Why You Should Care About the Canwest Sale
The sale of Canwest newspapers doesn’t mean the end of newspapers. It simply means the delivery method will change.
It looks like the looooong saga of the future of newspapers in this town is coming to a head soon. And that future looks increasingly digital.
Struggling Canwest Global Communications Corp. is selling its publishing division, which owns the Vancouver Sun and Province as well as the Victoria Times-Colonist and the Prince George Citizen, to a group of creditors and investors led by Canwest president and CEO Paul Godfrey for $1.1 billion.
Predictably, everybody in the journalism community has an opinion, much of it negative. That community is highly resistant to change and tends to fight it every step of the way. But this isn’t a wholesale revolution, it’s an evolutionary move. Or at least I think it is.
It seems the buyers of the Sun and the Province are going to commit more to the digital delivery of "news". As Godfrey said, "We must continue to innovate and to work to transform what was a traditional newspaper company to a culture embracing the opportunity of a digital world."
Before I go any farther, a little disclosure is warranted. I worked for Canwest for years, and for the Southam chain before that. I still write a column for the Financial Post, which is the business reporting arm of the National Post, currently headed by that same Godfrey. So, while that gives me experience with the chains, and the inner workings of newspapers, the fact that I’m now a business consultant no longer intimately involved with them also gives me an outsider’s view.
That view is that this has nothing to do with amorphous concepts such as “quality” or “tradition” usually put forward by those in the journalism community. It’s about what a newspaper’s core business is.
That is information delivery, and that’s not as simple as it used to be. Today, information pours at us like a fire hose, so we need someone to curate content—assemble the right information for the right people that need it, and then deliver it. That has always been the newspaper’s greatest strength.
But the methodology of distribution is changing. Today digital delivery is much cheaper, meaning you can deliver much more of it for much less cost. Those who don’t believe it’s the future have only to look at the Examiner chain in the US (and now in Canada as well) or the millions of info delivery channels such as blogs, online magazines and news sites, and even Google.
But, people say, I like to read newspapers. Me too, because there’s always something interesting in them that I wouldn’t normally find. Just today I read a fascinating article about a discovery that sheds new light on a collection of 500-million year old fossils in the BC interior.
But many others simply want a news fix and they don’t need an expensive physical product like a newspaper to get it. Instead, they'll get it digitally. If the Sun and the Province don't deliver it to them, someone else will.
In a fractured marketplace, there’s always room for an organization that can professionally package and generate relevant information. Quibbling about the delivery method is silly and non-productive.
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