“Hi there, a friend of mine just died and we want you to share the link to the Go Fund Me Page in your magazine”. “Hello, we have an event coming up and we want you guys to come cover…” “…Hi ya…this happened to me and I want to share it. Is there some one who can do an interview…?” “…We have this person coming to town and we will like to do an interview with him on…” This is how a day on the phone at Diversity Magazine looks like – proudly serving community, telling one story at a time.
May 25, 2019, was a day characterized by thoughtful conversations at the conspicuous Calgary Herald Building overlooking the city of Calgary. It was May 25, 2019. Organized by the City of Calgary, the event was titled 2019 Multicultural Media Forum. It drew over two dozens representatives from different media outlets in Calgary, a mix of mainstream and multicultural media to discuss collaboration, opportunities, challenges, learn, share, and get to know how the City of Calgary can be of help in supporting media tell stories.
During the discussion, the issue of visible minority in newsrooms was shared to be scaringly low, in most cases, it was under 3%. Also worthy of note are the challenges faced by mainstream media with most shrinking to 30% in the last five years due to dwindling advertising revenues. Multicultural media too suffers from financial sustainability with most running on part time mode with little succession plan in place due to lack of financial viability, with outlets serving hugely under served communities.
Collaboration was encouraged between multicultural and main stream media, so too was building of relationships. There was an exciting presentation of covering stories in First Nations Reserves. Some participants called for the inclusion of business modules in future discussions and for more of such networking event to be organized for the media community.
Business modules will certainly be an interesting conversation to peer in to the future of a shaky media industry shrinking in size by the day, at risk of loosing credible story tellers, photographers, videographers, and an endless wealth of culture, arts, knowledge, experiences, and a treasure bank of the best story telling talents of a society. Mayor Naheed Nenshi of Calgary was not able to answer if the City of Calgary has a reply to the challenges facing the media industry in a Calgary where a third speak other languages other than French and English at home.
The media feeds rich content into platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which enables these platforms to retain users. This helps to generate critical mass for everyone to jump on to advertise on these social media platforms in preference to traditional media. The media is one of the major contributors to these attractive numbers on social media but unfortunately becoming a threatened species in themselves. Social media platforms have smartly converted these eyeballs into billions of Dollars, sadly, the media outlets get nothing as a result of this newsy routines of getting news to a wider audience. As a result, these platforms expand in size, while the media dwindle in size.
In crafting the City of Calgary Multicultural Strategy, multicultural media outlets in Calgary were consulted to help draw and implement the strategy. How often these kinds of rare opportunity comes up is the question. Media outlets certainly have huge databases of interest to any business or organization. These days, our Diversity agenda is full of people who need help with marketing plans and strategic outreach into multicultural communities, to inject contacts, experiences, communication techniques, marketing and outreach strategy, and lessons learned over years into marketing plans. Just how far media outlets want to digress from telling stories to other spin-off businesses is the question.
In a world where everyone rely on the services of so few, it might just be time to call it what it is, and treat it as such. Everyone depends on the media to disseminate their information or get new information, but only advertisers compensate for the work the media does. The rest of the media work is free of charge; stories, photos, videos, and so on. In other industries, just reading an email from a client has a price tag, the same applies to a phone call. There is certainly time for an overhaul of the current media business modules and of course for the media to be considered a public service that it has always been, a public service used on a daily basis by everyone and be subsidized to do so like every other public service.
Media as we know it today is not going to disappear completely but will certainly evolve with new models coming up to adapt to the changing times in this process of evolution. Government at all levels should be part of this transformation to ensure conservation of our rich culture, arts, knowledge, experiences, and treasure bank of story telling talents.
