Finally, a major Canadian media owner sees the future — and it’s digital
Jim Sheppard is a former executive editor of globeandmail.com. He also held senior newsroom management positions at washingtonpost.com and ABCNEWS.com
Well, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
The battle for success in the world of Canadian journalism — which had been looking very bleak — has taken a turn for the better with the acquisition of The Toronto Star by Jordan Bitove and Paul Rivett.
Why?
Unlike other media owners in the country they see the future – and it is digital.
They are quoted in this column in The Star as saying they also believe in other things that are heretical to most major media owners in the country.
They are going to expand The Star’s digital presence. They have looked at the numbers at The Washington Post and other U.S. media (not to mention the success of the New York Times) and they’ve seen how digital can bring in more revenue than print.
They think that maybe too many journalists have been laid off. Gasp!
They think that maybe The Star should open/reopen foreign bureaus or hire more foreign freelancers. Double gasp!
The naysayers and pessimists may think this is naïve. After all, media owners in Canada have been preaching doom-and-gloom for years to justify massive cuts. They have convinced far too many people in the worlds of journalism and digital strategy that they have lost the war and there’s no alternative but to slowly bleed to death.
But, Rivett says he has taken a deep dive into how The Post and others turned themselves around by emphasizing digital and by expanding their newsrooms several years ago.
“I don’t have any doubt that this is not going to be easy,” he adds.
“But we are not reinventing the wheel. It has (Star’s italics) been done at The Post and The Times. You can get subscriptions up.”
Let me also point out that media owners who make the commitment to digital journalism not only get subscriptions up, but they also make money. In fact, as I noted recently, The New York Times now makes more revenue from digital subscriptions and ads than from print.
These U.S. media giants followed a very different path than their Canadian counterparts. They invested in digital. They hired more journalists to deliver a better product.
Sadly, in Canada, the media owners have been devastatingly stupid in their continued cuts to journalism jobs at their digital arms – often replacing them with algorithms — and their ongoing layoffs across their entire newsrooms.
In earlier posts in this series of the future of journalism, I have argued that COVID-19 may be the final nail in the coffin of newspapers who don’t go digital, and criticized Canadian media owners for going cap-in-hand to Ottawa for handouts rather than taking a good hard look at their own failures, then fixing them.
My hat is off to the new owners of The Star for rejecting the failed approach of the past and for being willing to take the actions essential for future success.
As Rivett explains: “Listen, I’m not and will never be Jeff Bezos (owner of The Washington Post and amazon.com who changed the direction of what had been an award-winning but money-losing paper).
“He’s one-in-a-million. But I do know his work and I’ve talked to people at the Post who’ve executed his strategy. It can work for newspapers. With The Star, there’s a playbook for success already there. At the core of it is, you still have really good journalists who care and want it to work.”
Bitove adds: ““Our goal is to change the conversation. Give journalists the tools to do the job.”
It’s difficult to imagine any journalist in this county who does not wish them well in that challenge.
I can’t wait to see how fast they turn The Star around. I hope the challenge this will pose to the other media owners — dinosaurs stuck in the past with failing legacy platforms – will be the spur to get them to go where they need to go. Digital.
Jim Sheppard is the owner of Conquest Communications Canada. He is a former senior digital manager at The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post and ABCNEWS.
Further reading:
Part 1: The future of journalism
Part 2: The future of journalism
Part 3: The future of journalism
Part 4: The future of journalism
