Catching Up on MediaPolicy.ca – I am CanCon – wanted, a C-18 strategy – another media merger – moving the newsroom to the right – Indigo’s troubles

Wade Oosterman and Lisa LaFlamme are centre, Michael Melling is on the far right. (Toronto Star Graphic).

July 2, 2023

Hello Canada Day weekend.

Our recommended read of the week is Kate Taylor’s reflection on why she believes in Canadian culture. There’s no flag waiving involved. I would say that she has read my mind on the topic but maybe that’s just an indication of how deeply her insights resonate.

That’s the good stuff. I’m afraid all of the news that follows is bad.

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It’s a measure of the media’s self-centred nature that nothing is more newsworthy to the newsmedia than breaking news about the newsmedia.

The turmoil of the last two weeks may justify that solipsism, what with the Bell Media layoffs, the television companies’ requests for deregulation, the announcement of Postmedia-Nordstar merger talks, and the dictats of US Big Tech.

My Twitter feed is running a firehose of comments on Google and Facebook’s point-of-no-return declarations that they will blackout Canadian news if Bill C-18 is proclaimed in force. As a consequence, the “I told you so” Twitter cadre is outdoing the “resist Big Tech intimidation” tweets by about ten to one.

In case you had any doubt, the MediaPolicy.ca view is that if we are going to defend our legislative sovereignty against Big Tech’s boycott tactics we should have a plan.

Another thing you can read on the C-18 crisis, foregoing the Twitter duel, is Hugh Stephens’ latest.

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Just when you thought bad news about Canadian media was due for a natural pause, don’t Postmedia and Nordstar announce talks about the long rumoured merger of our biggest newspaper chains. The Globe coverage is thorough and the Postmedia press release has the broad outlines of a potential deal.

Everyone in those two organizations is holding their breath. Here are some of the key details to watch for, if and when they emerge:

• editorial control, especially of the National Post and Toronto Star. We’re told there will be a moat around the Star, in a separate company controlled by Nordstar’s Jordan Bitove. What about the other Nordstar papers like the Hamilton Spectator: are they going to be pivoting right? Just out of curiosity, what will a new company do about election endorsements?

• on that point about control, the Postmedia press release said the two companies would share power, 50/50. Given that Mr. Bitove’s last 50/50 venture with Paul Rivett ended in commercial divorce, what’s the tie breaker going to be this time?

• whether ‘synergies’ will be cutting jobs or actually combining the best with the best. The Post and Star Parliamentary bureaus are stellar. Both papers have good business writers, just not enough of them. There are excellent investigative journalists on either side that could work together on big projects.

• what do Postmedia and Star spokespersons mean when they speak of ‘scale, efficiency and reach?’ We know what efficiency means. But do scale and reach mean anything truly significant for advertisers, digital subscriptions and algorithm-driven editorial content? The Globe and Mail has 300,000 digital subscriptions which makes them just about viable as a news organization. Will a merged Postmedia/Nordstar compare?

• what happens to home delivery? Margin for the print version is running on fumes, but it’s still there because Boomers who subscribe to newspapers are still here. Will a merger affect the remaining lifespan of print?

• the word is that the merger will swap debt for equity. The Globe says that Postmedia’s first-lien Canso Investments gets paid off. With whose cash? Will second-lien holder, the New Jersey headquartered Chatham Assets, get something in return for swapping all that debt for equity? And what kind of equity, voting or preferred? Who will hold the voting A shares? I mean, literally, their names.

• who will be on the Board? The Star’s Bitove is slotted for Chair, but what about the numerous Americans currently on the Postmedia board?

Overall, how much time and opportunity will a merger buy? When Postmedia bought Sun Media in 2015 the Postmedia chair Paul Godfrey said it would give both organizations ‘more runway.’ And to be fair, here we are in 2023 still on the tarmac, in one piece.

The thing about the runway metaphor, is that at some point the digital airplane has to take off or else there isn’t much to justify the loss of media diversity.

On that point, there are Competition Act considerations. Vass Bednar has a helpful piece here.

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Lately I observed that Bell Media’s asking the CRTC to abolish all license obligations for local news only days just after announcing 340 CTV layoffs displayed a hubris the company normally avoids.

Then within another few days, an anonymous source within Bell delivered to the Globe and Mail an audio recording of a meeting held last Fall by Bell Media President Wade Oosterman with then-Editorial VP Michael Melling and several CTV News managers.

In the meeting, Oosterman made some candid remarks about the dismissal of national news anchor Lisa LaFlamme (‘not fired for hair colour’) and asked for ‘balanced’ news coverage, questioning whether the CTV newsroom caters sufficiently to conservative viewers. According to the story source, he suggested LaFlamme was too soft on the federal Liberals.

On one hand, it’s not exactly unknown for a CEO running a news media business to express a desire to capture a bigger audience by shifting curation strategies (Conrad Black was known to say that he had ‘no wish to be severely aggravated by my own newspaper’). Except that’s normally done in the Editor-in-Chief’s office, not at a captive audience meeting with news managers.

Also, it’s way over the line for Oosterman to give specific instructions for more positive CTV coverage of BCE itself (this is not unrelated to one of his predecessors in the President’s chair childishly instructing the news room to ghost news stories involving the CRTC Chair).

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Three weeks ago I linked you to Ken Whyte’s column on the precarious situation of Indigo Books. Seems he was on the right track, unfortunately. The Globe reported on the book company’s $50 million loss and the reshuffling of its board. It’s a worrisome mess. What else is new.

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