Newspaper Monopoly A game involving two corporate players who swap community papers thereby decreasing competition
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I l l u s t r at i o n
Brian Horstead
By Dana Bowen
fter 15 years of working for the Chilliwack Times, editor Ken Goudswaard has seen the newspaper industry change drastically. While newspapers changing hands is nothing new to him, the latest deal by Black Press and Glacier Media involving six community papers, including his, left him shocked.
“I would have thought we would be sold to someone else,” Goudswaard says. “I never would have thought the competition across the road would have picked us up.” The Chilliwack Times, formerly a Glacier title, was dealt to Black Press, which already owns the Chilliwack Progress, leaving Black with both papers. This swap game by Western Canada’s two largest owners of community newspapers also involved Glacier’s Abbotsford-Mission Times, which Black picked up to join its existing paper, the Abbotsford News. In turn, Black Press sold papers to Glacier, namely the Westender (WE), the North Shore Outlook, the South Delta Leader and the Bowen Island Undercurrent. Glacier already owns the Vancouver Courier, the North Shore News, and the Delta Optimist, meaning single ownership of two papers in those communities. Glacier, which started as a bottled water company in 1988, 34 || LANGARA JOURNALISM REVIEW 2014
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owns seven daily newspapers in B.C. and some 60 community papers and other publications throughout Western Canada. Black Press owns more than 100 community papers in B.C. and Alberta, as well as community papers and dailies in the U.S. While the wheeling and dealing in newspapers might make financial sense to these companies, the obvious concerns centre on reduced competition and less news-gathering in the communities affected. Despite the fact that Canada has had two royal commissions and a government committee investigating concentration of ownership, the federal Competition Act has few rules limiting newspaper ownership. The rules mainly try to ensure that there is a choice for advertisers, and there always is if other media are taken into account. It didn’t take long for the collateral damage to occur from the Glacier-Black agreement. The deal was announced in October last year, and shortly thereafter Black Press closed the Abbotsford-Mission Times. Company CEO Rick O’Connor told the Vancouver Sun that the newspaper had been a money-losing operation for quite some time and there were no prospects of it regaining a profit. Cale Cowan, who was editor of the Abbotsford-Mission Times in 2005, says he was sad to hear about the closing. “I made no prediction the paper would close, but in today’s newspaper market, I am not surprised,” Cowan says. On Vancouver’s North Shore, the Outlook remains as a