If the federal government thinks its various subsidies to Canadian newspapers are doing much to uphold democracy, it needs to take a clear-eyed look at Postmedia’s paid circulation numbers.
Never mind the obvious right-wing bias of what is still the largest Canadian newspaper chain, even though it is nowadays mostly owned by a U.S. hedge fund. And don’t worry about the loony right’s hysterical claims the Trudeau government is buying media support with its subsidies, which are not supported by the behaviour of Canada’s remaining daily newspapers.
Instead, just look at how many people actually pay to read the things.
In what started out as a question on a social media site for former Calgary Herald employees, journalist Mario Toneguzzi uncovered some pretty shocking figures about the circulation of Postmedia’s two Calgary daily dailies, the Herald and the Sun.
Toneguzzi, who nowadays runs an independent communications company in Calgary, wanted to know “how many people actually buy printed newspapers these days”?
“Well, finding that key data isn’t very easy anymore,” he wrote in the blog on his website. “It’s also one that newspapers like to keep quiet about (Geez, I wonder why).”
Before we get to Mario’s Big Reveal, when I first worked at the Calgary Herald in the early 1970s, it proudly called itself “the newspaper of record in Southern Alberta” and boasted circulation of, if memory serves, about 144,000 on weekdays.
According to a deep dive in to the history of the Calgary Herald a year ago in The Sprawl, in April 1982, when the Herald moved into its imposing $70-million new building looming over the Deerfoot Trail in southeast Calgary, daily paid circulation was up to 150,000.
Despite the recession hitting Calgary in the early 1980s, the long-term forecast for newspapers in a growing and prosperous city should have been bullish.
But by 2008, Toneguzzi reported, the Herald’s average daily circulation had fallen to 121,800 and the Sun’s was 49,633.
Based on a spreadsheet last published in 2015 by News Media Canada, a mainstream media trade and lobbying organization, he discovered that year the Herald’s average weekday circulation that year had dipped to 62,974 and the Sun’s was 25,403.
So here’s Toneguzzi’s scoop: When he asked News Media Canada for the Herald’s and the Sun’s current paid circulation numbers, on weekdays they were 18,379 for the Herald and 9,908 for the Sun.
Weekend numbers were a little better, but not much: 20,675 for the Herald, 12,469 for the Sunday Sun, and 10,342 for the Saturday Sun.
So, paid circulation at the Herald has declined well over 85 per cent since its halcyon days.
Well, no wonder! Postmedia papers have very little local reporting.
In Calgary, since the sale last year for $17.2 million of the Herald building to U-Haul Canada, which has put the empty pressroom to work as a storage locker, it doesn’t even have a newsroom for the dozen or so reporters it still employs. (In 1998, the last full year I worked for the Herald, there were 146 people on the staff list for the newspaper’s editorial department alone. Most of them were journalists.)
As for Postmedia’s various websites – which seem to mostly publish the same National Post drivel – the number of paid subscribers would appear to be a deep, dark secret.
Maybe the feds know, maybe they don’t. But I’d bet they are few and far between.
For its part, Postmedia reported a 15.8-per cent decline in revenue, “primarily due to decreases in advertising revenue,” in the three months ended on November 30, 2023, which it calls its first quarter.
But not all is gloom and doom. “We welcome and thank the Canadian government for its revisions to the Journalism Tax Credit and positive settlement with Google on the Online News Act,” said Postmedia President and CEO Andrew MacLeod on January 10 in the company’s first-quarter report. “We look forward to working with Federal and Provincial levels of government to implement structural reform in the Canadian media sector so the domestic industry, critical to Canadians, can regain its footing and secure our digital futures.”
I’ll bet!
If Ottawa thinks bailing out these guys is doing anything for democracy, or keeping journalists employed, it needs to demand some hard numbers and do some easy arithmetic.
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