Starting Tuesday, Canadian print journalism will receive payments from Google

France Press agency

Montreal. Canada’s print press will receive nearly two-thirds of a C$100 million (US$75 million) annual payment from Google to the country’s media outlets in exchange for distributing their content, the federal government announced Friday.

At the end of November, Ottawa and Google announced an agreement under which the tech giant will compensate media outlets for lost advertising revenue.

“The share that TV and radio will receive is limited to 30 per cent, and CBC/Radio-Canada (Canadian Public Broadcasting) is 7 per cent, leaving the remaining 63 per cent for print media,” a federal official told reporters. In a briefing.

The official added that most of the amount will go to the print press because it “depends a lot” on electronic platforms to distribute its content.

“Canada has achieved something historic,” Heritage Minister Pascale Saint-Onge told the press.

“Newsrooms are going through a crisis that is affecting journalism, which is the foundation of our democracy,” he said.

The agreement between Ottawa and Google goes into effect on Tuesday. It is part of the Online News Act, which seeks to support a Canadian journalism sector that has been hurt by the flight of advertising dollars and the closure of hundreds of publications in the past decade.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company which is also covered by the new legislation, opposes the text as “fundamentally flawed.”

“We will continue to put pressure on Meta, which makes billions of dollars, without the desire to invest in journalistic stability and accuracy,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Friday.

Since August 1, Facebook and Instagram have blocked news content in Canada to avoid having to compensate media outlets.

Several media outlets have announced layoff plans in recent weeks.