The chronic but never quite fatal decline of Postmedia has to be slowest-motion trainwreck in Canadian history.
At this rate, the company will still be losing money churning out AI-written columns by virtual columnists with names like David, Rick and Don explaining why climate change isn’t a thing long after all human life on earth has been extinguished by global heating.
There’s probably a sci-fi story with legs in that scenario for some newly laid-off Postmedia hack hoping to kick-start a promising new career in a more respectable fiction genre.
Don’t knock it, similar predictions have come true.
Back in 2000, when your blogger was still on strike against the Calgary Herald, some wit put out a fake edition of the National Post with a story that promised the company (then known as Southam) would go green and “save thousands of hectares of Alberta forest by merging the Calgary Herald and the National Post.”
After all, said the four-pager handed out to bewildered passersby at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, the Herald and the Post basically ran the same stories anyway.
We thought it was a joke. Who knew this would all come true in a few years – with the virtual twist that the Internet would make even lousier paperless papers possible?
Now it’s 2023 and the foundering newspaper chain is still in business – it’s principal business, one assumes, being giving big bonuses to executives, because it sure as hell isn’t very good at running newspapers.
Last Wednesday, we learned Postmedia is about to kill off yet another dozen community newspapers in Alberta by converting them to “digital-only formats” – you know, just like this blog, only in many cases I’d be willing to bet, with considerably fewer readers. The switch to digital is supposed to take place on Feb. 27.
The list includes some venerable titles that have been bringing news to Albertans for generations.
The Toronto-based, U.S.-owned newspaper chain didn’t put out a news release or make a formal announcement, as you might have expected. The word got around after the Canadian Press got hold of a memorandum to staff saying so long to so many.
In a virtual “townhall” for hapless employees facing the chop – a recording of which was leaked to the Globe and Mail – Postmedia CEO Andrew MacLeod made the usual excuses for the coming cuts.
“We need to have our costs be more in balance with the revenue environment that we find ourselves in,” he said, which is what newspaper executives always say when their increasingly shabby and uninformative product loses even more readers and advertisers to the Internet.
The company did announce later in the day that it has finally sold off the huge and nearly derelict Calgary Herald Building on the east side of Deerfoot Trail – once upon a time the most fabulous newspaper plant in Canada, maybe the world, complete with a state-of-the-art vacuum tube system for moving award-winning stories from the newsroom to the pressroom – for a piddling $17.5 million. It took more than a decade to find a buyer willing to pay that much.
With high irony, the red brick mausoleum that looms over Cowtown’s rush hour traffic on the north-south freeway was sold to U-Haul Co., which can now rent trailers to Herald reporters to take their notes and desktop family photos home.
Postmedia has now reached the point where there would not be much point continuing to publish anything were it not for federal government subsidies and the aforementioned executive bonuses.
Postmedia reported last week that it lost $15.9-million in its first quarter, which for some reason ends on Nov. 30, compared with a loss of $4.4-million in the same period a year earlier.
The company said that revenue from advertising and circulation were down 5.9 per cent and 5.4 per cent in the quarter. The only part of its business that turned a profit was its parcel-delivery service.
So, for now, Postmedia will continue to print 19 newspapers in Alberta – four dailies in Calgary and Edmonton and 15 smaller community newspapers.
It was obvious at the time Postmedia snapped up many Alberta community newspapers that this was going to end badly – and now that prediction is being played out.
Speaking of U-Hauls, there was also word that the U.S.-owned newspaper corporation is sending its few remaining reporters in Saskatchewan home to work from their apartments, thus dumping the cost of running a premises in which to do business on their remaining underpaid hacks.
You can expect the same thing to happen in Calgary as soon as U-Haul moves into its iconic new facility.
The dozen newspapers that will be newspapers no more – and won’t be very good websites either, since they’ll be filled with the same drivel that appears on all of Postmedia’s other websites – include some storied names.
They are:
– Drayton Valley Western Review
– Airdrie Echo
– Peace Country News
– Fort McMurray Today
– Leduc County Market
– Cochrane Times
– Bow Valley Crag and Canyon
– Cold Lake Sun
– Hanna Herald
– Vermilion Standard
– Pincher Creek Echo
– Whitecourt Star.
In March 1999, according to the last edition of the Calgary Herald’s internal telephone directory published before the eight-month strike that began in November that year, there were 166 individual human beings employed in the paper’s editorial department alone!
This doesn’t count those employed in administration, advertising, building services, distribution, electronic pre-press, financial services, human resources, marketing, paper make-up, plate-making, the press room, reader sales and services, security, sundry smaller departments, the cafeteria, and, I kid you not, the staff daycare.
The paper they put out had its flaws, but all in all it was pretty good.
I doubt Postmedia employs 166 people in all of Alberta today. It would be considerable understatement to say its remaining papers are not so good.
At the end of the eight-month Calgary Herald strike in June 2000, with the union busted and most of us strikers taking buy-outs rather than return to that place, it seemed to me to be not just a rout, but a personal and professional catastrophe.
I’m very grateful now, though, to have left the newspaper business when I did, when there was still time for a just transition out of journalism.
NOTE: A story about Brock Ketcham, mentioned in the caption under the main photo, can be found here.
I am ok at math, so the $17.5 million for selling the Herald Building (which I believe cost considerably more to build), basically covers their quarterly loss of $15.9 million. It is not a good sign when a company has to resort to selling of what were its best assets for cash to cover the ongoing losses. Obviously, they will eventually run out of such things to sell – this can not continue forever. Perhaps someone should rent a billboard near the previous Herald Building was with the phrase “Post Mortal Media – the end is near” on it.
As for ceasing printing all those rural papers, that is not good news either. They will likely lose the readers and advertisers who really wanted the print edition. Most of the others already get their local news from various other existing on line sources that sometimes may cover it better.
Post Media has ceased to be as relevant as it once was and it seems like it will continue to drift towards irrelevance. This might not be a bad thing given their right wing political slant. I wonder how long it will continue and am surprised with all the ongoing losses, cuts and closures it has actually managed to last this long. I don’t know how much longer it will last so I will not predict their imminent demise, but I suspect the last thing to go out of print to digital only will be the Sun. It is like the cockroach of newspapers.
“Post Mortal Media” is a very appropriate coinage.
I have known Brock Ketchum, when he was employed in some other capacity, outside of the newspaper industry. A very outstanding gentleman, who sadly passed away, some years ago; God rest his soul. As for Postmedia, it is just an echo chamber for the conservatives. It doesn’t seem to be much more than that. I remember a time when newspaper columnists had integrity, and they weren’t propping up politicians. That basically changed, and I think that Ralph Klein had something to do with this. He had an associate, Rod Love, who was chastising newspaper columnists who didn’t agree with Ralph Klein’s bad policies, and spoke out against them. Newspapers, including the Edmonton Journal, are not what they used to be. The Calgary Herald isn’t much different. In the Edmonton and Calgary Sun, they are extremely entrenched with the conservatives. Even in the letters people write to The Sun, it’s that the Liberals and the NDP are bad, and the UCP and the CPC are good. Anyone that speaks out against what the UCP are doing, gets called nasty names. It really is a pathetic state of affairs.
Terrific column, David. One of your best. You lived through the torture and torment of a dying empire and lived to tell the story. You write, “…when there was still time for a just transition out of journalism.” Can you tell the reader how you transitioned?
Tom: I had the good fortune to be offered a job as communications director of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, where I worked with some wonderful people in a worthy cause for a dozen years. Then I was recruited by United Nurses of Alberta to do similar work in the same cause for a different group of working people. I continue to work at UNA. To scratch my journalistic itch, I started this blog a little over 16 years ago. DJC
In addition to the inception of his blog, David didn’t mention that sixteen years ago another major event took place. In 2007 the owner of the Calgary Herald during 1999 strike, Conrad Black a.k.a. Lord Almost of Crossharbour, was convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice in a U.S. courtroom. The jailbird served his time in a federal lockdown. Maybe even the scabs cheered.
God’s work, David. Thanks!
While times are a changing, so are newspapers. But Postmedia is a pro corporate/neofascist conglomerate and propaganda mill, controlling a portion of Canadian news and over 90% of the dailies. They are two-thirds owned by the American media conglomerate Chatham Asset Management, which has close ties to the Republican Party. Postmedia rags are filled with the likes of right wing Rex Murphy who are given space on the National Post to smear the Liberals and NDP with innuendo, rhetoric and half truths.
One of the things that also came out of the news story I read, when this first came out, was that Post Media will also be contracting out the actual printing of the Regina and Saskatoon newspapers to a printing company in Estevan, which is right on the American border. According to Google Maps, it is a 5 hour drive from Estevan to Saskatoon, which will take just a bit more ‘new’ out of the ‘news’ readers of the Star-Phoenix get.
Bob: Correct, although I suspect the location of the printing plant was less of an issue than the price of the service. For years in many parts of Canada – even well before the demise of the newspaper industry – publications were often printed far from where they were distributed. Southam/CanWest/Hollinger/Postmedia (different names, same company, run by basically the same group of idiots) has been selling of its printing plants for years. Here in Alberta, the Edmonton Sun-Journal is printed by the St. Albert Gazette; the Calgary Sun-Herald (and the Prairie edition of the Globe and Mail) by the North Hill News. DJC
I recall someone telling me some years ago that in South America the rise of totalitarianism began with the media. The newspapers were bought out by “interests” who proceeded to sack all the troublesome staff and replace them with other “journalists”. These journalists were no more than friends of the regime, hacks, or hangers on looking for a favour; but all were dedicated to one thing: white washing everything the regime did as being good for the nation. Once the newspapers, which were usually the source of criticism against the government were compliant, the television networks were turned into pure entertainment or infotainment platforms. Fulled with nothing but telenovellas, gov’t propaganda, and softcore porn, the rot in the society had begun.
Al generated columns by avatars, known as “Rex Murphy” and “David Staples”, real people lending their names for money, because they have nothing that can be called a credible career anymore, will populate the endless web pages of fluff they intend to produce. His High Lordship Conrad Black of Crossharbour and Rupert Murdoch would be proud.
Since readers are much less than discerning these days, sketchy platforms like Telegram, The Rumble, and even Twitter will be sources of all the truth who need to care about. Journalists will be replaced by shadowy Influencers and the End will be nigh.
Adding to today’s report on dying empires, Harper’s Index February 2023. “Chances that a U.S. college graduate with a journalism degree regrets this choice of major: 9 in 10”
The newspaper industry is no longer about paper, and it hasn’t been about news for quite some time. The whole thing is a misnomer. Children can go to a museum like Heritage Park if they want to see what a newspaper was.
I predicted the final decline of the industry in a paper I wrote for a class late last century. The marker did not take kindly to my prediction that the internet would be the thing. It was still early days for that, and most people hadn’t gotten onboard. Railcars were still rolling up to big news buildings to deliver giant paper rolls.
Well, times change. The thing that hasn’t changed is value for money. Newspapers shifted their focus to canned content from wire services. They lost interest in local content, because that costs money. Readers became dissatisfied. The news bosses started doing crazy things that destroyed any credibility they had. Take the Calgary Herald in the 2015 Alberta provincial election, for example. They stumped for the Conservatives, and predicted a Jim Prentice win. They were wildly wrong.
Since then, Postmedia has continued insulting the intelligence of its ever-diminishing customer base. They deserve no government protection or subsidies because they serve no purpose as guardians of democracy or any other such nonsense. They exist to sell ads, but we have the internet and podcasts to do that now. Of course there’s TV and radio, too, but who pays attention to those?
To paraphrase Hank Williams, “Goodbye Joe, You gotta go, Me oh my oh.” As I say, who needs to wrap fish with a city-provided compost bin on the counter and a big green bin outside?
Such a shame.
https://youtu.be/6vQpW9XRiyM
My view is that Calgary Herald did it to themselves. We have lived in Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver, and Calgary (twice).
We would typically subscribe to two papers… a national and a city. By a long shot the Calgary Herald was the worst of any of those city papers. Both times. Nothing but a ‘feel good’ paper with only one or two columnists worth our time to read. Hardly any investigative or in depth reporting.
We cancelled our Herald delivery a few years ago. Never missed it-not even for one day. In fact there was a bonus. Much less paper to put out in the recycle bin. They did it to themselves.
Now we subscribe to two digital papers in Canada and read two others from the UK.
We get far more worthwhile (to us) Calgary news and commentary from the digital papers and from CBC/CTV digital news sites that we ever did from the Herald. We should have cancelled it a few years earlier than we did.
We certainly do not miss all the filler columns and all the advertising bumph that seemed to make up 70 percent of the Herald.
I used to read the Edmonton Journal. When Southam owned it, the Journal was a pretty good paper. Along came the Edmonton Sun, which had good sports coverage and the Sunshine Girl (and Boy, though I didn’t care). Other than those, the Sun was a right-wing rag with idiots writing opinion pieces and little else. Then came the National Post, Conrad Black’s infamous vanity project and far-right corporate mouthpiece. I read the free copy that came with the Journal—and never read it again.
Times and owners changed, and the Sun and Journal slowly coalesced—with an unhealthy injection of National Post DNA to make bad worse. I cancelled my Journal subscription when PostMedia combined the Journal and Sun newsrooms. Now all my news comes via internet, mostly CBC. I still haven’t found a reliable local news outlet in Edmonton. I now doubt that I ever will. (I eventually made a Facebook login, then ignored it for three weeks. Bad move; an automated email notified me my account was permanently cancelled for “inappropriate content.” Apparently I wasn’t generating enough clicks.)
David, you missed the opportunity to post the famous Tom Olsen scab photo.
https://daveberta.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Tom-Olsen-Crossing-Picket-Line-Calgary-Herald-Strike-Calgary-Buffalo-UCP.png
This doesn’t surprise me at all. When you have editors refusing to print any letters that bad mouth their heroes Phoney Conservatives, Reformers. I have tried to get letters printed in some of these papers over the years and other people have also. With the Sun Newspapers are urging these stupid Albertans, mostly seniors , to write sarcastic comments about Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau it isn’t hard to understand why they have been forced to cut about 500 jobs over the last few years. I don’t know anyone who still buys their papers. While the papers have allowed fools like David Staples and Lorne Gunter to help spread the UCP lies is beyond belief. Reading the sarcastic comments editors have added to my letters in the Sun Newspapers anytime I pointed out something these reformers were doing to us was sickening. Catering to these Reformers and deliberately shooting themselves in the foot is just plain stupid.
Alan K. Spiller: In fact, I do remember reading your letters in newspapers for a long time. I don’t see them anymore. You were rightfully criticizing these pseudo conservatives and Reformers for the damage they were doing to Alberta. Now, these letters will never be published. We know who these people at Postmedia are affiliated with, and that’s why.
When any “news” organization owned by Postmedia goes under, it is addition by subtraction. Postmedia does not exist primarily to make a profit, it exists to push the Overton Window farther towards ever more authoritarian brands of capitalism so that the billionaires who get to use Postmedia losses to reduce their tax burden can have an even easier time feeding us a steady stream of outrageous nonsense while pillaging our societies. Even most of today’s “good” reporters spend most of their time dispensing canned propaganda, with very few exceptions, they are “good” because they sincerely believe the brand of canned propaganda they have been hired to dispense. Things have gotten so, so, SO much worse since Manufacturing Consent.
I guess as another early indicator of the fall of newsprint media, I recall being a young lad and perusing an edition of the Edmonton Journal. The paper was, I believe, a Southam property so it was already beginning to show signs of caring more about making a buck than its content. My favourite section of the paper was the Letters to the Editor section. This section intrigued me because I could read the plentiful musings of the insane. Yes, writers of Letters to the Editor are, more often than not, completely batshite crazy, full of venom, and would propbably go on a killing spree, if they had a gun instead of a pen and paper. (These days, a laptop.) Reading the thoughts of the crazies and kook-burgers gave me hours of amusment, until one evening. I was looking for the Letters section and I couldn’t find it. What I did find in the place of the Letters section was a massive full-page ad for Penthouse Magazine. I had to do a double-take as I stared at the teasing cover art of Bob Guccione’s personal contribution to Western Civilization and FreeDUMB and wonder, “WTF?” (It was the Nov edition and sometime in the mid-80s.) I thought that there’s going to be hell to pay for this stunt, and there surely was. In the days that followed, the Letters section was filled with screeds filled with bile, denouncing the Journal. How dare you put that trash in MY newspaper? I read comments that went along the lines of … There’s a special place in Hell for you and thousands of boils for your eternal damnation. The submissions went on for some time until the furor died down. Then, I noticed something interesting: ads began appearing in the Letters section. Ads for local and national businesses began popping up in the section on a regular basis, much to the chagrin of the prolific letter writers. I wondered if the Penthouse stunt was some kind of harbinger of more and more sacrosanct sections of the Journal being taken over by advertising? Sure enough, the abundance of ads grew and grew and crowded out all the usually community features. And it all started with an ad for a ladmag.
Curiously enough, the Journal doesn’t try to hide it anymore …
https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/day-in-history-nov-24-1984-magazines-swastika-ad-sparks-reader-outrage
Post media, Chatham, David Pecker, Conrad Black, hedge funds,….what could possibly go wrong ??? and for a bit more insight—https ://canadiandimension.com>view
“U.S. hedge fund bet on Canadian newspapers may be about to pay….
Just an aside , this took me , a long way down memory lane, to my very first “job” as a paper ‘girl’s, first one in town, and our little weekly paper, that given how busy things were, we got to roll off the press, dry, fold, then go out to deliver. I remember how upset I was when they closed it down, that was my allowance money. It’s sad to see papers become partisan, but it was inevitable given the players above and the pay walls they have put up for their digital platforms, means the loss of more people, how much information can you get from a headline? I agree that we are on a bad track to one news station, fluff and distraction on the rest, NE in overdrive, que the news….or the return of Kory and the sun….
Does the dominant Alberta establishment still have all of the tools necessary to maintain their hereditary Alberta status quo of economic/political power and privilege? In the Alberta polity the basic storyline should be a familiar one, as noted above by the author and host of this blog and below as follows:
“And this story of the Herald strike also features some of the scabs we have mentioned extremely unfavorably, but entirely fairly, on the Alberta Advantage before. These are people like Calgary Flames owner Ken King and Danielle Smith and her various iterations from Wildrose Party leader to talk radio host to platforms white supremacist conspiracy theories, plus Conrad Black, who most Canadians know by name but probably don’t hate as much as you will by the end of this episode.”
“Black wasn’t just interested in increasing profits. He was also very politically conservative, and willing to use his huge platform that he now owned to share his views with Canadians. So papers bought by Hollinger rapidly underwent editorial shifts to align with Black’s politics. Editors who wouldn’t accept having their coverage dictated from the top were replaced by ones who would. Conservative columnists were hired to slant opinion sections more to Black’s liking. And Black even hired his wife, Barbara Amiel, as a columnist.”
https://albertaadvantagepod.com/2020/01/12/the-1999-2000-herald-strike-20-years-later/
Hi David,
When I worked at Alberta Education in the late 80s and early 90s, we received clippings from the Calgary Herald and the Calgary Sun. It often turned out that the Sun had a clearer and more comprehensive explanation of education issues. I wonder if either of these newspapers does justice to education issues any more.
Chris: The beat system still existed at most major metropolitan newspapers in the 80s and the first part of the 90s, so the quality of the Sun’s reporting probably had a lot to do with who was assigned to cover the beat. DJC
A prescient speech by JFK on the importance of the press:
https://youtu.be/qvSD6If3zds
The rot is complete. The Federal government supports “legacy” media with tax breaks, thereby enriching American vulture capitalists. Local news outlets, such as they are, struggle to find viewers, sponsors and content.
I wonder if we’ll ever have any government, federal, provincial or municipal, that won’t suck up to corporate bigwigs at the expense of local interests.
The Postmedia decision to shut down 12 of its Alberta publications leaves me in a state of mourning. Until I read your blog, I hadn’t realized The Airdrie Echo was on the death list. That was my baby. I launched it in 1975, and ran it until selling out to Jack Tennant five years later.
I have to acknowledge it had become a poor product — like The Cochrane Times now facing the same fate — in recent years.
Intellectually, of course, I know nothing is permanent on this Earth. But I do feel a sadness at all these publications sinking slowly into the swamp.
Like you, I was involved in The Herald strike 23 years ago. But, I am sad, too, at its descent into awfulness. It’s hard not to be cynical about the end of the strike when Conrad Black paid us off just to basically disappear (and take up new adventures, as you suggest). His purpose was so he could sell Hollinger to the Aspers from Winnipeg for $2.6 billion.
That was a remarkable heist. Within a few years the media empire was worth little more than chump change. But, Black crawled out of his investment just in time, all the time telling the Aspers and whoever else was listening that the golden age of newspapers lay ahead. What a con by the man who once called journalists “reptilian slime” and who declared Herald strikers were “gangrenous limbs that needed to be amputated.”
Your blog touched on the tax handouts the federal Liberals have given to the American-owned company that operates these Canadian papers. Allowing subscribers to write off their subscriptions costs to papers like The Herald is a further bitter pill to swallow. May it all come crashing down — the sooner the better.
The adage about freedom of the press – “Freedom of the Press Extends Only to Those That Own It.”