If Canadian journalism is going to survive, then storytelling needs to get a lot more specific

It’s interesting coming back to Canadian media after being gone for almost 10 years. I left because I was frustrated that [the industry] was not really acknowledging that the internet was creeping up behind them. And I think to a certain degree, they still haven’t acknowledged this. Despite 10 years of massive problems in terms of revenue and trust, a lot of the media is still hanging on to an approach completely out of alignment with how people consume information. 

They still look at media as a static product: a daily paper, or a six o’clock newscast, or a specific show at a specific time. They are still oriented around the idea that the media is a thing we produce rather than a constant state. In reality, it’s all channel inputs, all the time. It’s WhatsApp groups, or YouTube or Instagram. Young people don’t really go to a URL. We are in a post-website era. The idea of my kids typing in a website URL is insane. We have to be thinking of our channels first and how those feed back into our repository of information. 

At the same time, the need for Canadian media and the need for Canadian storytelling has never been higher. There are so many people consuming more information than ever. The audience is there, which is exciting for journalism. But I think there is still a massive mismatch between how most Canadian media is operating and what the audience wants.

For me, the future of journalism is going to be about specificity. We’re a huge country with massive issues and I think we’re going through a phase of reorienting around first principles. Some of the biggest investments being made in Canadian media right now are in local news. For eight years, we were all writing the same trend pieces and hot takes. And now we want to know: who just got murdered in my town? What’s going on with the school? Why is my water not working? I think the next phase of who will survive in media will be about specificity as a source of Canadian information.

Siri Agrell is a long-time journalist and current CEO of BetaKit, a digital news platform covering Canadian startups and technological innovation.