The problems faced by the traditional print media are well-known. The growth of the internet and of 24-hour TV news has drastically reduced their audience. Falling circulation and plummeting ad revenues have made profitability a distant memory.
Remarkably enough under the circumstances, Toronto still has four daily papers, but they're a shadow of their former selves. Just consider the Toronto Star: it's still Canada's largest circulation newspaper, but it gives fresh evidence of its decline almost on a weekly basis.
Flip through the Star's pages, or scroll through its website, and one of the first things you'll notice is how much of the paper is now taken up with wire service stories. The Star compensates for its lack of global coverage by lifting material freely (but not free) from the likes of AP, The Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Bloomberg. Even within Canada, the Star relies heavily on stories from Canadian Press.
The Star's close relationship with the New York Times is especially instructive. Each Sunday, subscribers receive two special sections, one taken from the NYT's news and opinion sections and the other from its renowned book reviews. Even the most casual reader cannot fail to notice how much superior the NYT journalism is to the Star's, in terms of both style and reach. Interestingly, though, the Star is now so desperate for material to fill its pages that it sometimes includes the NYT stories, word-for-word, in its daily editions, quite often before the dedicated Sunday sections appear. How long the subscribers will put up with this double-dipping remains to be seen.
The Star parted company with many of its more experienced journalists earlier this year. Those who remain are being pushed very hard. Consider Rosie DiManno, whose byline has been appearing in the paper for four decades. She gets first dibs on covering the Wimbledon tennis every year, but of course this year there's a whole lot more going on in London. As well as filing at least two stories each day on the tennis, Rosie has regaled us at length with her views on Brexit and Scottish independence, two topics on which it would be charitable to say that she is out of her comfort zone. In the weeks before she went to London, Rosie was covering a major murder trial and writing about figure skating and baseball. Her writing style is becoming ever more erratic and cliche-ridden, which is perhaps no surprise, given the amount of copy she is expected to churn out.
The Toronto Star makes much of its adherence to the "Atkinson Principles", a set of precepts laid down a century ago by the paper's founder, Joseph Atkinson. This is basically a wish list of slightly left-leaning, Canadian nationalist platitudes. Anyone who has read the paper even once will have seen that it is as much a viewspaper as a newspaper, and those views are inevitably liberal, feminist and inclusionary in nature; mildly pro-union and mildly suspicious of capitalism.
Fair enough: I'm kind of that way myself. But underlying the Atkinson Principles is one other imperative that didn't quite make the list: profitability. The Star may rail against the excesses of the banks and others, but it will do whatever it takes to turn a profit. Just this past week, the Star closed its printing facility in Vaughan, north of Toronto, outsourcing production of the paper to a separate company. This led to the loss of, as the Star itself would put it (at least if it was writing about someone else) "almost 300 skilled, well-paying jobs". You might think the paper would have kept this low-key, but bizarrely, it chose to splash it all over the weekend editiona, even posting a kind of farewell video about the plant.
An annual saving of $10 million is not something to be sneezed at, but you have to wonder what old Joe Atkinson would think about it. The Star may well survive for many more years, but it will never again be the opinion-shaper it was just a couple of decades ago.
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