Media Beat: The Ongoing Dilemma Of Mainstream Media Funding (Column)
SaltWire follows Métro Média and Metroland Media Group in seeking restructuring protection, and StatsCan maps out one of the big reasons why.
SaltWire Creditor Protection Symptomatic of Newspaper Business Decline
The Atlantic Canada newspaper chain owned by a Halifax company and Toronto-based Fiera Private Debt has filed for creditor protection with debt far exceeding current assets of $33M.
SaltWire publishes four daily newspapers: the Chronicle Herald in Halifax; the Cape Breton Post in Sydney, N.S.; the Guardian in Charlottetown and the Telegram in St. John’s, N.L. — as well as 14 weekly publications in various Maritime provinces.
As reported by Canadian Press, in August 2023, Quebec-based Métro Média suspended operations at its more than 30 local publications, including the Journal Métro and 16 print weeklies. The following month, the company announced its pending bankruptcy, ending its coverage of local government in parts of the province's two largest cities.
As per CP again, in December 2023, creditors of Toronto-based Metroland Media Group voted to approve the company's restructuring proposal after the newspaper chain announced cuts to 60% of its workforce — about 600 jobs — and a move to a digital-only model.
Whatever internal business decisions may have unsettled the financial stability of these newspaper chains, the inevitability of declining revenues is a certainty given the changing landscape of where news is viewed and the exodus of advertising from mainstream media outlets.
What follows is from the latest Statistics Canada analysis of trends in media.
Over half of Canadians follow the news or current events on a daily basis
We asked Canadians if they followed the news and current events in 2020. Over half told us they followed the news or current events on a daily basis, with those living in Canada for 11 years or longer being more likely to follow the news regularly than more recent arrivals.
Internet provider revenue has almost doubled in 10 years
Not surprisingly, given we live in the Internet age, four in five Canadians surfed the Internet to get their news in 2020. Indeed, Internet providers generated almost double the operating revenue of all other news mediums combined.
Internet providers are likely to see their overall share of revenue grow in the years ahead, as more traditional mediums such as newspapers and magazines continue their transition to digital formats.
Internet providers generated $14.8 billion in revenues in 2021, up 8.2% from a year earlier and more than double the revenue generated a decade earlier.
The operating revenue of newspaper publishers has fallen by almost half since 2014
Over one-third of Canadians got their news from reading a newspaper in 2020, either the traditional paper type or online. This figure does not include Canadians who got their news from articles posted on news aggregation sites.
Newspaper publishers generated $2.1 billion in revenue in 2020, down by over one-fifth from two years earlier and 45.7% lower compared with 2014, when the data series began.
Newspaper publishers had an operating profit margin of 5.5% in 2020.
Online newspapers outperformed printed papers by a wide margin. Online newspaper circulation sales rose 43.6% from two years earlier to $74.8 million in 2020, while circulation sales of printed newspapers fell 12.0% to $522.0 million.
While over the 2018 to 2020 period, newspaper advertising sales were on the decline overall, the decrease in newspaper publishers' online advertising sales (-5.7% to $273.4 million) was considerably less than the drop in print advertising sales (-45.2% to $660.9 million).
Read the rest via StatsCan here.
