Postmedia, Canada’s largest newspaper publisher, has taken ownership of major parts of SaltWire Network, the largest newspaper group in the Atlantic Canada region.
SaltWire publishes newspapers in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador, including the Halifax Chronicle Herald, the Cape Breton Post and the St. John’s Telegram.
Earlier this month, a judge of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court approved Postmedia’s $1-million offer to buy some of SaltWire’s assets.
No one is saying yet how much of the SaltWire Network will survive.
In a later update CBC reports:
Toronto-based Postmedia, whose titles include the National Post and the Montreal Gazette, has taken over the financially insolvent SaltWire Network, Halifax-based owner of daily and weekly newspapers across Atlantic Canada.
The $1-million deal, completed Monday, may have saved SaltWire’s newsrooms in Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and Newfoundland and Labrador.
However, the acquisition will impact the former SaltWire newspapers through layoffs, the sale of offices and printing facilities and the reduction of print editions of at least one community’s long-running newspaper.
And Postmedia, which has been majority owned by U.S. hedge fund Chatham Asset Management since 2016, isn’t known for investing in the future of its local newspapers, according to people familiar with the company’s history with them.
“Its M.O. has been to slash and burn as much as possible to generate cash out of its property,” said April Lindgren, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s (TMU) School of Journalism.
The 145-year-old Telegram in St. John’s published its final daily edition on Friday.
Under Postmedia, it will exist online and in a weekly edition that will be printed out of province.
The Telegram will also have 30 per cent fewer reporters, after four of the newsroom’s 13 journalists were laid off.
St. John’s is now one of two provincial capitals without a daily newspaper, along with Fredericton, whose Daily Gleaner is delivered just three days a week — much thinner than it once was.
In 2022, Postmedia bought the Gleaner’s parent company Brunswick News, formerly owned by New Brunswick’s wealthy Irving family, acquiring its nine English-language newspapers.
Global News-Canada reports that layoffs are inevitable:
Layoffs at Atlantic Canada’s largest newspaper chain are necessary because the properties were facing bankruptcy, according to the CEO of Postmedia Network Inc., who says his company’s purchase of the troubled assets prevented a “terrible tragedy and travesty” for the region.
Award winning Bruce MacKinnon is the cartoonist for The Chronicle Herald and the SaltWire Network,
as is award winning cartoonist Michael de Adder, who contributes to a number of other Canadian newspapers.
Postmedia’s majority owner, New Jersey-based Chatham Asset Management, is also the majority owner of the McClatchy newspaper group who last year fired their three editorial cartoonists and announced they would no longer publish editorial cartoons. That action hasn’t as yet emigrated north of the border where Postmedia continues to buy and publish political cartoons.
Post Script:
Post is the latest in a long list of corporate media companies to own The Guardian and Journal-Pioneer: Transcontinental, Canwest, Hollinger, Southam and Thompson have all laid claim. It’s been 71 years since an Islander owned The Guardian, 52 years for the Journal.
Some owners were better than others, but all counted on PEI to churn corporate profit, an endless cycle of increased expectation that ultimately led to reductions in customer service, centralization, decreased local content and support for local communities.
I’ll let you in on a secret. Our little Island company, Island Press, tried to buy the Charlottetown daily and Summerside weekly. A small team of interested Islanders submitted a viable proposal. We believed it was time for Islanders to control the destiny of these iconic Island titles and to put Island stories and opinions at the heart of everything published.
Our bid was ultimately rejected by the corporation overseeing Saltwire’s creditor protection process.
Press Island Limited tried unsuccessfully to buy a couple of SaltWire’s Prince Edward Island small outlets. Publisher Paul MacNeill tells of the effort and editorializes on why local journalism is important.
feature image from The Halifax Examiner story
The Halifax Chronicle-Herald has been limping along for years, gossamer thin and very little worth reading in it. Many of the reporters write like high school dropouts and their only editor was MS-Word spellcheck, if they remembered to run it. The bright spots, the editorial cartoons, were usually treated like garbage, often printed postage stamp size. I used to get a rueful laugh when I would see the same news stories and features re-run days or weeks apart because they evidently didn’t even know what they had and hadn’t run.
I finally dropped my home subscription when they told me the best they could now do was deliver a stack of them a few miles away, and I could go pick mine up.
SaltWire also owned many local weeklies, all of them managed on a shoestring budget and with no way to buy subscriptions. My wife and I were featured on the front page one week (no, we didn’t kill anybody), and we had a heck of a time finding a few copies for souvenirs.
Saltwire has had no luck in making the transition to electronic media either. My subscriber login to the website stopped working so often that I finally gave up calling to get them to fix my account. Since their online content was no better than that in the paper edition, I figured there was little point.
Politicians in the maritime provinces are loving SaltWire’s long slow demise. They get away with murder now and there’s no one to hold them accountable. All we have left for news is the CBC, and since they are funded by the government they see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
Is Postmedia going to be debiting my account for the monthly fee that I paid the telegram.I have not seen or heard anything from Postmedia explaining this to the Telegram clients.You spoke of Daily digital services but where is it? Do I need to add on another App for this service?All this should have been explained to the clients of Saltwire.