And ref the Sun I just remembered reaading this peice in the TO Star : http://www.thestar.com/article/197575
Bad news for setting Sun
Tabloid chain's demise appears imminent
Mar 30, 2007 04:30 AM
Antonia Zerbisias
You may not notice it as you go by, but the smell of death is on many street corners in the GTA.
It comes out of all those red boxes offering the Toronto Sun.
It's not just here. The same stench emanates from Sun Media boxes in Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa and London, where the Free Press is also being bled to death by Quebecor.
As I have reported, the Sun chain is being eviscerated by the Montreal-based company controlled by Pierre Karl Péladeau, a guy who was born with a media empire up his butt and who seems to believe he can do anything, damn the rules and regulators.
Not only does his Quebecor own the Sun chain, it also has the largest French-language network, TVA, and its specialty channels; the most popular French-language newspapers in the country; Vidéotron, the third-largest cable company (with a monopoly in Montreal, Quebec City and Sherbrooke), as well as Canoe.ca.
But ever since Quebecor acquired control of the Sun papers in 1998 – in a fierce battle with Torstar, which owns the Star – it's been nothing but bad news for the tabloids.
Some of the chain's news, sports and entertainment pages are now designed in central locations then sent to its nine English-language papers, which include the commuter freebie 24 Hours.
In fact, the Sun papers so closely mirror the successful 24 Hours that rumours persist that they will be merged.
Fears are that the building at 333 King E. will be sold off, and the paper's operations moved into Sun TV's headquarters – ironically, just when its converged idea of local news coverage, Canoe Live, is being cut back to half an hour and bounced to 5:30 p.m. from 6.
That puts Quebecor in clear violation of its conditions of licence, the conditions to which it agreed when it acquired Sun TV from CHUM. According to the station's website, the 6 to 7 p.m. slot will be filled with repeats and U.S. sitcoms.
A call to general manager Don Gaudet was not returned.
As for 333 King, its presses have been rendered obsolete by new operations in Rexdale. Sources say that it's only a matter of time before the downtown building goes silent.
"At the present time, this building is not for sale," was all newly named editor-in-chief Glenn Garnett would say.
The devastation is so widespread that Sun Media's unions have filed complaints with labour boards.
Many of its best and brightest have been pushed out or, more recently, jumped. (Some of them are editing this very column.) This week, columnist Valerie Gibson, known for her cougar and sans-culottes philosophy, was dumped, while ace investigative reporter and author Alan Cairns is leaving the sinking rats because, as confidants say, he feels the ship is going down.
According to union numbers, at least 50 full- and part-time Toronto Sun newsroom positions are gone.
Best estimates are that the once mighty "little paper that could" now has six general assignment reporters, three bureau reporters and three police reporters to cover the GTA 24/7.
That's not a big city newspaper newsroom. That's not even a TV newsroom.
"I can't comment on staffing complement numbers," said Garnett.
It hardly matters anyway.
The demise of the Sun is being documented on the blogs, including the dedicated Toronto Sun Family blog, which now has a daily countdown since the last buyout, layoff, firing or resignation.
But Quebecor's destruction of the Sun chain is not likely to stop with mass firings and budget cuts.
The company's most recent quarter was abysmal with an $80.8 million loss. Its media subsidiary accounted for a $97.1 million net loss, compared with a $58.4 million profit last year.
Which is why last week's appointment of Mike Nesbitt as its general manager for new media is ominous. This is a newly created position in which the former Sun TV general manager of operations will be converging the Suns, the Canoe portal and 24 Hours into a multimedia monster to, according to publisher Kin-Man Lee, "deliver news content through all the Quebecor Media platforms."
Lee did not return my call.
Meanwhile, last week in Montreal, Quebecor was reprimanded by a monitoring committee appointed in 2001 by order of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The committee found that, in having a TVA reporter also cover Israel-Lebanon war for the Journal de Montréal, Quebecor was in violation of its agreement to keep its newsrooms separate to maintain a diversity of voices.
But so what? Nothing will come of this. In fact, last fall at the CRTC, Péladeau suggested he would tear down all the walls of all his operations because this is a new media age.
So few reporters, so many platforms.
The other day, I asked former Sun staffers about their joy and relief in 1998 when they learned that Quebecor and not Torstar would be taking over.
"They were hugging and dancing in the atrium," recalled one.
Now that atrium echoes with the voices of ghosts.
