There is a tendency when talking about the decline of traditional media to treat it as an inevitable consequence of progress.

Newspapers are old fashioned. Radio is dying. Conventional television belongs to another generation.

Everything is moving online.

But at some point, Canadians should probably stop and ask a fairly simple question:

Are the alternatives actually better?

That question feels particularly relevant in Alberta right now.

Last month, Rogers abruptly shut down both 660 NewsRadio and Sportsnet 960 The Fan in Calgary as part of a larger round of cuts.

Think about what disappeared in a single day.

One was a dedicated local news station in a city of nearly 2 million people. The other was Calgary’s sports radio station and the longtime radio home of the Calgary Flames.

They weren’t replaced by better radio stations.

They were simply gone.

Meanwhile, another Canadian broadcasting institution has disappeared from free television.

After nearly 75 years, Hockey Night in Canada will no longer air on CBC beginning with the upcoming NHL season. The sublicensing arrangement between Rogers and CBC has ended, and Citytv will no longer provide another free over-the-air option either.

For the first time in generations, a Canadian with an antenna and a television will not simply be able to turn on the TV on Saturday night and watch the NHL.

Some games are moving deeper into the streaming world as well. Amazon Prime Video will carry Wednesday night games and selected playoff series under the new national rights arrangement, while Sportsnet retains the bulk of the national schedule.

Again, we’re told this is evolution.

Perhaps it is.

But is it improvement?

For decades, Canadian media had an extraordinarily simple proposition.

Turn on a radio and you could hear local news, weather, traffic and sports for free.

Turn on a television and you could watch major national events for free.

Pick up your community newspaper and you could find out what your municipal council was doing, who won the local hockey tournament, what businesses were opening, who had died, what events were coming up and what was happening down the road.

None of those systems was perfect.

But they were remarkably accessible.

Today we have more content than any generation in human history and, strangely enough, it sometimes feels harder to find out what is happening in our own communities.

The replacement for radio is supposedly podcasts and streaming audio.

The replacement for television is supposedly streaming video.

The replacement for newspapers is supposedly social media and websites.

But those aren’t necessarily equivalent products.

A podcast can provide tremendous analysis, but it isn’t necessarily going to send a reporter to city hall.

A national streaming service can offer thousands of hours of entertainment, but it isn’t necessarily going to tell you why Highway 13 is closed.

A Facebook community group can spread information incredibly quickly, but it doesn’t necessarily have someone attending a school board meeting, checking facts, calling both sides of a dispute and putting their name on the resulting story.

And an algorithm isn’t an editor. There is another difference that shouldn’t be overlooked. Traditional broadcasting was remarkably democratic. If you owned a radio, you had radio. If you owned a television and could receive the signal, you had television. If you owned a post office box, you received a newspaper.

There wasn’t a monthly bill attached to every individual piece of culture.

The technological argument is that consumers have more choice than ever. Technically, that’s true.

But having 15 subscription services to choose from isn’t necessarily more useful than having one television channel showing the hockey game everybody wants to watch.

There was also something valuable about millions of Canadians occasionally consuming the same thing.

Hockey Night in Canada was one of those things.

It didn’t matter whether you lived in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver or a town of 500 people. Saturday night hockey was simply there.

No password.

No wondering which service had the game.

Just turn on the television.

There is value in that kind of shared national experience that doesn’t appear on a corporate balance sheet.

The same applies on a smaller scale to local media.

A community newspaper creates a shared record of a place.

Local radio creates a shared conversation.

Local television creates a window into a region.

When those institutions disappear, information doesn’t disappear entirely.

It fragments.

Some of it goes to Facebook. Some goes to X. Some goes to Reddit. Some goes behind subscription walls. Some goes into podcasts. Some goes into neighbourhood groups and email newsletters.

And some simply isn’t reported anymore.

Canada has already seen hundreds of local news organizations close since 2008. The Local News Research Project has documented more than 600 closures across nearly 400 communities, with community newspapers accounting for the large majority of them.

That should concern people, because the value of local journalism isn’t limited to the person reading it.

A reporter sitting in a council meeting changes that meeting simply by being there.

A local newspaper asking questions creates accountability whether 500 people read the resulting article or 50,000.

A radio newsroom capable of immediately broadcasting information during a major storm, wildfire or emergency provides something that a recommendation algorithm cannot guarantee.

The argument against traditional media is usually economic, and there is truth to it.

Audiences fragmented. Advertising moved elsewhere. Production became expensive. Consumer habits changed. Government supports across all levels of government has notably vanished.

But that explanation only goes so far.

Because in community after community across Canada, large corporate owners haven’t simply decided they no longer want to operate a newspaper, radio station or other local media property. They’ve eliminated any chance of it ever existing again.

They’ve closed it. They’ve slashed it beyond recognition.They’ve eliminated the staff, consolidated the operation somewhere else, shut down the local office or switched off the transmitter.

And too often, they haven’t given anyone else the opportunity to try.

There is a tremendous difference between a company deciding it can no longer make a local media operation work and deciding that nobody else should get the chance.

Sell it.

Let a local entrepreneur take a run at it. Let employees buy it. Let another independent publisher or broadcaster try a different business model. Let somebody with lower overhead, deeper community connections or simply a different idea see whether they can make it work.

Maybe they fail.

But at least the community gets a chance to keep something it may have relied upon for generations.

Instead, too many Canadian communities have watched distant corporations acquire local media properties, extract what value they could from them, reduce their local presence and eventually close them altogether.

Once that happens, the loss can be permanent.

Canada spent generations building an extraordinary network of local newspapers, radio stations and television broadcasters that connected communities and gave ordinary people access to news, information, entertainment and culture.

We should be extraordinarily careful about allowing a handful of corporations to dismantle that network one balance sheet at a time.

Once they’re gone, there may be nobody coming to replace them.