The San Francisco Chronicle’s 15-year deal with Montreal-based Transcontinental to print its newspaper officially began today, and the paper heralded the new (outsourced) presses that allow for more colour. That, of course, is being mocked in the usual places.
You’ll recall that Transcontinental signed an 18-year deal with the Globe and Mail to print their newspaper last year.
UPDATE: A short piece in the New York Times that questions the point.
"Bienvenue aux lecteurs du dimanche" reads the Gazette
Well that’s it. There’s no La Presse today, and there won’t be any next Sunday, or the Sunday after that.
The painful decision to cut out the most expendable of the seven daily editions, made last month, has finally seen its effect. Except for a blog post from Chantal Guy, there isn’t much mention of it today, probably because everything has already been said.
I’ll note a couple of things though, both involving my newspaper. First is that today’s cover has a note which I’m sure some old lady in the West Island will ask to have translated for her, welcoming former La Presse readers who are so desperate for a paper to read on Sunday that they’ll grab the anglo rag. There’s no article inside or anything, just the banner.
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a newspaper has tried to move in on the Sunday market left empty by another:
The other is a notice in yesterday’s paper that warns readers in some far-away areas that the delivery of their Sunday paper will be delayed because The Gazette subcontracted delivery in those areas to La Presse and now there’s no one to bring their newspapers to them. It’s one of those little secrets of newspapers that often the same person will deliver competing papers to an area (especially when there are few readers in that area, as one would expect for Trois Rivières and Sorel). La Presse’s cancellation of its Sunday edition was sudden and caught my paper a bit flat-footed.
UPDATE:
... and again the next week
Ah, Montréal-Matin…
Message from the publisher in Victoria Times-Colonist, May 9, Page A2
The Victoria Times-Colonist announced in Saturday’s paper that, because of the weakened economy and the business crisis facing newspapers, the TC will stop printing on Mondays as of June 22.
That’s a week before the National Post does a similar cost-cutting measure. The difference is that the TC move isn’t temporary and they’re not producing a smaller online-only edition, just promising to post breaking news online seven days a week.
(The TC story is closed to comments, but the Globe and Mail story about it is open.)
The Times-Colonist case is also unusual because the newspaper will still print both Saturdays and Sundays. Unlike most other Canadian newspapers, the TC has a strong Sunday paper with plenty of advertising.
I’m not sure if this is a coincidence, but the this-week-in-history column in Sunday’s paper focuses on the decision of Victoria’s two newspapers, the Times and Colonist, to move in together and share space, though keep their editorial matters separate. We all know how that turned out.
Tuesday’s Gazette has a profile of Main Street, a small Laurentians monthly newspaper that’s producing an online-only weekly edition. It’s on their “You’ll like this” good news page, because it’s an example of a small guy bucking the big trend of newspapers cutting back and shutting down.
Let’s hope this move turns out to be sustainable in the long run.
In case you missed it (you ungrateful non-newspaper-readers), the Financial Post and Canwest News Service ran a series this week on the future of newspapers, which unless you’ve been living under a rock recently you’ve noticed are in a bit of business trouble. But these writers know newspapers are better than those other media.
The series is in five parts:
As part of the series, Canwest’s newspapers were also encouraged to write about their individual histories and connections with their communities. The Gazette got young reporter Jason Magder to do a piece on the paper’s connection with its community.
Other Canwest papers also wrote self-congratulatory pieces:
The National Post also asked its “opinion-makers” about their thoughts on newspapers:
As if underscoring how far newspapers have to go, in neither of the three above cases could I find one page linking all these related stories together.
Finally, unrelated to any of the above, Stuart McLean writes in the Globe and Mail about why he loves newspapers.
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:
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.
The final issue of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tuesday March 17, 2009
If you follow media, you probably don’t need me to tell you that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer finally pulled the plug on its money-losing but historic print edition, and will attempt to make a go at producing a news website with a few dozen journalists. It will be a test case for other major newspapers thinking of doing the same. If they succeed in making such a venture profitable, others will surely follow. If not, others might try, or they might decide to close up shop completely.
Meanwhile, in Denver, where another city has become a one-newspaper town, former staff at the Rocky Mountain News are trying to do the same thing, even though their publisher decided not to. So they’ve made a pledge that if they can get 50,000 people to subscribe for $5 a month, they’ll start up an online newspaper.
In Canada, big papers are still here, and for the most part still profitable. But the smaller papers are dying off. Sun Media this week closed two underperforming small newspapers in Alberta, the Jasper Booster and Morinville Redwater Town & Country Examiner (UPDATE: The Edmonton Journal explores some of the lives affected by these shutdowns and other layoffs). They weren’t the first, and certainly won’t be the last small newspapers to throw in the towel in this economy where even journalism students don’t read papers and journalists are thinking of some desperate ideas to keep the business model going. While the number of consumers of information is about the same, the shift of advertising dollars is not, and that’s going to put negative pressure on people like me who would like to make a living off the collection, packaging and redistribution of information.
The trends are encouraging for journalism, but not for journalists. Plz I can haz bizniss modul nao?
This video, complete with fake old-style-cinema lines, shows a bunch of headlines from francophone Montreal newspapers, without any sound or other commentary. But the message it’s trying to convey comes out pretty clearly.
The Chicago Tribune, apparently keenly aware of the current newspaper economic crisis, has decided to print two versions of its paper: a broadsheet version for home delivery and a tabloid version for newsstands. Both will have the same content, just formatted differently.
Does this sound excessively stupid to anyone else? They’re going to have to use valuable resources to edit and layout two newspapers (and unless they’ve outsourced it to India, this is an expensive proposition), with editors doing two sets of layouts with different headlines, photos, captions and story lengths.
The Tribune says it has no plans to force home subscribers to switch to tabloid, but I can’t imagine one of the two not being forced to close and replaced with the other down the road to save costs.