Métro Média shuts down operations, blames Montreal’s Publisac ban

If you see one of these, it’s a keepsake now.

Métro is no more.

Saying it pained him to do so but he had no choice, Andrew Mulé announced late Friday afternoon that the activities of Métro Média, including the free Métro newspaper, community newspapers in Montreal and Quebec City, and the journalmetro.com website, are being suspended.

Unless some magic saviour steps forward to rescue them, this means the end of the last free “daily” newspaper in Montreal (24 Heures still exists but no longer in print format), the last Metro-branded newspaper in Canada, and the jobs of dozens of journalists doing hyperlocal news.

In his note to readers, Mulé says the pandemic was hard but the “devastating” blow came from Montreal’s decision to no longer allow the distribution of the Publisac flyer bag, which Métro used to distribute its community papers. Between paying more for Canada Post to distribute the papers or doing without print advertising that still represented a significant part of their budget, they couldn’t make the numbers work.

It wasn’t for lack of trying to create a new business model. Two years ago Métro redesigned the print product, redesigned its website, redesigned its mobile app, and adopted a 100% local strategy.

Mulé also turned over every stone trying to get funding, but hit a brick wall this week.

The legacy of the former Transcontinental papers

Métro Média was born in 2018 with the purchase of the Métro daily newspaper and community papers in Montreal and Quebec City from Transcontinental, which decided a year earlier it didn’t want to be in the print media business anymore and put all of its papers up for sale.

Of the 93 publications Transcontinental put up for sale that day (92 in Quebec, plus the Cornwall Seaway News, though the number is a bit fuzzy because it includes things like weekend editions and monthly inserts separately), all but four were eventually sold. But I count only 46 of them still publishing. That’s just less than half.

Of them, 20 are owned by Icimédias, 12 by Médialo (formerly Groupe Lexis Média), and five by Gravité Média.

For other former Transcon papers, it’s not much better:

A lot of nuance can be added to this tally. It doesn’t take into account new publications (whether print or online) that spring up to cover communities, for example. But it’s a good indication that the situation is bleak for print news media, whether large or small.

The transition to … whatever will be the new way we get news in this world may require steps like this. But those steps are painful. They mean the loss of institutions and many people doing good work who now have to find some other way to make a living.

3 thoughts on “Métro Média shuts down operations, blames Montreal’s Publisac ban

  1. Dilbert

    The quality of work done, while good for them, isn’t very relevant if nobody is reading it. It is much more of a dead end than anyone wants to admit.

    Transcontinental saw the writing on the wall, they already knew when they started to get out that print media was in trouble, and that the Publicsac concept was headed for the grave at some point. That removed the distribution method that created the appearance of wide distribution. That misleading wide distribution is what would drive the price of advertising in the Metro style papers.

    They saw it coming apart, and got out of it before it failed.

    The world is slowly but surely turning away from paper, not just newspapers but any wasteful use of paper. Circulars are a mostly wasteful use of paper, with tens of millions of them ending up in landfills every year. The signs have all been there, but some have ignored it.

    Reply

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