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 week, 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 February 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 November 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.
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