U Multicultural staff, left to right: Arin Streeter, Mariia Burdiak, Graham McDonald, Taya Rtichsheva (founder), Yuliia Kovalenko, Viktoriia Kondratenko and Sunday Adeola. Photo: Viktoriia Kondratenko/U Multicultural.
Six months after Manitoba adopted a policy directing at least 25 per cent of its annual advertising budget to local media, a rural community broadcaster that participated in the hearings that shaped the policy says it still receives no provincial advertising.
Rrain Prior, News Director and Director of Programming for Neepawa’s community access television station, NACTV, says her station has received no provincial advertising since the policy was put in place and also received none before.
“Zero. None at all. And that has not increased. That was one of my big points as well: we get nothing right now. We’re in this hole where they don’t see us being there, even though we have access to around a million households across the country.”
The policy was adopted after the publication of a series of recommendations made by the All-Party Committee on Local Journalism following earlier consultative hearings with journalistic organizations throughout the province.
According to Prior, NACTV is the only surviving community access television station in Manitoba outside of Winnipeg.
“There are about five of us in the country. There’s not a lot,” Prior explained.
One departure the policy makes from the report of the All-Party Committee on Local Journalism is that it refers to “local media” rather than “local journalism.” The definition of local media used in the policy includes billboards, ads on transit buses, digital ads and television.
Prior said that from her perspective the expanded definition is not wholly unwelcome.
“… The way they originally put it didn’t include television media either. So, the expansion does allow them to include us.”
“It’s gone a little bit further than I maybe would have, because we are journalism, and I would not call a billboard journalism.”
Being a television station puts NACTV in a strange position, according to Prior.
“We fall into this weird kind of no-man’s land where we don’t qualify for funding for television productions,” Prior said.
“We also don’t qualify for print funding, and we don’t qualify for radio funding. There is no existing fund that funds community television, so we are in a real funding gap.”
The province’s policy promises twice yearly reporting on advertising spending. Prior said she would like to see a breakdown of how that money is spent.
“I would like them to be exhaustive. I fear something that might just show the spend in local media and say, ‘Look at what we’re doing,’ without showing that, say, 97 per cent is going to Google or whatever it is. So, I would want those reports to be exhaustive so we can make that comparison.”
Prior explained that journalistic outlets in small communities are generally the only outlets producing consistent news content on local issues.
“We actually do community journalism. We get out there to our councils, to our school boards. We’re covering public meetings, we’re talking to people, and we’re really getting out there. Just awareness of the work we’re doing here matters, because maybe it goes a little under the radar.”
“CBC comes out here, you know, once or twice a year, maybe, but there’s news all year round.”
Prior added that competition from social media can muddy the waters.
“I think there’s so much noise on social media. The signal-to-noise ratio is not great. You may be putting something out there, but it gets drowned out by everything else and it passes very quickly.”
“I think there’s more permanence to a station like this. There’s more of a focus on truth and on reaching everyone. We’re still an analogue station. There are people with antennas out in the country who get the station, which is wild to me because I haven’t had one of those since I don’t even know when.”
Prior said that a provincially administered grant program to help news outlets to hire journalists, similar to the federal government’s Local Journalism Initiative, could be helpful.
U Multicultural is a Winnipeg-based nonprofit community TV and FM Radio broadcaster which airs on channel 14 in Manitoba and also operates a radio station on 88.7 FM. Like Prior, its executive director and founder Taya Rtichsheva made presentations to the All-Party Committee on Local Journalism.
“Our message was about making sure that community and ethnocultural media are actually included in the economic ecosystem of local journalism. A 25% benchmark is meaningful only if that money reaches organizations that are actually producing local journalism and serving Manitoba communities,” Rtichsheva said.
U Multicultural serves Manitoba’s ethnocultural communities and produces content in a variety of languages, including French and Ukrainian, as well as a number of Indigenous languages.
“The committee’s report specifically recognized the importance of rural and cultural communities within that 25% benchmark, which I think is very important.”
Like NACTV, U Multicultural has not received provincial government advertising since the policy was implemented.
“We didn’t receive a penny from Manitoba Government for advertising,” Rtichsheva said.
Rtichsheva added that U Multicultural operates the only local community TV station and only nonprofit ethnocultural radio station in Winnipeg.
Both Rtichsheva and Prior said that there are structural issues facing journalism in Manitoba and that more opportunities for journalism education and training in the province could help ameliorate the situation.
“For organizations like U Multicultural, workforce development is particularly important because we are not simply producing English-language content. We are building capacity for multilingual broadcasting and creating opportunities for people from different communities to enter media,” Rtichsheva explained.
Prior said a training program for journalists in rural areas could help alleviate staffing issues.
“If we can’t import people, then we need to train our own,” Prior said.
Neither Prior nor Rtichsheva said they were directly notified by government officials when the committee’s report was released or when the subsequent policy was adopted.
U Multicultural contacted both the office of committee chair Robert Loiselle and caucus communications director Zova Andrusco Da Silva seeking interviews, but no committee member was made available.
Graham McDonald, U Multicultural Journalism and Media Arts Centre