Could “Journal Wednesday” turn into a digital download instead of a trip to the mail box?
That’s the future envisioned by Nick Fillmore, a former CBC and Globe and Mail journalist who, over the past several weeks at online alternative news outlet www.rabble.ca, has been pondering the state of Canadian newspapers.
Early in the series of essays, Fillmore had no trouble enumerating what he sees as decades of failure — by corporate-controlled newspaper chains — to live up to the public’s expectations. In subsequent articles, by contrast, he encounters a great deal more difficulty proposing a solution to the fact that, in recent years, profits have fallen off considerably, leading to such trends as layoffs in editorial and production, increased reliance on “canned” articles designed for broad use across ownership chains (thereby cutting back on local relevance), and contracting out of some roles to lower-paying employers.
“They’re firing highly skilled production workers and editors,” Fillmore wrote of CanWest Global — owner of the National Post and several city —centred dailies — and Ontario-dominant Torstar Inc.
Fillmore is concerned about the survival of newspapers. “They’re the source of most of our news, even the news that’s available from dozens of Internet sites,” he writes. And he believes a future way to “provide communities with a manageable, inexpensive, small newspaper” will be to send it out electronically to subscribers.
“Individual pages would be brought together in an attachment and e-mailed,” he suggests. “Subscribers would open the attachment and then print out their newspaper, affix a simple binding they would be provided with and read it at their convenience.”
Instead of citing the Internet as a reason for newspapers’ decline, Fillmore suggests the trend “began almost 60 years ago . . . During the 1950s the number of newspaper subscriptions exceeded the number of Canadian households. Last year, the equivalent of only 35 per cent of households had paid subscriptions.”
“Traditional daily newspapers are extremely expensive to operate,” he adds in a subsequent essay. “The technology is stuck in another era. Newsprint has become very expensive, and the companies need to be able not only to maintain a huge printing plant and staff, but also cover the cost of distributing tens of thousands of copies of a paper by trucks and delivery staff. They have to cover the high salaries paid to executives and sales staff. On top of all this, investors expect profits of 20 per cent-plus.”
Fillmore’s ponderings come, interestingly, just as the Winnipeg-based CanWest corporate empire proceeds through a series of bankruptcies and asset-by-asset sell-offs. Through late 2009, a number of bids were rejected for the daily newspaper chain that was purchased from the infamous Conrad Black in 2000. Then last week, the Calgary-based Shaw cable conglomerate purchased CanWest’s broadcasting assets, at least ensuring that the national Global television network will live on in the short term.
I’ve been reading a five year-old book entitled Ego and Ink, which chronicles the lavish spending — on high-profile journalists, free-distribution promotions, and glitzy production tactics — that accompanied Black’s late 1990s launch of the National Post.
At the time, it was impossible to ignore the mini-Golden Age the newspaper’s launch created in Canadian journalism. But looking now at the plight of Canadian dailies, it’s equally impossible to ignore the feeling that the resulting advertising war — which also included the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star, among others — ensured that outrageous amounts of money were thrown around, just as the Internet was finding its footing as a legitimate information source.
And that’s why, notwithstanding Fillmore’s assertions about a pre-Internet decline, it seems clear Canada’s major newspaper chains — many of which also own dozens of weekly newspapers, including the Torstar-owned Journal Argus — were unprepared for the Internet’s advance, in terms of a competitive strategy and a means to finance that strategy. From 1999 on, they seem to have been scrambling:  to sell off assets (like Black, then CanWest); to cut costs (like Torstar, London Free Press owner Quebecor, and the Bell Canada/CTV-linked Globe and Mail); and scrambling to put in place some kind of revenue-generating, online service that could counter the Internet tide.
Here at the Journal Argus, we like to think we’re essential to the community; that no free, web-based alternative can provide what we provide. And, in general, weekly community newspapers have fared better than dailies — to the extent that the weekly-dominated Metroland division was seen as a driver of Torstar’s profits for several years.
Still, over the years, we’ve experienced our own corporate-driven cost-cutting: decreased paper size; sharing of resources with nearby weeklies; increased demands on staff. The recession has certainly done weeklies no favours.
But printing your Journal Argus using your home  printer? It wouldn’t be the same.  We’d certainly miss the Wednesday morning visits from our readers, who opt to pick up their copy at the office, hot off our presses instead of their own.