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While I was in the air for the recording of this podcast, the conversation Martin Waxman and I had about the layoffs at The New York Times launched the conversation he and Joe Thornley had today.

While it’s a focus on Canadian media, it shows a very interesting trend: There is an ongoing march of media consolidation, which could very well continue to affect the way communications professionals—particularly those who focus on media relations—do their jobs.

In the news, Post Media acquired Sun Media and they are suddenly the largest print publication in Canada. Martin suspects they have 100% media market in cities such as Ottawa and Vancouver. While they’ve said there won’t be layoffs, we surmise they don’t really need multiple news bureaus in every city so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

There continues to be a consolidation of newsrooms and the disappearance of beats—PR pros today outweigh journalists four to one—which means we have to continue to evolve.

And speaking of evolution, Martin and Joe spoke to an interesting tactic Jesse Brown is taking with Canadaland.

For those of you who don’t know (I didn’t), Jesse Brown was an early podcaster with Search Engine. A couple of years ago, he turned that into Canadaland, which is a media watchdog of sorts.

He has broken big stories, such as the policy the CBC had that allowed Peter Mansbridge to be on the news every night and also get paid to speak at events for organizations that were in the news. Because of the Canadaland investigation, the CBC changed their policy.

But Jesse is facing something many content producers face and that is he’s not being paid to spend the necessary time to break news like this. So he has asked his supporters to become patrons of sorts…and it’s working!

Martin and Joe wonder if this could be a new trend, particularly for brand-new content producers.

What do you think?

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Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

Inside PR is produced by Ashlea McGrath.