Postmedia Network Canada Corp. (also known as Postmedia Network, Postmedia News or Postmedia) is a Canadian-based media conglomerate majority-owned by American investors, consisting of the publishing properties of the former Canwest, with primary operations in English-language newspaper publishing, news gathering and Internet operations. It is best known for being the owner of the National Post and the Financial Post. It owns and operates over more than 130 print and digital news titles across Canada.
The company's strategy has seen its publications invest greater resources in digital news gathering and distribution, including expanded websites and digital news apps for smartphones and tablets. This began with a revamp and redesign of the Ottawa Citizen, which debuted in 2014.
Approximately two-thirds of the equity in Postmedia is owned by the media-focused American hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. Under Canadian media ownership laws, Chatham can only elect one-third of Postmedia's board and is not permitted to directly control its operations, though the extent of Chatham's involvement has been disputed. Postmedia publications are known for having a conservative editorial stance. The company is headquartered at Postmedia Place on Bloor Street in Toronto.
Contents
History
The ownership group was assembled by National Post CEO Paul Godfrey in 2010 to bid for the chain of newspapers being sold by the financially troubled Asper family's Canwest (the company's broadcasting assets were sold separately to Shaw Communications). Godfrey secured financial backing from a US private equity firm, the Manhattan-based hedge fund GoldenTree Asset Management—which owns 35 per cent—as well as IJNR Investment Trust, Nyppex and other investors. The group completed a $1.1-billion transaction to acquire the chain from Canwest on July 13, 2010.
On October 6, 2014, Postmedia's CEO Godfrey announced a deal to acquire the English-language operations of Sun Media. The purchase received regulatory approval from the federal Competition Bureau on March 25, 2015, even though the company manages competitive papers in several Canadian cities; while the Sun Media chain owns numerous other papers, four of its five Sun-branded tabloids operate in markets where Postmedia already publishes a broadsheet competitor. Board chair Rod Phillips has cited the Vancouver market, in which the two main daily newspapers, the Vancouver Sun and The Province, have had common ownership for over 30 years, as evidence that the deal would not be anticompetitive. The purchase did not include Sun Media's now-defunct Sun News Network. The acquisition was approved by the Competition Bureau on March 25, 2015, and closed on April 13.
In 2016, the company sought to restructure its compensation plans and reduce spending by as much as 20 per cent, after reporting a net loss of $99.4 million, or 35 cents per diluted share, in the fourth-quarter ended August 31, compared with a $54.1-million net loss, or 19 cents per diluted share, in the same period a year earlier. This resulted in 90 newsroom staff losing their jobs. Also in 2016, it was announced that the newsrooms of newspapers in Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, where Postmedia owns competing newspapers, would be merged into one newsroom per location while continuing to print each newspaper.
On November 27, 2017, Postmedia and Torstar announced a transaction in which Postmedia will sell seven dailies, eight community papers, and the Toronto and Vancouver 24 Hours to Torstar, in exchange for 22 community papers and the Ottawa and Winnipeg versions of Metro. Except for the Exeter Times-Advocate, St. Catharines Standard, Niagara Falls Review, Peterborough Examiner, and Welland Tribune, all acquired papers will be closed.
Operating branch
Postmedia News is the news branch of Postmedia Network, providing similar content to all of its subsidiary news outlets and websites. It is identified as a source on all of its subsidiary newspapers. The news agency provides news, sports, entertainment, photography, financial and feature information and data to Postmedia Network's Canadian newspapers, online properties and a number of third party clients in Canada and the United States.
Criticism
Ties to right-wing politics
In October 2018, it was reported that CEO Andrew MacLeod had declared the company "insufficiently conservative". That resulted in Kevin Libin, who had played an active role in defeating a union drive at the paper earlier that year, taking charge of all political reporting and analysis in Postmedia newspapers to ensure the newspapers became more "reliably conservative." In June 2019, Kevin Libin, comments editor and editorials editor of the National Post and Financial Post and a founding editor of Western Standard, was assigned “executive editor of Postmedia politics". The role focuses on the coverage of federal politics in the National Post. In addition, it focuses on the coverage of federal and provincial politics in all of the dailies owned by Postmedia.
In November 2019, Postmedia announced that 66 per cent of its shares were now owned by Chatham Asset Management, an American media conglomerate which owns American Media, Inc. and is known for its close ties to the Republican Party.
Centralization Operations
The creation of the Postmedia Network effectively concentrates more than 90 percent of all Canadian dailies and weeklies in one company, a fact lamented by J-Source, a Canadian media watchdog, in a 2015 online article.
Margo Goodhand, a former Edmonton Journal editor-in-chief, wrote in a 2016 Walrus article that Postmedia executives were behind the outsourcing of Postmedia content to a site within an office in Canada for the sake of producing "Regina Leader-Post sports pages, Arts fronts for the Montreal Gazette, editorial pages for the Vancouver Sun". In a 2020 article by The New York Times, it was reported journalists had attested that since Chatham Asset Management took over, Postmedia had centralized operations and cut staff so that its 106 newspapers were essentially clones of one another.
Relationship with the government
On November 27, 2018, The Competition Bureau applied for a court evaluation contesting Postmedia's claims of solicitor-client privilege, for records seized by the bureau during raids at the company's offices. In March 2018, the Competition Bureau issued a court filing accusing Postmedia and Torstar of structuring the deal they made together with no-compete clauses in an effort to reduce competition in the newspaper industry in violation of the Competition Act.
According to Marc Edge, author of The Postmedia Effect, the network received $9.9 million in government financial assistance in 2022. In the same year, Postmedia's operating income was only $13 million.
Treatment of staff
In 2016, Paul Godfrey took a $900,000 bonus during a time when Postmedia laid off staff company-wide. CFO Doug Lamb received $450,000, COO Andrew MecLeod $425,000, legal and general counsel Jeffrey Harr $300,000, and National Post president Gordon Fisher $200,000. Unions representing Canadian journalists wanted the Postmedia executives to reject the total $2,275,000 as the newspaper chain continued to cut staff.
Decline of journalistic quality
In 2015, the Globe and Mail reported that National Post columnist Conrad Black, who used to own some of Postmedia's newspapers and is one of Postmedia's largest investors, told executives that he felt that some of the properties' qualities have deteriorated. Black felt that the company should be investing on improving the quality of its properties.
Assets
Advertising
The Flyer Force
Go!Local
Publishing
National Post
Financial Post (administratively part of the National Post)
Belleville Intelligencer
Brantford Expositor
Calgary Herald
Cape Breton Post
The Chatham Daily News
The Chronicle Herald (Halifax)
Cornwall Standard Freeholder
Edmonton Journal
Kingston Whig-Standard
London Free Press
The Gazette (Montreal)
North Bay Nugget
Ottawa Citizen
Regina Leader-Post
The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
Sault Star
The Telegram
The Telegraph-Journal
Timmins Daily Press
Vancouver Sun (not related to the tabloid Sun newspapers also owned by Postmedia)
Windsor Star
Calgary Sun
Edmonton Sun
Ottawa Sun
Software
QuickTrac
QuickWire