Someof our competitors have a problem with our success. One recently called us"the Death Star" of Canadian media, out to obliterate your localnewspaper. Another said we're "nothing but a zombie" and we'veoutlived our usefulness, simply because we no longer restrict our activities toradio and television, which is what we're mandated to do by the BroadcastingAct.

Whilesome private media commentators and owners have been calling for the demise ofthe public broadcaster for decades, their opposition to our expansion of onlineservices is fairly recent. It often coincides with their own decisions to puttheir content behind paywalls. They're doing this not just because more andmore people are viewing that content online for free, but because traditionalprint advertising is dropping dramatically. A report last year from PriceWaterhouse Cooper predicts a $370 million drop in traditional advertisingrevenue for all Canadian newspapers between 2011 and 2016, to be offset byan increase of just $14 million in online advertising.

Sonewspapers would appear to have no choice but to ask readers to pay for onlinecontent. The jury is still out on whether enough people will subscribe tooffset the loss of online advertising caused by the drop in visits of peoplewho refuse to pay up. It seems to be working for the Wall Street Journal andthe New York Times, but not for many other organizations, at least not yet.Ironically, a decade or so ago many news organizations charged a fee for theirfeatured online content, including their star columnists, and then decided tomake all their content free. Now they want to charge again. It's always hard toput the genie back in the bottle.

Weknow that your news habits have changed. You may want the details of animportant story right away, and you don't always want to wait for a radionewscast at the top of the hour, or one on television at suppertime or 10o'clock. We also want to give you access to better context for our stories aswell. On radio and TV, we can't re-broadcast every story related to the one youmay be interested in now, but online, it's really simple to link to previousstories on the same topic.

Wealso need to make our content freely available online, to remain relevant,especially to younger Canadians. I don't have any comparable statistics forCanada, but I doubt they'd vary much from these findings from south of theborder, in the Pew Research Center's State of the Media report earlier thisyear:

Onlinenews consumption rose sharply the last two years, following the rapid spread ofdigital platforms. In fact, online was the only category of news that showedgrowth in Pew Research Center's 2012 News Media Consumption survey.

In2012, about 39% of respondents got news online or from a mobile device"yesterday," (the day before they participated in the survey) up from34% in 2010, when the survey was last conducted. And when other online anddigital news sources are included, the share of people who got news from one ormore digital forms on an average day rises to 50%, just below the audience fortelevision news (which combines cable, local and network), but ahead of printnewspapers and radio (29% and 33%, respectively). A further breakdown showsthat 19% of respondents got news from social media and 16% did so from e-mail,while 8% said they'd listened to a podcast.

Ourdecision not to put our content behind a paywall has to do with our role as apublic service broadcaster and our belief that access is part of that promise. And we'renot alone among public broadcasters with respect to paywalls. The BBC, NPR, PBSand the ABC in Australia don't have one either. The other simple reason for notcharging you for our news content is that you already own it. Canadians alreadypay for CBC. I don't want to think of the furor that would erupt if we decidedto charge extra for our online news content. We have one exception, and that isthe monthly fee charged for online streaming of CBC News Network. This isconsistent with the subscription fees that are charged for that service on yourcable and satellite bill.

Asmuch as our critics would like to have us turn back the clock and stick toradio and television broadcasting, CBC News will not limit access to ourcontent. Instead, we're finding ways to extend our reach to serve moreCanadians and provide more value with our existing funding. It's why we've setup digital services in places such as Hamilton and Kitchener-Waterloo, so wecan provide more relevant content to Canadians living outside our biggestcities. We take our mandate to inform, enlighten and entertain seriously, andin 2013, we embrace digital distribution to achieve it.

I'llgive the last word to a prominent Canadian newspaper publisher. Here's whatPaul Godfrey of Postmedia said about all this to Steve Ladurantaye, who coversmedia issues for the Globe and Mail:

I'mnot an anti-CBC person. It basically has a place in Canada, and I think gettingworked up about [their free sites] won't change that so we've got to find a wayto work it out. I've never been averse to competition, we'll compete foraudience. I'm more concerned about Google.