If you work in the newspaper business, it feels like you’re in a convoy of ships, sailing from Halifax to England in 1941, while wolfpacks of German U-boats pick off ships around you. Boom! Another explosion, and another one goes down.
In the past few weeks, that’s exactly what’s been happening in the Saskatchewan newspaper space. Boom! Down goes the Moose Jaw Times-Herald! Boom! That was the Oxbow-Carnduff Herald-Gazette! Kablooey!
Star News Publishing, owner of these papers, told the CBC on Dec. 10 that it plans to close or sell every paper it owns in the province. In 2016, it bought 13 from Transcontinental.
A few months ago, the Gull Lake Advance, an independent paper in which this column appeared, went down as well.
On Nov. 27, over in a distant ocean (Ontario), another two convoys are being pummeled. PostMedia and Toronto Star announced a swap of a total of 41 titles, and then promptly closed nearly all of them. Doing so effectively eliminated the competition in many communities.
A scribe can get pretty skittish these days, wondering where the next torpedo is coming from.
Notice how I referred to a CBC story? The CBC’s presence in the media space is especially galling for many in the newspaper business. As newspapers have been forced into the digital media space, CBC, too has moved into the same space. Whereas they used to be strictly broadcast, now they are doing online text, the 21st century version of print, and they are doing it with an enormous taxpayer-paid subsidy.
To further fan the flames, have you noticed the lack of government advertising in print media these days, especially from the feds? You’ll see plenty of federal advertising dollars spent on digital, but next to none with newspapers.
This has been a personal bugbear for me. In the 9.5 years I’ve been writing Pipeline News, I think I can count about three ads, and small ones at that, from the provincial government. I don’t recall even one from the feds. Pipeline News, I like to say, is the only publication that really focuses on the Saskatchewan oilpatch. I’ve been on the ground, and on the ground specifically in Saskatchewan, doing this, for all those years. Up until 2015, we had a reporter in Lloydminster doing the same. If there was anyone else doing the same, we would have run into them. There isn’t, and hasn’t been.
Yet the Ministry of Economy buys full page ads in a Winnipeg-based outfit that publishes the Saskatchewan Oil Report, an annual, magazine format. Its 2017 editions had three full pages from the Ministry of Economy, Worker’s Compensation Board and SaskTel, and they get similar support every year.
That’s kinda tough to take. I’ve squawked about it to pretty much every senior official and politician in the ministry, and no change. They are obviously spending money. Just not with the publications that are in the communities, telling the local stories.
And that’s important. We’re here, not generating infotainment in the internet. You see us in the grocery stores and on the street. We’re accountable, and truthful.
So who does get these government advertising dollars? Facebook and Google are big winners. The newspapers who are on the ground, in communities throughout the land, not so much.
The broader issue is whether or not print media, and its related digital operations, can be profitable. I’m told by someone much smarter than me it is possible to make money in print, with good management. So I’m hopeful.
The difficult thing is figuring out how to make money in the transition to digital, and to make enough to sustain the operations that still exist. Newsrooms and the support staff that allow us to run around and report on stories have been pared to the absolute bone.
I would guess there had to be at least 100,000 people working in the North American newspaper business. Yet with all those highly intelligent people trying to figure out this digital thing, only a few – the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post, seem to be making an obvious success in the transition.
It used to be you would set up a press, put together a news team that makes the paper worth reading, and sell ads, subscriptions and newsstand copies that paid for all the above. It worked pretty much everywhere, quite literally for centuries. Those publications have now tried everything digital, from banner ads to hard paywalls to paywalls that allow a few stories to be read a month. There is no obvious answer for a business case that can be broadly applied. Everyone’s trying, and trying hard. But that answer is more elusive than the Nixon tapes.
The merchant mariners didn’t give up in 1941, and we aren’t either. We will find a way to see this through.
