Canada’s news is a mess. A self interested, divisive, and profit-fixated news business has bred a corrosive and deepening distrust not just of the media, but of our democratic institutions themselves. Many see this this crisis of the fourth estate as an existential threat to a bedrock of democratic decision-making.
In Tomorrow’s News, Marc Edge lays out some of the new forms of journalism that are emerging in the post-print, digital-first world. The bad include “dark money” funded non-profits, such as the US news outlet Richmond Standard, which have been rushing into the breech with “pink slime.” The good include worker co-operatives, such as CHEK-TV in Victoria, B.C., the Prince Albert Daily Herald, and CN2i in Quebec. Tomorrow’s News also explores the potential of a voucher system as a financing mechanism for local news organizations.
People will always be news hungry; journalism isn’t going away, Marc Edge argues. The news organizations that thrive in the post-print world will be the ones that are able to shift their support base, and revenues, from advertisers to readers.

A native of Greater Vancouver, Marc Edge began his newspaper career as a writer at the Province in 1974. He later worked in the business section of the Calgary Herald, and in 1982 completed a Master of Labor and Industrial Relations degree at Michigan State University. He was BC Supreme Court reporter for the Province for ten years before accepting a Southam buyout offer in 1993. From 1995 to 1997, he sailed his forty-foot ketch Markenurh around the Pacific. He completed a PhD in Mass Communication from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in 2001, and is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He can be contacted by e-mail at pacificpress@hotmail.com.

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