At the beginning of the 1990s, I landed a job with a survey company specializing in advance work for seismic projects. It involved travel and working in isolated areas. The starting pay was modest, but I loved it..Climbing the workplace ladder in the survey industry was a slow process back then. I had to put in a few years as a rodman and a chainer before I was allowed to even touch a survey transit as a junior surveyor..I had to learn how to take solar observations to determine an azimuth, how to double angles in my head to ensure accurate measurements and had to process my raw data into a finished survey at night. It was a big learning curve..Shortly after I became a junior surveyor, everything changed as real-time GPS survey systems came on the scene. Suddenly, with only a few hours of training, a person could navigate to a location and record the elevation just as accurately as with conventional surveying..It was as easy as playing a video game..Demand for conventional surveyors dropped dramatically as fewer people with less training could cover more ground in staking out exploration programs..It felt unfair. It was annoying to say the least..It left me with two options..I could stubbornly refuse to change how I work and slowly fade into unemployment, or I could adapt with changing times. Many of the older surveyors opted for the first option. Old dogs can learn new tricks, but it is tougher for them. As for myself, I adapted..I learned how to create maps using GPS data and took on more supervisory roles in the field. In being flexible, I kept working and spent over twenty lucrative years working in energy exploration..I left the field eventually as I tired of being out of the country for months at a time and the feast or famine nature of petrochemical exploration wore on me. Had I wanted to, I could have stayed in the field. I would have had to constantly adapt to new technology and methods though..Changes in the media industry over the last decade have been no less dramatic than they were in the survey world..Readership and viewership for conventional media platforms such as television and newspapers have dried up..Advertising dollars have followed audiences and headed to platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. Every major media outlet has been forced to heavily cut back on staff and resources. They are in a dire position..Canada’s government has responded by directly subsidizing media outlets and is even trying to extort funds from social media platforms to try and prop up legacy media sources..The government is using the weasel words 'fair share' as it tries to steal funds from social media platforms and give them to media outlets. .Not only will the efforts to bail out obsolete media outlets inevitably fail, but it will hurt them..If I had a subsidy lifeline tossed to me when my survey trade was evolving, I would have desperately grabbed it at the time. It would have been easier than changing how I do things and I could stick to the form of the trade I had trained for..For a while at least. No amount of bailout dollars could have saved my job in its original form in the long run. .For perspective, the first program I ever worked on had a survey crew of about 40 people and it took more than a month. A job that size today would take eight people about two weeks to do. The old way just wasn’t sustainable..If I had somehow been protected from change as GPS came along, I would have been employed for perhaps a couple more years, but it would have left me even more vulnerable when the dollars dried up..I would not have been inspired to learn modern methods nor would companies in the industry. We would have been left behind and could possibly have been replaced by foreign workers who kept up with new technology. Subsidies would have stunted the evolution of companies and workers..The same will happen with legacy media..Instead of griping about new upstart outlets and journalists, the old guard in conventional media should be looking at how to emulate them..If journalists hope to remain gainfully employed in the field, they need to accept change. Newspapers are little more than flyers now and TV news ratings will never recover..Radio stations will be unheard of in a generation. The infrastructure required for those old models is too expensive to maintain. A new company can build a studio or create an online publication for a tiny fraction of the money required only 20 years ago..The government is keeping a corpse on life support and it's doing a disservice to both journalists and consumers. New outlets are being choked off while legacy outlets are creating products modeled for a market that doesn’t exist anymore..Legacy media dinosaurs will go extinct no matter what the government does. When that happens, the information gap will be much harder to fill due to efforts to fight change..Demand for news and information isn’t going away any more than demand for petrochemical products is. The way we produce and deliver those products has changed though and unless we let companies evolve, we will lose our domestic producers to innovative foreign ones..The government shakedown of social media platforms has to be stopped.
