gained its dominance when, backed by a US hedge fund, it acquired much of Canwest’s newspaper holdings, which were already saddled with merger debt22 that had pushed that media conglomerate (TV, print, and digital) into bankruptcy. Since acquiring Canwest’s print assets, Postmedia (itself more than $670 million in debt),23 has bled money and staff24 while cashing out its real-estate assets. Canada’s ever-somnambulant Competition Bureau, at least under Stephen Harper’s gimlet-eyed control, saw nothing wrong with the Postmedia/Quebecor transaction,25 blithely concluding there was no real competition between Postmedia’s broadsheets and Sun Media’s tabloids, so, by implication, ownership concentration would do no harm. The bureau also said there was an “incentive for the merged company to retain readership and maintain editorial quality in order to continue to attract advertisers to its newspapers,” that there was healthy competition “from digital alternatives in an evolving media marketplace,” and best of all, there was “existing competition from free local daily newspapers,” which, I believe, are those things that people in coloured bibs thrust at commuters when they’re struggling to work every morning. That’s like saying you really don’t need modern medicine because we’ve still got leeches.
Results that speak volumes
BRAZEN POLITICAL INTERFERENCE? Check. But is ownership concentration the only way to maintain quality and commercial viability in these tough economic times? What would Conrad (not David) Black say? Well, Conrad Black did say this: “Some of [Postmedia’s] newspapers have deteriorated a long way from what I remember. Some of it you can’t avoid. Some of it you can. But please build the quality. Otherwise, you’re going to retreat right into your own end zone, if you’ll pardon the sports metaphor.”26 Or continue your death spiral, if you’ll pardon a metaphor from the insurance industry. By the time December 2015 came around, the Globe and Mail’s business section sported a fetching headline: “Postmedia’s S&P credit rating is now the same as Greece’s.”27 Postmedia had earlier announced plans to cut an estimated $50 million in operating expenses over two years, much of them salaries, but meanwhile had forked out $69 million in interest in its 2015 fiscal year. “A Postmedia spokesperson declined to comment,” and honestly, why would they?
Indeed, why say anything in December when you are planning to announce in January another 90 job losses in the chain by merging newsrooms at multiple city newspapers into one each in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa? “We will continue to operate separate brands in each of these markets,” Godfrey said in a memo to staff on January 19, 2016. “What is changing is how we produce these products.”28 This, in complete contravention of what he originally told the Competition Bureau, with layoffs to match. And still the debt piles up,29 with Postmedia “sitting with its own unique time bomb of financial constraints,” according to the Canadian Press, and “operating under debt obligations that come due over the next few years at astronomical amounts.” Its long-term debt of $25.9 million vaults to $302.7 million in 2 017, according to its annual report filed in November 2015. “If Postmedia is unable to repay those debts, or find a solution to refinance what it owes, the company is almost certain to wind up in bankruptcy,” the CP reported. Second-quarter losses reported in April 2016 totalled $225 million, amid attempts by the company’s largest shareholder to get out altogether.30
In truth, people living in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Ottawa—actually in every media market in the country—have been subjected to such insufferably middlebrow journalism for so long now that it’s tempting to ask who even cares if Postmedia eventually goes under. Well, the prime minister for one, who tweeted after hearing the company’s January announcement that “Journalists are vital to our democracy. . . I’m saddened to hear of the cuts at #postmedia today and my thoughts are with the affected.”31 The affected, of course, being not just journalists but all of us. “Centralized news gathering and opinions, including in local news, do not add to the national debate that helps build a functioning democracy,” said Unifor president Jerry Dias. “With each quieted voice, our democracy suffers.”32 Not so fast, says Kelly Toughill, director of the school of journalism at Nova Scotia’s University of King’s College, who questions how important newspapers are to democracy when there’s so much good content online. “Journalism matters, but the future of newspaper companies should not be confused with the future of journalism,” Toughill writes. “The demise of newspapers breaks my heart—but it won’t break democracy.”33 Chantal Hébert begs to differ, writing in the Toronto Star about La Presse’s almost complete move to digital, save a Saturday print edition, that “the jury is out as to what toll, if any, the shift [to digital] will take on the quality and breadth of [Quebec’s] public conversation.”34
Just think for a moment about what just happened in the preceding passage: informed Canadians debating the importance of newspapers to democracy, a debate waged—democratically—on the editorial pages of newspapers. In a Facebook world, where the most that is demanded of readers is that they “like,” “love,” say “haha” or “wow,” be “sad” or “angry,” and/or share or comment on a story (and keep it under 20 words or folks will scroll down), it is fair enough to be anxious about the quality and breadth of the public conversation, if it can be considered a conversation at all. That’s what’s in danger of going missing in Canada if newspapers become extinct.
And then, days later, on January 25, 2016, this: “The Guelph Mercury, one of the oldest newspapers in the country, is the latest casualty of a wave of austerity that has swept through Canadian newsrooms this winter.”35 The paper, whose publishing history dates back to Canada’s Confederation, published its last print edition four days later. Out on the West Coast, the Nanaimo Daily News went dark the same day.36
“I’m pretty startled by how quickly things have declined,” Dwayne Winseck told the Globe.37 He should know, not only being a Carleton University professor of journalism but a lead researcher for the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project. “Perhaps the most dramatic tale of doom and gloom in the network media economy comes from the experience of newspapers,” Winseck wrote, even before the latest round of cuts and closures. “Newspaper revenues drifted downward slowly between 2 000 and 2008, but have shrunk immensely since from $5.8 billion to $3.7 billion—a plunge of one-third in half a decade.” Of all media in Canada that his study encompasses, newspapers are “the most clear cut case of a medium in decline.”38
The irony here is that concentration and consolidation have always been seen—at least by owners, and by negligent competition watchdogs—as a justifiable sine qua non for media profitability, a bulwark against the vagaries of competition in diminishing markets, a keystone support for keeping the newspaper industry from imploding altogether, taking media diversity down the drain with it. So regulators have tended to approve mega mergers, believing that Canada, with its relatively small, dispersed population, needs to offer corporate media clear pathways to efficiencies so as to retain capacity to do significant journalism—or just survive.39 In return, as part of the bargain, merging media giants promise to develop and subsidize vital, original Canadian content. However, bottom-line pressures inevitably win out. Today’s reality is that concentration and consolidation are simply exacerbating the industry’s lack of profitability (Postmedia being essentially now just a debt-service agency for an offshore hedge fund), driving out what little quality journalism is left, but even more damagingly, serving as a huge barrier to the sort of vibrant, variegated media innovation ecosystem, most of it digital, that has begun to flourish elsewhere. Or as John Stackhouse describes it in his book Mass Disruption, it is a case of an “innovator’s dilemma, the creative deadweight of an old business that not only wouldn’t die but kept showing enough signs of life to prevent anyone from trying to break it.”40
Our so-called “legacy media”—newspapers in particular, but broadcasters, too—are committing a kind of economic and editorial seppuku: they have lost the will to invest in the sort of journalism we used to take for granted,
