Content area
Full Text
The News We Deserve: The Transformation of Canada's Media Landscape. By Marc Edge. Vancouver, BC: New Star Books, 2016. 224 pp. ISBN: 9781554201211.
In the year 2000, dial-up internet service provider America Online (AOL) merged with U.S. media company Time Warner. According to the newly formed AOL-Time Warner, the aim of the merger was to create a "My integrated media and communications company for the Internet Century" that would "dramatically enhance consumers' access to the broadest selection of high-quality content and interactive services" (TimeWarner, 2001). A year later, Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE) announced the creation of Bell Globemedia (comprised of CTV, The Globe and Mail, Globe Interactive, and Sympatico), a Canadian "multi-media" company that proposed to "create new products and services by combining the resources and capabilities of our broadcast, print and Internet disciplines" (BCE, 2001).
Bell Globemedia and AOL-Time Warner are just two examples of converged media companies skewered by Marc Edge (2016) in his book The News We Deserve: The Transformation of Canada's Media Landscape. Edge is a former reporter whose main concern in the book is that media concentration and convergence, combined with corporate endowments to J-schools, is threatening the quality of Canadian journalism (p. 32).
Edge recalls how pre-millennial tension/excitement related to technological and corporate convergence, fuelled by "the computer revolution" (p. 98) and "[t]he notion that traditional media-print and broadcast-would in the future be delivered only online," prompted media companies in Canada and elsewhere to "get in on the expected digital gold rush by diversifying into as many media as possible" (p. 96). As Canadian media companies such as CanWest Global, Quebecor, Rogers, and Bell experimented with their own converged initiatives throughout the first half of the aughts (to largely profitable results),...