More from Andrew Mitrovica available here.There’s big trouble in Postmedialand. Recently, the sad state of Canada’s largest media chain was the subject of some old-style gumshoe reporting by the National Observer’s Bruce Livesey.
In his exposé of a beleaguered news outfit circling the drain, Livesey shows how Postmedia is being slowly hollowed out — ethically, journalistically and financially.
Livesey’s a rarity in Canadian media these days. While the usual carnival barker columnists have been offering the usual apron-over-the-head hysterics about Justin Trudeau’s nannies and his Vogue shoot, Livesey has trained his sights on what journalists talk about amongst themselves lately — the cancer of greed, entitlement and blithe stupidity gnawing away at the nation’s largest news chain, driven by its wealthy CEO, Paul Godfrey.
Postmedia’s recent litany of sins is a long one, and familiar to anyone who worries about the state of journalism in this country. Its Toronto-based head office managed to disgrace itself thoroughly during the recent election by forcing 16 of its major daily papers to run editorials endorsing Stephen Harper — a repeat of its disastrous mandated endorsement of the provincial Progressive Conservatives during the last Alberta provincial election. (A hint, Mr. Godfrey: Albertans really, really don’t like suits from Toronto telling them what to think.)
Three days before the federal vote, the chain ran yellow front-page ads paid for by the federal Conservatives on most of its major dailies, warning Canadians of the awful risks of voting Liberal. Then there was National Post columnist Andrew Coyne’s surprising resignation as the Post’s op-ed editor just days before the vote — apparently because he was ordered to close ranks on the paper’s endorsement of Harper.
What it all points back to is Godfrey himself — a well-connected Conservative supporter who sees nothing at all wrong with using his platforms to try to browbeat readers into supporting his pet politicians. Bootlicking the party in power isn’t a long-term strategy to grow readership; its 12 leading dailies lost 179,868 paid subscribers in just the three years to the end of 2014, while its revenues dropped by about a quarter over the same period. The chain has continued to liquidate staff and consolidate operations as its business model implodes. And as the quality of the product continues to fall off, and as readers flee as a result, Godfrey carries on collecting at least $1.4 million per year for his work in squeezing out nickels and dimes for Postmedia’s hedge-fund ownership.
The irresistible irony here is that this media chain is home to the nation’s leading free-enterprise editorial cheerleaders — people who have spent their careers lecturing the lefties on the importance of keeping the books balanced. Do as we say, not as we do.You won’t, of course, read any of these facts anywhere in the National Post, where columnists continue to whine about climate science and the CBC. But Postmedia’s problems are getting to be too great for even these editorial ostriches to ignore — at least in private.
Earlier this month, The Globe and Mail’s media reporter, James Bradshaw, turned the knife on his newspaper’s chief rivals by noting that Standard & Poor’s had downgraded Postmedia Inc.’s credit rating “to the same grade ailing Greece.” Bradshaw pointed out that the downgrade was triggered by the credit agency’s warnings that “the newspaper company could struggle to refinance its high-interest debt” and that its capital structure was “unsustainable” in the long-term.
In plain English, that means S & P has little faith that Postmedia Inc. is going to be able to arrange financing to service the interest payments on the mushrooming debt it has to pay off just to keep afloat.
Still, S & P signalled that Postmedia Inc. has enough cash on hand to meet its IOUs for at least the next year, “which mitigates the likelihood of a near-term payment crisis.” A temporary reprieve.
That’s cold comfort, I suspect, to the Postmedia staffers who have watched so many of their fellow worker bees head for the exit – voluntarily or involuntarily – over the last several years because the high-priced bean counters keep losing bean after bean.
Postmedia Inc. isn’t facing a “sea of red” — it’s more like an ocean. The irresistible irony here is that this media chain is home to the nation’s leading free-enterprise editorial cheerleaders — people who have spent their careers lecturing the lefties on the importance of keeping the books balanced. Do as we say, not as we do.
Anyhow, a day before S & P issued its ominous downgrade, Steven Shapiro, a senior manager of the New York-based hedge fund that holds a sizeable chunk of Postmedia’s debt — and a member of the chain’s board since 2010, who reportedly played a pivotal role in the acquisition of Sun Media — suddenly announced that he was taking a year-long sabbatical for “personal reasons”, beginning in January.
Maybe the timing of his decision — just as Postmedia’s numbers were looking gloomier than ever — was coincidental. But the optics were awful … especially coming at a time when Postmedia’s product — its journalism — was suffering image problems of its own.
There were the must-run Conservative endorsements, which set subscribers’ teeth grinding from coast to coast. There was the public split with Coyne. There was the fact that Post columnists Terence Corcoran and Peter Foster lost a high-profile defamation lawsuit brought by Andrew Weaver, an esteemed B.C. climatologist and Green Party MLA; Corcoran and Foster suggested Weaver was exaggerating the dangers of climate change — the judge awarded Weaver $50,000 in damages. (The decision is being appealed.)
And just for laughs, there’s former Conservative candidate Arthur Kent’s libel lawsuit against the National Post, Postmedia and one-time Postmedia columnist Don Martin for a piece Martin penned claiming – based on anonymous sources – that the former globe-trotting NBC correspondent once dubbed the ‘Scud Stud’ was being described as a “dud” on the 2008 Alberta election trail by Alberta Conservatives.
Martin’s defence of the column was badly undermined by … Martin himself. The host of CTV’s political Punch and Judy show, Power Play, admitted under cross-examination that his claim that “Alberta Conservatives” had dissed Kent as the “Dud Scud” wasn’t true — that only one source had offered up the unflattering nickname to Martin on the qt.
“That paragraph,” Martin told the court, “is not true. Correct.”
Taken together, it’s been a deeply discouraging December for Postmedia. Chances are good that, in the new year, it’ll get a lot worse.
Andrew Mitrovica is a writer and journalism instructor. For much of his career, Andrew was an investigative reporter for a variety of news organizations and publications including the CBC’s fifth estate, CTV’s W5, CTV National News — where he was the network’s chief investigative producer — the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. During the course of his 23-year career, Andrew has won numerous national and international awards for his investigative work.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.