Tag Archives: Metro newspaper

| Media

Canadian newspaper readership stable

It seems to go against conventional wisdom, but NADBank results released this morning show that readership at major Canadian newspapers remains stable, with three quarters of Canadians reading at least one daily newspaper each week. Online numbers also remain stable, which is disappointing because they represent so little.

Both the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail cherry-picked results to declare victory. The Star has more print readers on a daily, Saturday and weekly basis, but the Globe has more online readers and a higher total readership of both online and print (the Globe also says it won “key” demographics and implies that its readers are smarter). Other newspapers trumpeted their gains, especially the Calgary Herald, whose readership jumped 7% over last year,

In Montreal, the Journal de Montréal is still the undisputed print leader, with 578,800 having read it “yesterday” and 1,129,600 in the last week, 40% more than second-place La Presse (even throwing in Cyberpresse readers, against the Journal’s lack of a website, the paper still comes up short). Note that this is all before the lockout.

For those who care about comparing competing papers, there’s not much new here. The market percentages are almost identical to last year. A slight uptick in online readers for Cyberpresse, but only from 9% to 11% of the market.

In terms of raw numbers:

  • The Journal de Montréal lost about 3% of its weekday and Sunday readers.
  • La Presse lost about 30,000 weekly print readers but gained about 26,000 weekly online readers.
  • The Gazette (my paper) gained modestly in all categories, but online growth is robust, rising 11% since it relaunched its website last fall. In the Greater Montreal Area, it rose 31%. (Still, most of the website’s traffic comes from outside Quebec, an oddity among Canwest’s papers)
  • Metro lost almost 5% of its weekly readers, and though it gained almost 20% online, its web readership is still negligible.
  • 24 Heures gained 2.4% in weekly readers (perhaps partially at Metro’s expense). Its online numbers are similarly negligible.

In general, 49% of Montrealers 18 and over read a newspaper on the average weekday, 74% read at least one a week, and 76% read a newspaper or go to a newspaper’s website in a week (which means a tiny number – 4% nationally – go to newspaper websites but don’t subscribe). Freebie newspaper readership is at 24% here, with 717,000 people having read either Metro or 24 Heures in the past five weekdays.

| Business, Media

Metro expects journalists to work for free

In case you needed more evidence that news organizations are taking advantage of the naiveté of young journalism students to reduce their payroll costs, the Metro newspaper in Toronto has fired its paid staff and replaced them with but are keeping their unpaid interns.

One of these days, newspapers (especially crappy ones like Metro) will lose that prestige that allows them to abuse students who are so desperate to get into their dream career they’ll work for free.

UPDATE (Feb. 11): One of those laid-off journalists writes about his bosses escorting him from the building on his personal blog.

| Public transit

Metro to run all night during Nuit Blanche

The metro ... after dark?

The metro ... after dark?

According to Metro (the newspaper), the STM is announcing Wednesday that it will keep the metro (the subway) running all night during the Nuit Blanche Feb. 28.

The STM has only done this twice before, once during a snowstorm in 1971, and again on New Year’s Eve 1999. The overnight hours are when maintenance is performed on the tracks, cashes are emptied and other similar stuff is done.

The Metro article is so far the only source that confirms this story (Midnight Poutine surely uses it as a source without credit and Montreal City Weblog picks the story up from there), and its wording isn’t very clear, making me suspect they might have gotten the story wrong.

UPDATE: It’s true. The STM confirmed it today. The metro will run all night long (presumably all lines), in addition to the regular night bus service. (Though considering most of the Nuit Blanche activities are in the Old Port, the Plateau and the Quartier des Spectacles, the metro might not be the most convenient method of transportation between them – it’s more useful for getting home afterward.)

In the past, the STM has opened up the Place des Arts metro station during the Nuit Blanche for performances in the metro, though it confines it to the mezzanine and doesn’t have actual trains running.

Kudos STM, but would it kill you to do the same on New Year’s Eve once a year too?

UPDATE (Jan. 29): The STM is focusing on art in the metro, including a 15-station art rally quiz thing.

| Media, Montreal

Metro is now No. 1 paper in Montreal (kinda)

Yesterday’s issue of Metro (PDF) sang from the heavens about the latest NADbank ratings report which showed that the paper gets 244,700 daily readers, just passing the Journal, La Presse and 24 Heures for the top spot on the island of Montreal.

(The figures are for the island, not the metropolis, since Metro is only distributed in the city’s core.)

The figures seem to represent a national trend, as free dailies are seeing huge increases in readership, and that increase, along with modest gains from the Globe and Post, are helping to raise the overall average of newspaper readership in Canada.

So call this one a victory for bite-size news with no analysis, and newspapers with no few journalists spewing out wire copy by the cheap.