Shadow wire: A formal agreement between two or more news outlets from two or more geographical locations to republish each other’s reports outside of an established wire subscription.
The media, wherever it is in the world, is facing a crisis – people are increasingly unwilling to pay for news. Even though there are a handful of countries (such as Germany and Switzerland) that implement an annual household fee to support public broadcasters, these fees only support publicly funded institutions and do not cover print publications.
Canadian media have a shrinking international presence. The Globe and Mail no longer have a permanent bureau in China and the number of foreign correspondents that Canadian media support pale in comparison to other G7 nations. France has France 24, Germany has DW, the UK has the BBC, Japan has NHK, and the US has CNN, but Canadian and Italian media have no international presence. Even countries that don’t traditionally have internationally recognized legacy broadcasters, such as Qatar with Al-Jazeera (founded 2006) and Russia with RT (founded 2005), have surpassed Canada’s CBC (founded 1936) in international presence.
Go to any five-star hotel in any capital in the world and Canadian media will most likely be absent from the list of over 200 channels.
Wire services, the most recognizable of which are based in France, the UK, or the US, provide good general coverage to reach most of the world but lack in-depth coverage from a local perspective. They also tend to report on global issues with a Eurocentric view, lacking in the plurality of views – a critical component of a free press.
On the other hand, regional news outlets tend to have excellent coverage of local news and domestic perspectives of international affairs. The South China Morning Post has good coverage on issues in East Asia, the Süddeutsche Zeitung is a trusted source of news in the Germanosphere, and The Times of India is widely circulated in South Asia.
The proposed shadow wire system proposes for publications from different countries to form multilateral agreements for content sharing. This pooling of resources would reduce reliance on homogenous perspectives from wire services, provide the benefit of having a foreign bureau at a fraction of the cost, and bring a more global variety of news to the domestic reader to inform them of the opportunities and dangers at home and abroad.
For example, if this were applied in the Canadian context, the Toronto Star could come to a bilateral agreement with the Frankfurter Allgemeine to exchange articles on North American and European affairs. So, the Toronto Star can cover the German federal elections in-depth and the Frankfurter Allgemeine can have insights on the Canadian energy sector. This could either be implemented in a one-to-one article publication exchange, be a payment-per-article model, or a free exchange agreement. Not only would Canadians and Germans gain a broader perspective on global issues that may affect them, but the papers would also significantly lower their financial costs of international reporting while gaining local contextual knowledge.
Extrapolate this kind of collaborative effort across even more countries and continents, and soon a domestic audience can find out what other countries think of them, learn of new and exciting ideas abroad, and understand the international impact that their own government is making. This network would complement established wire services.
In this new paradigm, the wire service will act as a true “first-draft” of history, providing quick-turnaround articles in unfolding events almost in real-time. The shadow wire will act as a complementary network of international in-depth analysis in the hours and days that follow to reveal different interpretations and impacts of the event that just unfolded.
