Postmedia's newsroom consolidation gets plenty of attention
The combining of newsrooms in four Canadian cities by
Postmedia Network has prompted a tremendous amount of media coverage today.
Multiple media outlets on all platforms have devoted a lot
of time and energy to the announcement that newsrooms in Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary
and Vancouver would be combined. As part of this restructuring, each city will
have one editor overseeing the combined newsrooms, even though there will continue to be
two newspaper titles in each city. A total of 90 people are losing their jobs,
and buyouts will also be offered in Ottawa and Vancouver. As many as 50 more journalists may be without jobs after that is complete.
It’s interesting how much attention this has received, but
not surprising. The media love to report on the media. Meanwhile, 430 people
who work at a potash mine in New Brunswick, where finding new jobs is much
harder than in a large city, also lost their jobs today. Potash Corporation of
Saskatchewan announced it would be closing the mine. This follows its closing
of another nearby mine in November, with the loss of another 140 jobs.
The Potash Corp. announcement, which means almost five times
as many people lose their jobs, probably got about one-tenth of the media
coverage as the Postmedia announcement.
One of the biggest impacts of the job cuts that
readers will notice will be in the sports sections of the eight Postmedia
newspapers. My son Andrew Bucholtz, who blogs for the U.S. sports media blog Awful
Announcing, had an excellent post detailing what that means today.
As a once-weekly subscriber to The Province who gets the
newspaper each Sunday particularly for the sports coverage, I will be watching
that very closely.
I also wonder what will happen to the Victoria columnists.
Vaughn Palmer has covered the provincial scene for The Sun since Bill Bennett
was premier, while Mike Smyth does so for The Province. Will one of them lose a
job, and will the two papers be running columns by the same person?
Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey said that one reporter will likely
cover stories for both titles, with the copy then rewritten by copy editors to
tailor it to the specific audience of each newspaper. That seems like an odd way
to cover news. Why not just use the same story in both papers and cut out the
rewriting? There isn’t much of an overlap in each print publication’s audience.
As for columns, rewrites to tailor them to specific audiences
seems to be an impossibility – unless they are done by the columnist.
In Vancouver, both The Sun and The Province have cut their
newsroom staffs substantially in the past decade. The paid circulation for both
has also fallen dramatically. The photography staff of the two papers was combined
some time ago, and the quality of photos has not diminished at all.
In Vancouver, unlike the other three cities, Postmedia also
publishes 24 Hours. Thus far, it still has a separate (and very tiny) newsroom,
but it is possible it could be combined with the other two. However, it is
non-union, so that may be why it remains untouched thus far.
I wish all those affected by this nothing but the best, but I also predict that many of them will go into other fields, given the ever-diminishing number of media jobs.
The print newspaper business is in significant decline, and
Postmedia’s revenues are falling each quarter. Just recently, an analyst stated
that its stock had essentially no value. Its digital strategy hasn’t paid off
thus far, and its debt load of more than $670 million is huge. It has sold off
real estate, closed printing plants and chopped in virtually every department.
One wonders just how much cost cutting the company can still endure.
You can only throw your furniture on the fire for so long. Eventually,
the house is stripped to the walls and there isn’t any fuel left.
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