SAINTS PRESERVE US
It’s Not Me, It’s You
I’m currently immersed in a door stopping,
wrist-breaking, bedtime belly-busting tome called Rise to Greatness by Conrad Black. The book surveys Canadian
history from the first intermittent Viking settlements proximate to the Grand Banks fishery to the present day. Mr. Black posits
that Canada is a unique place on Earth because we managed to shed our colonial
yoke nonviolently, we have never suffered through a sustained civil war and,
somehow, despite a shared respect for democracy with our neighbours south of
49, we never became one of the many United States of America.
Lord Black of Crossharbour infamously
renounced his Canadian citizenship in order to accept a British peerage. In the
eyes of the intricate American justice system he is a fraudster. While Mr.
Black’s days as a media baron are done, he should be lauded in this country for
his time as head of Hollinger when he transformed the Ottawa Citizen into an authoritative paper of record as befits a
broadsheet in a national capital and his audacious launch of the National Post in 1998 which, by the
simple virtue of competition, forced the rival Globe and Mail to become an even better newspaper. And the man can
write.
Dribs and drabs from Mr. Black’s crumbled empire
now trade publicly as Postmedia, whose CEO is a gentleman named Paul Godfrey.
Mr. Godfrey is a Member of the Order of Canada. He’s also a bit of a
dilettante, having left his mark in Toronto
politics, sports and media. Mr. Godfrey was once president of the Toronto Sun, the mildly hysterical
flagship rag of a murder and sports tabloid chain which pegs the lowest common
denominator of its readership a few inches beneath Toronto’s deepest subway
tunnel. He was instrumental in selling Sun Media to Quebecor (run by Pierre
Karl Peladeau, the would-be dauphin of a sovereign Quebec) at an inflated price; as chief of
Postmedia he bought it back for a song.
Postmedia’s results for its last financial
quarter were spurting blood, not just red ink. Print circulation and
advertising, and digital subscriptions and advertising are on the ground
outlined in chalk. The dilemma for a pair of newspaper titans such as Mr. Black
(still a major investor in Postmedia and a weekly columnist) and Mr. Godfrey is
how to sell the news in this day and age, oh boy. They’re butting loggerheads.
A conference call late last week with business reporters indicated that the men
have parted ways at a fork in the road back to profitability.
Edmonton’s two daily newspapers, the Journal
and the Sun are both owned by
Postmedia. Mr. Godfrey sees obvious, expensive redundancies: two newsrooms, two
printing plants, two digital platforms, two admin departments; all of which
make for one complex org chart. The same concentrated state of affairs exists
in other Canadian markets including Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa.
Mr. Godfrey has arrived at the conclusion that it is no longer practical for
newspapers to compete amongst themselves; scoops are for ice cream and wouldn’t
it be nice if Breyers bought a four-colour double truck. The enemy now is a
tech company like Google and to the victor the spoils of advertising revenue.
The National
Post is an anorexic shadow of itself. It does not publish a print edition
on Mondays during the summer months. The once essential weekend edition is now
a pointless purchase as a goodly portion of its content is reproduced in the Edmonton Journal. Mr. Black’s contrarian
message to Mr. Godfrey was refreshing. Stop slashing costs, stop churning out
generic newspapers, invest instead in quality of content. His views align
somewhat with an existing public awareness campaign called JournalismIS
(JournalismIS.ca). Its message to readers (and scanners) is Sesame Street simple: reliable
information comes from reliable sources. Vested sponsors include Postmedia, the
Globe and Mail, universities with
well-regarded journalism programs and industry-relevant unions and
associations.
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