Postmedia reporter Randy Boswell, a member of the Parliamentary bureau, said there’s some consolation in knowing the decision to cut the 25 reporter and editor jobs last week was “strictly a business decision,” but said the news, for an already relatively small bureau, was “pretty devastating.”
“There are a lot of close friendships and [it’s] a pretty collegial place, and to come in one day and hear that almost half of that group is going to be leaving is, like I said, pretty devastating,” said Mr. Boswell. “Pretty tough week for a semi-family.”
Other reporters said privately that the layoffs came as a surprise and that morale in the office was low after Postmedia announced that it would get out of the wire service business.
On May 7, in a memo to staff, Postmedia Network announced the “strategic decision” to end its wire service and “refocus” their operations away from “commodity” or day-to-day news. Parliamentary bureau chief Christina Spencer and Lou Clancy, vice-president editorial and editor-in-chief, who came in from Toronto, held a townhall meeting with Postmedia staff in Ottawa to explain the changes the same afternoon.
The 25 of 58 employees who lost their jobs as a result of the shift were gone “almost immediately, many have already left,” said Postmedia executive VP Gordon Fisher in a May 9 interview with The Hill Times. They will reportedly receive two weeks of severance pay.
At the same time it announced the layoffs, Postmedia announced it had signed a three-year agreement with the Canadian Press to subscribe to their newswire service for their 10 daily newspapers and Canada.com; CP is also the exclusive distributor of Associated Press content in Canada. In the internal memo, Postmedia stressed that the company would continue to produce “original content” that would be exchanged across their network of operations, which includes The National Post, The Ottawa Citizen, and The Vancouver Sun, among others.
As described in the memo to staff, this shift allows the company to focus efforts and resources on their “distinct voices…along with distinctive reporting, commentary and analysis.” Ms. Spencer pointed out that in the last year Postmedia has hired three new political columnists—Michael Den Tandt, Steve Maher and Andrew Coyne—and will continue to produce investigative, analytical, enterprise journalism.
“We’ve been doing a lot of it already, we’ve been breaking a lot of exclusive material—the robocalls story comes to mind as an obvious example—so we’ve been moving in that direction and [using the CP newswire to cover basic, day-to-day news] will give us an opportunity, I think, to focus more deeply,” said Ms. Spencer, adding that Postmedia is not abandoning news. “What we can do here, now, is we can pick and choose the intelligent places for us to be, and the stories that we really want to do. So some of those are the big news stories of the day and some of them won’t be. It’s a little bit like having a safety net.”
In 2007, former media corporation Canwest News ended their subscription to the Canadian Press wire service in order to create their own in-house newswire because they felt they were paying too much. When Postmedia took over the bankrupt Canwest Global Communications in 2010, they maintained this in-house wire service.
Postmedia Network has been struggling with debt since taking over Canwest. Though the company emerged from bankruptcy court protection in July 2010 and restructured, cutting a reported 750 jobs, Postmedia was saddled with almost $700-million in debt.
Since then, Postmedia has been active in paying off their debt which has led to a number of strategic changes. Last November, it sold the majority of its B.C.-based daily newspapers—including the Victoria Times Colonist, Nanaimo Daily News and the Alberni Valley Times—to Glacier Media Inc. which brought in $86.5-million in gross proceeds, the net total of which was put towards debt repayment, according to the company’s 2011 annual financial report.
According to Postmedia Network’s 2012 second quarter results report, published April 12, the company has approximately $516.1-million in outstanding debt. Along with debt, the company has been dealing with decreased advertising and circulation revenue, causing a net loss of $11.1-million in the last quarter.
Ending its wire service is only the latest measure Postmedia News is undertaking to tackle financial pressures and survive in the changing news environment; in April, president and CEO Paul Godfrey announced that Postmedia newspapers The Ottawa Citizen and The Vancouver Sun would be putting up online pay-walls. Similar to recent moves by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times of London. The Globe and Mail also announced last week that it will move to a paywall for its online content.
In addition to these moves, The National Post said it would sell its Toronto headquarters to move to a smaller location. With almost half of Postmedia’s Ottawa office now gone, Mr. Fisher said the company is looking at sub-leasing some of their excess space.
Mr. Fisher noted, however, that Postmedia’s Parliamentary bureau remains in tact and aims to be “a jewel in the [company’s] crown.” Mr. Fisher, president of The National Post, said all Parliamentary writers, all beat writers and all columnists are still at the national bureau and their focus will be shifting from daily, breaking news, to looking at “why things happen as opposed to what happened.” The bureau will also be producing more “exploratory, explanatory, investigative, exclusive kinds of material,” he said.
Mr. Fisher would not comment on how much Postmedia would be saving as a result of their decision to end their newswire, saying only, “there were savings.” Similarly, CP co-president Jim Jennings would not disclose how much their three-year agreement with Postmedia is worth, and said the value of a contract is based on a “wide range of factors,” including the type of medium and size of the operation. The Globe and Mail previously reported that Canwest paid more than $5-million a year for CP’s news services. Under last week’s deal, it’s estimated Postmedia News will pay The Canadian Press $3-million a year, but this figure could not be confirmed.
The decision to resume ties with CP is seen as a cost-cutting measure for Postmedia, and as reported by The Globe and Mail, Mr. Godfrey said CP’s new ownership structure appealed to him.
In 2010, The Canadian Press was struggling financially, burdened with a $34.4-million deficit in its pension plans and trying to cope with the changing media environment, and the industry co-operative needed to find investors to stay afloat. That year, Torstar Corporation, The Globe and Mail and Square Victoria Communications Group formed Canadian Press Enterprises Inc., and bought the Canadian Press to make it a for-profit company.
“This [Postmedia’s agreement with CP] speaks to the understanding that people recognize the value and the quality of what we produce. It is naturally one more facet of the turnaround plan that has been in the works for over a year, and we’re very, very happy to have Postmedia back as a client,” said Mr. Jennings in an interview with The Hill Times.
Mr. Godfrey told The Globe and Mail he’s “not sure there’s a need for competition” in the newswire service area, saying it’s costly to run and “Canada is only so big a country.”
Mr. Fisher said the company is making “every effort” to find other opportunities in the company for the 25 people who lost their jobs.
“We do have some opportunities that will become clearer in the weeks and months ahead, and there have already been conversations with some of them about these opportunities,” said Mr. Fisher.
“It’s a change that we’re making because consumer habits are changing. We had many goals in mind when we created this wire service operation. … We were going to compete with Canadian Press. [But] the reality is that the value of commodity news today is just not there, and we’re not the only news organization in the country that is relying less and less on commodity news and looking more and more to the kind of explanatory and investigative news—because that’s what makes you special,” said Mr. Fisher.
While Carleton University journalism professor Chris Dornan said Postmedia’s decision to end their newswire service and instead use CP’s makes perfect business sense, he said it means there are less people covering national affairs.
“It’s not that it’s necessarily bad, it is simply unfortunate that we’re seeing yet another contraction, yet another constriction of the source and variety of journalistic coverage of national affairs,” said Prof. Dornan, who said competition in any endeavour is a good thing and noted that, “this is a dance that’s been going on between The Canadian Press and the companies it serves for going on almost 50 years.”
Carleton University journalism professor Christopher Waddell said everyone in the media industry is trying to figure out what sort of content they should be producing for today’s readers, which he said leads to questioning how best to use available resources.
“Obviously the more you can produce something that’s distinct and different, the more likely it is you’re going to be able to charge people, people will be willing to pay to get access to it online,” said Prof. Waddell, who said the question now is “can they live up to that challenge and can they actually do it?”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Laura Ryckewaert
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