Newspaper Ownership In Canada

The effects of concentrated ownership in the Canadian newspaper industry

Newspapers are rooted together with the public sphere, globalization, and mass media. The newspaper and the public sphere give citizens an opportunity to examine matters of public concern and global matters. Does this mean that those involved with the Canadian newspaper industry and ownership ultimately wield the power in Canadian society by exercising this influence to mold the Canadian opinion of readers (Wagenberg & Soderlund, 1975)? Historically, multiple independent newspapers existed, but this had significantly lessened over time with the rise of concentrated ownership in the newspaper industry. Canada has the most concentrated ownership of any country in the free

. A study of Minnesota newspapers found that group newspapers with headquarters outside of the state carried significantly less conflict reporting about local government than did independent papers or group newspapers. This is important to note because critics have said that group ownership will lead to a reduction in the diversity of ideas and the use of economic strength to force out competition. In terms of quality, If different newspaper ownership types – independently owned newspapers, privately held group newspapers, publicly held group newspapers – pursue different goals, which are reflected ultimately in the newspapers content. It was found that coverage of local and nonlocal business news were more favorable, and that group editors were more likely to emphasize profit as a top corporate goal than were indepent editors. The only statistically significant difference was that private groups had slightly more space devoted to editorials about the country in which the paper was located. With this study we have to ask ourselves if newspapers and independently owned newspapers differ in news quality, and if the same goes for private and publicly owned newspapers. Lacy and Fico’s study assesses the quality through eight ways which measures newspaper quality: Comitment to locally produced copy, amount of non advertising copy, ratio of non advertising to adverting space, number of interpretive and in depth stores, amounts of graphics, number of wire services, story length having more depth, and finally reporter workload. The conclusion of this study saw that there was no significant difference was found in news quality between independent and