Tag Archives: newspapers

| Media

Montreal Gazette returns to being The Gazette after 9 years as a blue square

Two newspapers, one with a blue square "Montreal Gazette" logo on the front and the other with an Old English-style "The Gazette" logo

The Montreal Gazette’s front page, before (left) and after (right)

The Gazette is The Gazette again.

On Thursday, my employer brought back the familiar Old English-style logo that had graced its cover for decades (until Postmedia’s 2014 design changes that unified layout styles in broadsheets across the country). Friday’s paper was the first with the old logo, combined with a large Aislin cartoon to mark the occasion.

An editor’s note that appears in a wrap around Friday’s edition and was also posted online says the change “is more than symbolic, and serves as a powerful reminder that although the journalism of today is different than in generations past — and even though we tell stories using digital tools that would never have been imaginable in the 18th century — our high standards and promise to seek the truth remain the same.”

Postmedia also issued a press release on the matter. The rebrand (unrebrand?) comes with a new tagline: “There with you then. Here with you now” — which gets added to a long list of Gazette marketing slogans including “The English Language, daily.” “The Gazette IS Montreal” and “Words matter.”

Besides the logo, and a reconfiguration of the skyboxes to fit its new shape, the paper is the same as it was on Thursday. But there’s a bit of a morale boost among its staff.

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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.

| Media

Métro Média shuts down Montreal’s Corriere Italiano newspaper

Corriere Italiano, a 71-year-old Italian-language newspaper in Montreal, is shutting down.

The announcement was made Wednesday on its website, attributing the decision to owner Métro Média, which bought Corriere Italiano along with Métro and community newspapers in Montreal and Quebec City from former owner Transcontinental in 2018.

In a message to readers, editor-in-chief Fabrizio Intravaia laments that “this community will have less of a voice to express itself, to publicize its activities, its progress, its achievements.” He also seems to lay part of the blame at the feet of the community, asking if the community has supported the newspaper as much as the newspaper has supported it.

That phrasing might be apt in the sense that the paper has noticeably declined over the years, and its shutdown does not come as much of a shock. Its previous issue dated March 9 had only eight pages, despite dropping from a biweekly schedule to what appears to have been a monthly one.

Compare that with Il Cittadino Canadese, which still publishes weekly and whose latest issue is 24 pages and filled with ads.

It might be simple to suggest the community let Corriere die and rally behind the other paper. But Carole Gagliardi, daughter of Corriere Italiano’s founder, suggests giving the paper a “second life” in some unspecified way, and says she’s gotten support from the community.

Will we see an independent community-led resurgence, or is this truly the end of this media institution? Il tempo lo dirà.

| Media, Opinion

Five years after La Presse, seven more French-language newspapers go online-only

Are we witnessing, finally, the death of the newspaper?

I don’t necessarily mean it in a bad way. Most of the time when you hear about a newspaper or magazine going “online-only” it’s a cost-cutting measure that signals the publication’s impending death (no matter how much they claim otherwise).

But as the business model for print media changes, the balance appears to be tipping to the point where it makes more and more sense to go online-only even if you still employ dozens or even hundreds of professionals doing daily journalism.

La Presse publisher Guy Crevier explained the math to me 10 years ago, before that publication decided to make the big leap. Publishing a print edition comes with a lot of overhead costs. The pages have to be designed, both in terms of news content and advertising. The newspaper needs to be printed, either at your own plant or by a third party. The newspaper then needs to be distributed through a network of delivery people who need to work before sunrise every day the paper publishes. And you need a subscriptions department to manage print subscriptions and deal with all the issues that come up.

What’s more, many of those costs don’t scale linearly. As print subscribers and print ad revenue dwindle, it costs more per subscriber to produce. And subscribers will tolerate price increases only so much.

In January 2016, La Presse took the first step toward weaning itself from its identity as a newspaper by cutting down to one print issue a week. Two years later, it abandoned print entirely.

Other once-daily newspapers have also taken that first step in going weekly, like Métro. Some, like Saltwire and Postmedia publications, have taken a more gradual approach, dropping Monday editions.

More newspapers dropping the paper part

On Wednesday, the Coopérative nationale de l’information indépendante (CN2i) announced its six newspapers — Le Soleil in Quebec City, Le Droit in Ottawa-Gatineau, La Tribune in Sherbrooke, Le Nouvelliste in Trois-Rivières, Le Quotidien in Saguenay and La Voix de l’Est in Granby — would cease producing print editions at the end of the year. The six newspapers had all dropped down to weekly publication at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, mere weeks after they had been sold to employee cooperatives out of the ashes of Groupe Capitales Médias. (This month the group announced its cooperatives would merge into one to cut down on overhead.)

The CN2i sugarcoated the announcement with news about a new website and mobile app, saying this was the plan all along. They expect to drop 100 print-centric jobs but will do what they can to encourage voluntary departures and otherwise minimize layoffs.

A week ago, Quebecor’s 24 Heures, which was born as a free commuter daily in 2001, announced it too would cease publishing in print. A note to readers was not quite as upbeat as the one from CN2i, talking about grieving but still promising to be active online and social media.

How long before more take the plunge? Maybe not that long.

Quebecor’s Journal de Montréal and Journal de Québec took pride in proclaiming that they would remain print newspapers when La Presse transitioned away from print. But even they eventually had to face the music, and announced in December that they would no longer be publishing in print on Sundays.

The Montreal Gazette, my employer, has also stuck to print editions, partly because its print readership skews older, but even then it dropped Monday print editions.

Le Devoir has also stuck to print editions, in part to separate itself from La Presse. But I would not be surprised if they too eventually decide print isn’t worth it anymore (especially because they’re printed by Quebecor and at the whims of the business decisions of Quebecor’s printing plants).

Will it work?

A decade after the launch of La Presse+, which the publication quickly dubbed its flagship product, things seem to be going well. In its latest annual report, it reported a surplus, which it is using to build a reserve fund. And while the nonprofit is accepting donations from readers, it would still have had a surplus even without those donations. It says 80% of its revenue still comes from advertising.

That’s not to say the iPad app is a runaway success. La Presse has put more effort into its website and mobile apps, understanding that it can’t push everyone toward tablets. And the Toronto Star’s StarTouch project, based on La Presse+, was a spectacular and expensive failure.

But this is proof there’s hope out there for what were once daily subscription newspapers. If they are willing to invest and innovate, and stop trying to prop up the old business model by cutting expenses until they whittle themselves into nothing, they might be able to come out of this.

Unfortunately, for a lot of publications, the focus isn’t so much on innovation as it is on finding magical solutions like getting Facebook and Google to give them a bunch of money.

| Media

Journal de Montréal/Québec will stop printing Sunday editions in 2023

After La Presse, the Montreal Gazette and countless other newspapers across Canada and around the world, the Journal de Montréal and Journal de Québec are becoming the latest to announce they’re reducing their print schedules.

In a note to readers published Thursday evening, they announced they will no longer publish on Sundays in 2023. The last Sunday print edition will be Dec. 18, before the two holiday Sundays.

They were among only four mainstream (English or French-language) newspapers in the country still publishing print edition seven days a week. The only ones still publishing after this will be the Toronto Star and Toronto Sun. Most others are either six days a week (Monday-Saturday), five days (Tuesday-Saturday) or something less often than that.

The Journals (their notes had virtually identical wording) promise additional content in their Saturday papers to carry them through the weekend. Other papers that dropped Sunday editions, like La Presse in 2009 and the Gazette in 2010, made similar moves. But having a slightly bigger Saturday edition doesn’t compensate for not having a Sunday one.

The move is kind of inevitable, and I’m surprised it took this long, frankly. Not only does laying out, printing and distributing a paper cost a lot these days, but with no other newspapers publishing on Sundays, the Journal de Montréal couldn’t share delivery costs with their competitors. (Many of the independent contractors delivering newspapers in Montreal deliver multiple papers simultaneously.)

The Journal made it a point of touting how it wasn’t abandoning print readers like its competitors were. Only three years ago, it had a slogan about how it was a “real newspaper.” But, as the editor’s note says, times have changed. Publisher Lyne Robitaille took swipes at the big tech giants, as many newspapers like to do these days, as well as CBC/Radio-Canada, which Quebecor has long considered an unfair competitor because of its government subsidies.

The truth is that this is a reflection of both changes in readership habits and changes in business models. A new federal government bill to somehow force Facebook and Google to pay newspapers may bring some money back into the industry, but don’t expect the Sunday newspaper to return. The economic fundamentals simply aren’t there anymore.

It’s the end of an era. And if something spectacular happens on a Saturday, you’ll need to wait until Monday morning to get a sheet of paper that announces it in a way that makes it feel real.

| Media

The end of the Monday newspaper

If you’re a print subscriber to the Montreal Gazette, you didn’t get a copy delivered this morning.

It’s not an error, it was a choice by my employer Postmedia, which has also ended print distribution of Monday editions of the Sun and Province in Vancouver, Herald and Sun in Calgary, Journal and Sun in Edmonton, and Citizen and Sun in Ottawa.

“The decision reflects the rapidly changing news consumption habits of our readers, the needs of our advertisers and the escalating costs of printing and delivering a printed product,” wrote Gerry Nott, Senior Vice President, Editorial, in a note published in those newspapers.

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| Media

Groupe Capitales Médias files for creditor protection — What’s next?

Updated Aug. 21 with news of Métro Média’s interest.

Groupe Capitales Médias, the newspaper company started by Martin Cauchon when he bought six daily newspapers from Gesca in 2015, made good on rumours that it wouldn’t make it to the end of the month, filing for creditor protection on Monday.

The newspapers continue producing while their journalists await their fate:

  • Le Soleil in Quebec City
  • Le Nouvelliste in Trois-Rivières
  • Le Quotidien in Saguenay (which also publishes the weekly Le Progrès)
  • La Tribune in Sherbrooke
  • La Voix de l’Est in Granby
  • Le Droit in Ottawa/Gatineau

The stakes are serious, because there isn’t a lot of competition in this space. Quebec City has Le Journal de Québec, but Trois-Rivières, Saguenay and Granby don’t have other daily newspapers. Sherbrooke and Ottawa/Gatineau have English dailies but no other French ones. And Le Droit represents not only francophones of the national capital region, but Ontario francophones as a whole. Simply put, except for Quebec City there is no direct competitor that will take these newspapers’ places.

Without them, a lot of news will simply go unreported.

The Quebec government has stepped in with an emergency $5-million loan, which will get it to the end of the year. By that time, a new plan will need to be in place. That likely means new ownership, but in what form?

There’s no end to speculation about the group’s future. So let’s break down the suggestions and analyze them here:

Quebecor

The media empire is reportedly in talks with GCM. It makes sense on a few levels: Quebecor is already in the print media space, it owns TV stations in Quebec City, Sherbrooke, Saguenay and Trois-Rivières (and has an affiliate in Gatineau) that could benefit from news synergies.

But Quebecor has already owned regional newspapers, back when it was a competitor to Transcontinental in the community newspaper wars. That war ended with Quebecor selling all its weeklies to Transcontinental, and later Transcontinental selling all its papers to local owners for peanuts. Quebecor tried expanding to Saguenay with a Saguenay edition of Le Journal de Québec, but that edition quietly closed. (Quebecor also owned a weekly in Saguenay, but locked out its employees and later saw it disappear entirely.)

There’s also the competition concern in Quebec City, where Quebecor would own both daily newspapers. It’s unclear what the government would do about this. The Competition Bureau had no problem with Postmedia buying Sun Media, and owning both daily paid-subscription newspapers in Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton. But it’s still investigating the community newspaper deal between Postmedia and Torstar, in which newspapers were swapped and immediately shut down.

If Quebecor did buy the chain (or the chain minus Le Soleil), it would be an admission that having a media empire is better than having no local media at all.

La Presse

These six newspapers used to belong to the same company as La Presse, which was at the time owned by Power Corp. But as La Presse shifted to a tablet-based publication, and the others maintained their print products, at some point it was decided to separate them, and Cauchon (with a source of funding that remains unclear) stepped in and bought them (for an amount we still don’t know).

Despite the separation, the publications maintain links, including content sharing (which would disappear if Quebecor was the buyer).

The big advantage is that it would be the closest to maintaining the status quo. But La Presse isn’t swimming in cash either, and is making similar demands to governments for financial aid.

Le Devoir

Quebec’s only independent daily newspaper wants to help, but it doesn’t have the money. It has a particular affinity for Le Soleil. And Le Devoir has a strong presence in Quebec City already with its sizeable bureau in the National Assembly press gallery. They also have existing business partnerships — Le Devoir is going to use GCM’s software for its tablet edition, and GCM sells national ads for Le Devoir.

If Le Devoir took Le Soleil and Quebecor took the rest, that might solve competition concerns. But we’re still back to the same problem that Le Devoir doesn’t have the money to buy a newspaper, much less an entire chain.

Local owners

It’s the feel-good option: break up the chain and find local owners in each community to take control. It’s what Transcontinental did when it decided to get out of the community newspaper business. But owning a daily newspaper is much more of a financial commitment than a community one.

And selling to local owners is no guarantee. Those owners generally get their money from other industries, and are more likely to compromise their ethics when it comes to promoting those industries. And even if they’re purely altruistic, once that good will wears off, those papers could end up shutting down anyway.

Plus, selling to a series of local owners would be complicated and take time. This needs to be figured out in a matter of months.

The Journal de Montréal talked to two of the companies that bought Transcon newspapers, and both say there’s no interest in taking over the money-losing company. (Transcontinental itself also is not interested.)

Métro Média

One group that bought newspapers from Transcontinental is interested, though. Métro Média, the group owned by businessman Mike Raffoul and which purchased Montreal’s Métro daily and community weeklies in Montreal and Quebec City, is interested, it told La Presse.

Such a takeover would provide some synergies in the national capital, and create a chain that had a presence in both Montreal and Quebec’s other large cities. But Métro Média is still new, and less experienced in paid subscription newspapers.

Employee co-op

CSN says its unions are interested in taking over the papers and having them be employee-run. It’s another feel-good option, in the same vein as a non-profit. But would an employee-run (or union-run) shop be willing to make the staffing cuts necessary to stay in the black? Would it have the financial capacity to make major investments when necessary? Would it have the courage to stand up to the CSN if that union is its de facto owner?

Maybe. None of these things are dealbreakers, but the co-op model isn’t a magic solution either.

Cogeco

La Presse said they were interested, but Cogeco has repeatedly denied it on the record. Cogeco owns radio stations in most of these markets, so there’s some synergy sense there, but considering its experience with TQS (it was an owner of the TV network when Quebecor was forced to sell it to buy Videotron and TVA in 2001, then it went bankrupt before being bought by the Rémillard family), it’s unlikely the company wants to gamble away a bunch of money for little gain.

Postmedia (or other anglo Canadian chain)

No one has seriously suggested this, but it should be included in such a list. As much as I’d love to have sister newspapers across Quebec (and Le Soleil used to be owned by Conrad Black’s Hollinger chain), the biggest problem is that Postmedia, Torstar et al don’t have any French-language news assets, so don’t stand to gain much in terms of synergy. And, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, they don’t have a lot of money lying around.

The government

Nationalizing GCM sounds like a bad idea, and the Quebec government has already ruled it out.

It doesn’t really matter

In the end, though, regardless of who buys GCM and its newspapers, the business needs to change. Even a rich owner isn’t going to cover deficits forever. That means there will need to be cuts to staff, or new revenues, or direct government support, or some combination of all those things. Le Devoir’s Brian Myles talks about following his paper’s model, focusing more on subscription revenues. The Quebec government will be expected to consider more direct support when it conducts hearings next week. And the Canadian government is putting in place a tax credit system to help. There are also proposals like taxing telecommunications companies and using that money to support news media.

Speculating about potential new owners is fun, but the real problem is that this is a broken business, and someone needs to come up with a plan to fix it.

| Media

Transcontinental/Chronicle Herald sale continues regional monopolization of newspapers

The Halifax Chronicle Herald surprised me this morning by announcing it is purchasing almost all of Transcontinental’s print assets in Atlantic Canada, including 27 newspapers, one online-only news outlet, and four of Transcon’s six printing plants. (This despite the fact that the paper is 15 months into a general strike.)

Included in the sale are newspapers like the St. John’s Telegram and Charlottetown Guardian. The sale takes effect immediately, Transcontinental said. No word on purchase price, but we’ll probably learn that at Transcontinental’s next financial report to shareholders.

This sale follows several recent region-wide newspaper selloffs, including Quebecor selling 74 community papers in Quebec to Transcontinental, Transcontinental selling its 13 Saskatchewan newspapers to Star News Publishing, Transcontinental buying all of Rogers’s business-to-business magazines, Gesca selling all its newspapers except La Presse, and swaps of newspapers between Black Press and Glacier Media in B.C. (Not to mention the whole Postmedia/Sun Media thing.)

The result of most of these transactions is that the country is being divided up regionally, and community newspapers are avoiding competition so much that their owners are swapping assets to stay away from each other’s markets.

After the Transcon/Chronicle Herald deal, the new owners (who have incorporated as Saltwire Network) made it clear they have no plans to expand into New Brunswick (beyond the purchased Sackville Tribune Post, which is on the Nova Scotia border) to avoid competing with the Irving-owned Brunswick News. The Transcontinental-Quebecor deal ended the companies’ competition in Quebec, which had heated up a few years earlier when Quebecor decided to launch some new publications on Transcontinental territory.

A look at which groups own more than a nominal number of newspapers in each province shows how fragmented it has become (numbers are based on a quick count and may not be exact):

  • British Columbia: Black Press (77), Glacier Media (25)
  • Alberta: Postmedia (36), Glacier Media (17), Black Press (12)
  • Saskatchewan: Glacier Media (15)
  • Manitoba: Glacier Media (9), Postmedia (9), FP Newspapers (9)
  • Ontario: Torstar (115), Postmedia (61)
  • Quebec: Transcontinental (100)
  • New Brunswick: Brunswick News (24)
  • Nova Scotia/Prince Edward Island/Newfoundland and Labrador: Saltwire Network (34)

Besides Alberta and Manitoba, no province has more than two major community newspaper publishers (as measured by number of titles). But just as importantly, no publisher operates substantial operations in more than four provinces.

As a result of the latest sale, Transcontinental will drop to being a Quebec-only newspaper publisher (except for papers in Cornwall, Ont., and its partnership in the Halifax Metro free daily).

The transactions make sense from a business perspective, and as much as we can complain about lack of competition, the truth is that healthy competition in community newspapers just isn’t possible as the industry continues its slow death march.

We may see further consolidation (particularly in western provinces) in the future, and if the situation doesn’t improve, major shutdowns. And if one of these companies goes under and is forced to shut down completely, it could leave an entire province without community media.

| Media

N.D.G. Free Press newspaper shuts down

The Free Press newspaper, which launched as the N.D.G. Free Press in 2009 and later expanded to include neighbouring west-end communities, has published its final issue, its editor told Mike Cohen and the Montreal Gazette.

Its sister paper, the Westmount Independent, will continue to publish, David Price says.

As a free paper, distributed mainly through the mail, the twice-monthly Free Press required advertising revenue to survive, but despite a recent plea to readers, the paper couldn’t find enough advertisers to become profitable.

The Free Press wasn’t the kind of news machine that you’d find at the Montreal Gazette or CBC or La Presse, but it was independent, and it tried to fill the hole left after Transcontinental shut down what was left of the old N.D.G. Monitor. There’s still The Suburban, which has a west-end edition, and of course the daily Gazette, but residents of that part of town will be less connected to what happens in their community.

City councillor Marvin Rotrand tweeted something offering hope something could be done to save the paper, but that seems too little, too late at this point.