Postmedia Star Merger Must Be Stopped

On A Fucking Horrible Idea

So, apparently Postmedia and the Toronto Star are in merger talks that, while certainly unofficial and non-binding, are very clearly premised around the idea that Postmedia will get out of their debt crisis by buying an asset with cleaner books. Allegedly the Star will have editorial independence, but nobody with a brain should believe that, given Postmedia’s record of lies.

So, let’s have the honest conversation about the non-CBC news media in this country, which is that there’s no way to save it in its current form. And that’s a disastrous truth that everybody is too scared to admit.

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The rise of places like this site’s host have revived the “paying for news” discourse since its inception, but the difference between paying Paul Wells or Matt Yglesias or whoever and paying for a paper is that the economics for a independent creator isn’t actually that difficult to sustain, because your overheard is almost nothing, if not actually nothing. But more importantly, even if you have to do something every day, takes are easier to pump out than journalism.

The death of localism – the fact that of a Montreal Gazette, almost none of it is written by people in Montreal about Montreal, for example – means that nobody in Montreal feels the need to read it as their entity, and at that point the conservative politics alienates a lot of the upper income, high social trust potential readers who think supporting news is a good unto itself.

The mergers that led to a state where so few cities have an independent daily newspaper have been a disaster on every level – Postmedia is bleeding money, local news is dying, and social trust is near the floor, because now the Gazette or the Citizen is seen as a mouthpiece of a conservative board, not an independent arbiter of what’s true in their cities. And the answer to mergers failing to achieve positive ends is not more mergers.

What needs to happen if we’re going to get a press worth reading again in this country is the death of Postmedia, and the sales of all of their assets back to local owners – and local owners who understand that they might have to lose some money in the process of saving this country. It’s not like this country has a dearth of billionaires, and it will take some of them deciding that saving their local papers is the best way to pay it back to the cities and the country that’s given them so much.

Yes, it’s not ideal that the papers these people buy would have potential conflicts – I’m not saying the Desmarais kids buying the Gazette or Bill Malhotra buying the Citizen would be panaceas, but it’s going to take the death of Postmedia to even start to find something.

We know what works in the modern media landscape – it’s authenticity. The reason people keep offering to pay me to write for this site (not that I will ever allow that) is because they think I have earned it. Give a group of young, upstart English writers the room to revive the Gazette, you think they wouldn’t be able to build something Montrealers would love to support? Of course they would, but Postmedia – the cold, uncaring corporate shield of Postmedia – precludes it by definition.

The problem with Sun Media’s purchase into Postmedia isn’t that the Sun sucks – it does, but that’s not the point. The sin was that the Sun became fairly indistinct from the “original” Postmedia product, as the lines blurred and the purposes mingled. The Sun went from a discernible brand and having a discernible viewpoint to being a slightly more right wing version of a right wing paper in most cities, destroying their entire raison d’etre.

Without a clear vision, these papers are all dying, and further mergers aren’t the answer. What is the answer is not a new venture designed to do what The Athletic’s done in sports, which is burn through VC cash and then run into the same problem of not making enough money. What we need is a dismantling of the hegemonic force in the industry, and owners who view good journalism as a value unto itself.

The reason that nobody’s really managed to make reader-supported media work at scale is that the scale is what washes away the authenticity that makes it worth reading and supporting. What needs to happen is a forced breakup of Postmedia on anti-trust, an auctioning off of the independent assets, and an injection of good, young talent who wants to tell stories about their cities and their country.

Look at the UK or Australia, countries with a much more mature political discourse than ours, and look at the media in those places. Yes, Murdoch owns most of the local dailies in Australia, but the media diversity those two countries have is remarkable. Here, we’re hollowed out, with the same shuffling of the deck chairs. You know which part of the country has produced the most good young journalists in high profile roles? Quebec, and specifically French Quebec, because Le Devoir and La Presse exist and push the Quebecor papers not to suck. You know what both Le Devoir and La Presse also share in common? Their independence from corporate influence.

In Australia, even with a Postmedia-esque dominance, there is some news diversity still, in the old Fairfax papers (The Age, The Australian Financial Review, and The Sydney Morning Herald), in addition to the Murdoch papers, the Guardian, and a robust network of weekly papers, magazines, and online sites to augment them (plus the publicly funded ABC). In the UK, there’s a wide spectrum of views, and while a majority skew right, left wing views are much more common – in the I or the Guardian, or in the weekly New Statesman – than in this country.

What other countries have that Canada doesn’t is some news owned by people for whom profit is not an immediate obligation. A Brit of Russian heritage bought the Evening Standard 14 years ago and made the paper free for customers, and while it essentially worked as a long running scheme to get into the House Of Lords, it’s very good for Brits that the Standard still exists and still pays for journalism. And in Canada, the Postmedia monopoly has poisoned any chance that we might get any innovation at all, and the reliance on wire pieces and the central newsroom has meant Canadians get fewer and fewer pieces of actual journalism.

If we let this Postmedia-TorStar merger go through we might as well just let America absorb us as the 51^st state and give up on Canada. We deserve a media that’s not in perpetual decline, a media focused on good journalism and not debt reduction as a sole good. The Canadian government needs to stop this merger, we need to break Postmedia at the seams, and we need to return local institutions to their cities, so that we might have a chance to let journalism succeed in this country again. And if we’re not prepared to do that then we might as well just give up.