The Media Crisis (Part 1)

Veteran journalist and filmmaker Pierre Saint-Yves interviews Amélie St-Pierre, who spent a decade working as a community newspaper editor for Icimédias in the Mauricie and Nicolet-Bécancour areas.

Pierre: Um, especially at a time when the industry was in turmoil, I imagine.

Amélie: Yes.

Pierre: Did you find the media crisis difficult to navigate?

Amélie: Yes, difficult… It’s been… I arrived around… I was named General Manager 10 years ago, and we were already… It was right after a major restructuring, it was already underway. So, yes, we’ve been dealing with it for at least a decade. We do more with less, that’s how I always put it. There are fewer positions. Layers of management and entire teams have disappeared. For instance, when I arrived in 2006, there were six newspapers operating in the Mauricie. Basically, each one had its own general manager, its own editor. So, things have really changed. Of course, new technologies have made it possible to work more efficiently. But the crisis has definitely forced us to work differently and to find savings in places we wouldn’t have even thought to look 30 years ago. Things were just so different back then.

Pierre: Do you worry about the future of the media industry?

Amélie: Am I worried about the future of the media industry? A little bit. People have changed how they consume information. When Meta decided to remove news content from their platform, it did force people to visit our websites or find other sources. But it also changed how people consume information. That worries me, because our readership is basically what’s at stake. It’s also hard to monetize digital media compared to… I’m going to talk about print editions because that’s where my experience lies… It’s hard to monetize online content compared to print content. It’s less concrete. Yes, there are statistics, analytics when you publish an advertisement online. We can determine that it was seen by a certain number of people, that there were so many clicks and all that. But it just doesn’t have the same impact as print advertising. Lots of people send us press releases and event listings that we put on our different platforms. But they’re disappointed when the information doesn’t show up in the print edition. Sometimes it’s because of a lack of space. But the response is usually, “Oh, it wasn’t in the print edition. I’m disappointed.” It appears online, but that doesn’t have the same… the same value.