Postmedia Is Wrecking Canadian Journalism 

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I’m not sure if journalists outside of Canada realize how totally fucked the news media industry is up here, so I’d like to share a little bit about the giant media company one journalist once called “a cancer on Canadian journalism.”

In June, the Montreal Gazette, the oldest continuously-published newspaper in Canada and the daily broadsheet for the country’s second-largest population center, announced a new round of layoffs. The cuts were hard to fathom; the Gazette had already endured three decades of downsizing, and after the latest trims, independent journalist Christopher Curtis reported that the newsroom was down from seven senior editors to just one. “We’ve been cut to the bone, and now we’re actually getting into the bone marrow,” the paper’s union president Ron Carroll said earlier this year.

Some Canadian journalists were legitimately puzzled as to how the paper was still being produced. One quipped on Twitter that the Gazette was one bad cold away from being unable to go to print. How did the once-legendary institution get here?

Since 2010, the Gazette has been owned by Postmedia Network Canada Corp., an enormous media conglomerate formed 13 years ago to buy up the media assets being sold by Canwest, another now-defunct conglomerate. Postmedia is the parent company of National Post, a conservative national daily broadsheet that in just 25 years of existence has grown to become one of Canada’s top three most widely-read newspapers. Since Postmedia’s genesis, the majority American-owned company has aggressively bought and swapped its way into owning more than 70 Canadian publications, including the daily papers of record in six of Canada’s seven most populous cities. (The only exclusion is Toronto’s Toronto Star.)

 

The Montreal Gazette’s newsroom is one of dozens that Postmedia has hollowed out across the country. In 2017, Postmedia and rival Torstar Corp. swapped 41 community papers then shuttered many of them, cutting 291 journalism jobs in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. (The two companies briefly held merger talks in June.) The next year, Postmedia closed six more local papers, and cut print schedules for others. The New York Times reported that since American hedge fund Chatham Asset Management had taken 66 percent ownership of Postmedia, the company had cut 1600 workers and closed more than 30 papers, and the slashing just hasn’t stopped. Months before the blood-letting at the Gazette, Postmedia moved 12 community papers in Alberta to online-only, sold the Calgary Herald’s building to U-Haul, and laid off an “unspecified number” of media workers.

Jonathan Goldsbie, news editor of CANADALAND and indefatigable Postmedia watchdog, says he often hears the conglomerate described as a “zombie,” eating its way through the Canadian mediascape to pay down debt. 

Journalists have been sounding the alarm on Postmedia’s operations since the company was created, with initial concerns centering around how both national and regional news ecosystems were being damaged by Postmedia’s business practices. But for the past five years, it’s not just Postmedia’s cuts damaging Canadian media. It’s their content. 

National Post was always intended to be a conservative paper. Arshy Mann, a journalist and host of the Commons podcast, says that when National Post came on the scene in 1998, it was in some ways a positive development, since the resulting “newspaper wars” between the Post and its competitors resulted in the hiring of dozens of skilled journalists.

But since at least 2018, Postmedia president and CEO Andrew MacLeod has explicitly pushed all of the company’s papers further and further to the right—this despite an already well-established corporate culture of editorial overreach and insistence that their papers endorse right-wing candidates. (Both of these traits previously led to resignations from the Ottawa Citizen and National Post.) The Post’s executive editor, Kevin Libin, who was a founding editor of the Canadian far-right outlet Western Standard, played an active role in shutting down a 2018 unionization campaign at National Post, and in 2019 was promoted to managing political coverage and analysis across all Postmedia outlets.

As the political right has ventured further afield into conspiracism, culture war dog whistles, and reactionary rhetoric, Postmedia has followed, mutating into a Fox News of the north. Their Comment page, which is their dressed-up op-ed section, often looks like a far-right Facebook feed: depending on the day, columns rail against socialism, schools, progressive Israelis, climate action, trans people, and Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau. Some of these opinion pieces run in Postmedia’s papers with no byline, like this one from March, which appeared in my hometown paper, the Kingston Whig-Standard, and propped up Indigenous people in service of oil and gas development.

But Postmedia has also started to blur its click-mongering content with reportage. In May, the Post published a lightly reported, ridiculously long op-ed against safe supply programs in Canada by columnist Adam Zivo, who had previously written about drugs and related health programs just once (in another anti-safe supply column). Nonetheless, Zivo and the Post billed the piece as a “lengthy investigation,” despite its reliance on anecdata and anonymous sources, and its ignorance of generally-accepted healthcare consensus on the topic. These pieces are promoted, recapped, or regurgitated across Postmedia’s other media, like the Sun chain of right-wing tabloid papers, but they’re also recirculated by the online far-right infosphere.

Goldsbie describes this as “the National Post-ification” of daily news across the country. In place of local, contextual news, Postmedia properties are bloated with op-eds and columns that are often branded as hard-hitting investigations and given “the appearance of prestige or rigor.” This approach is cheaper, and draws traffic while clogging up discourse.

Postmedia’s pieces frequently trend on social media and draw thousands of comments—especially ones that attack drag queens, drug users, and “wokeism.” In the course of reporting a story this year on safe supply in small-town Canada, I heard from a source that in the wake of the Post’s lengthy opinion piece railing against harm reduction, locals had taken a harsher tack against harm reduction programs and those who access them.

David Olive, the Toronto Star business writer who in 2016 called Postmedia “a cancer,” predicted that the company wouldn’t be around long given its lack of profitability. But like other profit-driven media operations, it keeps skirting death with brutal cuts, cheap content models, and ad-friendly culture war clickbait. (Still, financial reports show the company on its deathbed.)

Postmedia’s operations are a stunning example of the industry’s stupid, greedy death spiral. Last year, for the first time, polls indicated that more Americans distrust news media than trust it, and a similar downward trend has unfolded in Canada since 2016. Journalism jobs are predicted to continue disappearing, and the ones that do exist pay poorly. Poor, rural communities are the ones hit hardest by these shifts. 

All of this hacking and burning by hedge fund-owned media has left our industry’s workers scrambling to figure out how to do the thing they love while keeping a roof over their heads and appeasing an ownership class hellbent on generating profit. Journalists now have to contend with an increasingly distrusting and divided readership, and a polluted information ecosystem galvanized by far-right news and social media operations. Most of these outlets offer their content for free, which broadens its reach. It seems impossible for well-meaning journalists to continue to do their work while being compensated fairly. I don’t believe that’s going to change any time soon, but maybe in the next decade or so, we’ll be having conversations about the future of the industry in a world where Postmedia, finally out of money, will be dead. That might not be a total win, but it will feel like one, and when the dust settles, I’m certain that journalism will be better for it.

 

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Comings and Goings

—Anya Grundmann, NPR’s podcasting and programming chief, is set to leave the network at the end of the year.
—Aaron L. Morrison is now race and ethnicity news editor at The Associated Press.
—Shannon Palus has been promoted to Features Editor at Slate.
—Shadi Hamid is joining The Washington Post as a columnist for the Opinions section.
—Jada Yuan is now a national culture writer for The Washington Post.
—Mandy Velez Tatti is no longer managing editor at The Daily Beast. In September, she’ll be starting a new role as associate director of audience development and analytics for Teen Vogue and Them. 

 

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Everything Else

—More turmoil at G/O: Jezebel editor-in-chief Laura Bassett quit. She’s now the seventh G/O EIC to leave in the past eight months. In an internal memo obtained by The Daily Beast, Bassett cited having a myriad of issues with G/O management such as them not letting her give her writers raises, fill positions, and promote team members.  The Daily Beast piece alleges that staffers describe CEO Jim Spanfeller as “unhinged and impossible to work for.” In a statement on the recent departures, the GMG Union blamed Spanfeller for focussing on “misguided initiatives” such as “AI-generated articles and an ill-conceived writer ‘scorecard’ that promotes quantity over quality.”
—Last Wednesday, The Texas Tribune laid off 11 journalists — its first round of layoffs in its 14 year history. CEO Sonal Shah told staff that the layoffs were due to an “unsteady economy” in an email. The nonprofit news organization laid off its entire copy desk and its criminal justice reporters. According to one of the now-former criminal justice reporters, The Texas Tribune will stop covering the beat.
—According to NBC News, in the midst of an ongoing Hollywood shutdown, entertainment companies are listing jobs “related to AI.” Yikes!  Also, the studios approached the WGA with an offer that they deemed “not yet good enough.” Read our previous coverage on the ongoing strike.
—VICE is leaving its Williamsburg headquarters.
—Futuro Media, a nonprofit media organization that produces “Latino USA”, announced that it is undergoing layoffs as part of an effort to “scale down” the organization. Editorial Director Fernanda Santos posted on X that she offered her resignation “in hopes of saving jobs.” “Too many people were laid off and I couldn’t in good conscience stay while seeing them gone. I stand in solidarity with them and remain committed to helping them on the road ahead,” she wrote. She elaborated on her experience at Futuro on her Substack.
—Autostraddle has been acquired by For Them, a queer wellness company that makes products like a “chic binder for transmascs” and a gender tracking app which offers users to chronicle their “real time gender evolution using daily mood and identity check-ins.”