NowMedia’s chief operating officer Jim Csek has spoken with CBC about what he calls the “devastating” consequences of Meta’s ban on news in Canada.
Csek, who also serves as a video host for NowMedia, was interviewed by Jacqueline Hansen from Canada Tonight on Aug. 1.
The public broadcaster was marking one year since Meta announced it would be removing news from Facebook and Instagram as a consequence of the government’s Online News Act, also known as Bill C-18.
When asked about the effect of the news ban on NowMedia as a business, Csek went straight to the point: “Pretty devastating.”
He added: “We’re cutting different things to kind of survive and hope they’ll find some resolution to Bill C-18.” The company, he said, has lost "about half" of its revenue since the dispute began.
Csek emphasized that NowMedia does not receive any assistance from the federal government and said the outlet was “turned down” for the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit, which subsidizes the wages of reporters.
Both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge have previously told NowMedia the Online News Act is necessary to prop up Canada’s struggling newsrooms and bolster the country’s democracy.
But University of Ottawa Professor Michael Geist, a prominent critic of the bill, told NowMedia the legislation is “deeply flawed” and the Liberal government is merely being “stubborn.”
Geist said the law meant “effectively … payment for links,” an arrangement Meta has said it is not willing to accept.
But Csek said NowMedia had “willingly put our content on Facebook,” just like “everybody else.”
“We view it as a symbiotic relationship where they give us a lot of traffic and we give them content,” he explained.
A study – also released on Aug. 1 – looking at the consequences of the Online News Act and Meta’s news ban found there had been a “dramatic decline” in the reach of Canadians media outlets over the last year.
Previous studies have found that dozens of outlets went bust in the wake of the feud between Meta and the Liberals.
