How the West is run

CanWest may be Canada’s largest media corporation, but in the face of online uncertainty, the company’s commitment to journalism is ‘dubious’

Matthew Brett, The Link (Concordia University)

MONTREAL (CUP) — It didn’t take long for the Montreal Gazette’s internal document to leak. The one-page notice read something like this: we’ll offer you a healthy buyout package. Take it, or we’ll lay you off.

A former Gazette journalist forwarded the document, noting the “gloomy times at the Gazette — talk about Scrooge-like coldness to their approach! Damn these corporations!”

And corporate it is.

CanWest MediaWorks owns 13 dailies, including the Gazette, with a total readership of 8,898,120. But that’s just the tip of the Asper iceberg: CanWest also controls 11 television stations in eight provinces, reaching 94 per cent of English-speaking Canadians, a concern in its own right.

But when CanWest owner David Asper took the stage alongside Stephen Harper during the 2006 federal election campaign to endorse Harper’s candidacy, the elusive notion of objective media smashed through the window.

But the corporate conservatism of CanWest is coming back to haunt them as Asper’s corporation faces a debt of $3.8 billion and the lowest share price in four years. And when a corporate news organization like CanWest is in the red, rest assured it’s news content that gets hit first. Hit they got, and hard — which brings us back to the Gazette.

“The newsroom at the Gazette has been protected for a number of years by different publishers on purpose,” Gazette editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips said from the paper’s downtown office, an ornate grey stone building with polished gold doorways. “The newsroom has been largely protected. Finally, we couldn’t really continue to do that.”

The Gazette’s 2006-07 fiscal year saw advertising revenues plummet by roughly $6 million compared to the previous year’s revenues. “It’s a significant decrease,” Phillips said. Then there’s the crumbling readership.

“The fragmentation of markets means that our audiences have either been stagnant or declining,” said Phillips. The Gazette’s weekday readership was 338,200 in 2001. But like the newspaper’s advertising revenue, readership has also plummeted to a weekday average of 290,200 as of last year.

“That’s a hell of a hit,” David Klimek, Gazette researcher, said. “We’ve lost 50,000 readers on an average weekday.”

With slumping advertising revenue and readership, surely the logical thing would be to increase the readership by improving the content. Improving the content, in theory, would increase the readership — added incentive for advertisers to boost the Gazette’s revenue by buying a space in the paper (a full-colour banner ad on a Saturday costs $5,586.)

But, instead of improving the content, CanWest is giving 200 news staff members across the country the boot. The union is up in arms and the Gazette is buying out its journalists and filling their pages with copy-and-paste content off the CanWest news service wire.

“A lot of news organizations are figuring out that you can put out a newspaper with very few people — not a good newspaper,” said Mike Gasher, Concordia University journalism department director, from his office.

“You’ve got to have the people . . . that’s my concern with what CanWest is doing. They seem to be going in the opposite direction.”

Less people doing more work is the new CanWest way.

“There’s definitely talk around the office,” Gazette journalist Jason Madger said, who started at the paper in April after a stint at the Suburban. “There’s cost cutting going on, basically around the chain.”

In another internally leaked document, Patricia Graham, Vancouver Sun editor-in-chief, sent an e-mail to the paper’s newsroom, dated Nov. 20.

“There are two parts to this note: first, some elaboration on the nature of the changes ahead for the newsroom and second, information on some opportunities for those of you who wish to get involved in both the short and longer terms,” the document read. “Given the necessity of producing a high-volume, constantly changing website 24/7, it is clear as well that shifts are going to change for a significant number of people.”

This trend is taking hold across the CanWest board as newspapers across Canada try to cope with the tectonic shift from print-based content to online material. A number of working committees have been set up at the Vancouver Sun to figure out just how to get a hold on the world’s most competitive market: the Internet.

“Once you put up a website, you’re competing with everybody else who’s on the Internet,” Gasher said. “Newspapers are trying to figure out how to be part of it.”One such initiative taken by CanWest is “hyperlocalism,” and it’s happening at the Vancouver Sun and at the Gazette. A “content” committee set up at the Sun was given the objective to “make recommendations on what we should be covering to excel in hyperlocal content.”

By competing and failing against a global online news market, hyperlocalism becomes the most assured way of maintaining a solid readership in CanWest’s eyes.

“What the Gazette can do better than any organization online is local coverage,” Gasher said. But just as the world adapts to an increasingly globalized community, CanWest wants to start looking inward.

“I find that localism business is a bit of a problem,” Gasher said. “You live in a globalized world. You need more than a local angle. You need a global angle.”

As the Gazette buyouts work their CanWest cost-cutting magic, the Gazette’s editor is optimistic about the future.

“It’s part of a bigger process of reshaping the newsroom to adapt to the new information age, if you like,” Phillips said. He sees “the web as much at the centre of what we do as the newspaper. It’s a big change. It’s a big cultural change for all of us.”

With the shift from print to online content, hyperlocalism is CanWest’s first line of defence against the Google.com generation’s intimate love affair with the World Wide Web, but it’s not the only one.

“They call it ‘Linkalism’ — journalism through linking,” said Gasher, welcoming readers to a term for what Internet surfers do on a daily basis by the millions. “You can flit from place to place and sort of make up your own newspaper as you go along . . . following the story rather than the newspaper’s coverage of it.”

Reading an article about an innocent man taser-gunned to death by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in British Columbia may take you to the homepage of anti-taser activists, which will then take you to a taser company’s website to write an angry letter to the owner.

Linkalism means less time on any one website, and newspapers the world over are struggling to retain their readers.

“The whole Internet question is huge,” Gasher said. “I don’t think we’ve even come to terms with mobile technology yet.”

But as CanWest remodels itself to find a place within the seismographic shift to online journalism, the news content, and the journalists who write it, seem to be those hit first and hardest.

Orson Welles’ quote in Citizen Kane could very well sum up the new approach to media: “I don’t know how to run a newspaper, Mr. Thatcher. I just try everything I can think of.”