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rfmcdonald"But it was the only local paper the newsstand had left!" was the last defense that I could think of as some of my co-workers stared at the copy of the National Post I'd left on the staffroom table today.
Founded by Conrad Black back in 1998, when he was still a newspaper magnate and not a convicted felon, the Post was Black's attempt to shift the tone of public discourse in (English) Canada further to the right, with a lavish budget for high-profile columnists and expensively-produced extra coverage of arts and culture and politics. Unfortunately, after Black sold the Post and the rest of his newspaper chain to CanWest in 2001, so as to abandon his Canadian citizenship and become a British lord, CanWest decided to stop the financial hemorrhage by imposing a budget and trim coverage.
The result? The Post's circulation dropped, sharply, and hasn't yet recovered. A May 2007 survey revealed that in the critical Toronto market, the National Post comes a distant third, behind the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. Despite a recent redesign,
things like the decision to stop circulation in Atlantic Canada outside of Halifax lends credence to media journalist Frank Moher's caustic assessment of the Post's prospects.
It's probably unlikely that the Post will disappear altogether, if only because it's CanWest's flagship newspaper. It's equally unlikely that the Post will be able to be anything but a scrappy right-wing voice; Black's original vision of a Canada that was ready for his particular vision of an Ameriphilic hard right, perhaps unsurprisingly, turns out not to have had that much tenure on reality.
Founded by Conrad Black back in 1998, when he was still a newspaper magnate and not a convicted felon, the Post was Black's attempt to shift the tone of public discourse in (English) Canada further to the right, with a lavish budget for high-profile columnists and expensively-produced extra coverage of arts and culture and politics. Unfortunately, after Black sold the Post and the rest of his newspaper chain to CanWest in 2001, so as to abandon his Canadian citizenship and become a British lord, CanWest decided to stop the financial hemorrhage by imposing a budget and trim coverage.
The result? The Post's circulation dropped, sharply, and hasn't yet recovered. A May 2007 survey revealed that in the critical Toronto market, the National Post comes a distant third, behind the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. Despite a recent redesign,
things like the decision to stop circulation in Atlantic Canada outside of Halifax lends credence to media journalist Frank Moher's caustic assessment of the Post's prospects.
The newspaper wars are long over and the Post has quietly and conclusively lost. Neither paper much trumpeted their circulation figures when the Audit Bureau of Circulation numbers came out last Fall, as both had lost readership over the previous 12 months (as had most of the papers in North America, besieged as they are by the Web). But where the Globe was down 1%, the Post was down a brutal 10%. So it may be that my daily one-man focus group on the streets of Calgary wasn't all that reliable. Still, cauterizing its wounds, the Post can at least claim to be a more national national newspaper than Canada's National Newspaper (for all the good that'll do them). As for the Globe, pretty soon it'll read more or less exactly as it did back in the 1970s. Then it'll just be a case of getting Justin Trudeau elected Prime Minister and, why, everything will be back to normal.
It's probably unlikely that the Post will disappear altogether, if only because it's CanWest's flagship newspaper. It's equally unlikely that the Post will be able to be anything but a scrappy right-wing voice; Black's original vision of a Canada that was ready for his particular vision of an Ameriphilic hard right, perhaps unsurprisingly, turns out not to have had that much tenure on reality.
