[BRIEF NOTE] On the impending end of the National Post

[rfmcdonald]

I got this from Antonia Zerbisias at Facebook. It looks like the National Post, the right-wing national newspaper founded by Conrad Black and consistently a money-loser, is finally reaching its end thanks to the implosion of national media conglomerate CanWest.

The

National Post, the flagship daily newspaper of Canada's beleaguered Canwest Global Communications (CGS.TO), will likely be forced to close after Friday if it isn't transferred to a new holding company, Canwest said in a court filing.

Creditors of the company have indicated they are no longer prepared to fund continuing losses at the Post, which employs 277 people, Canwest said.

The creditor group "will not continue to support funding the National Post Company in the long or short term past Oct. 30, 2009," Canwest said in a court report released on Thursday.

Canwest said the Post has no other sources of funding its "ongoing losses." A failure to transfer the newspaper into a different holding company by Oct. 30 "would likely result in the forced cessation of its operations and commencement of liquidation proceedings in respect of the National Post Company."

Canwest said earlier this week it has reached a deal to move the Post into a new subsidiary of Canwest Publishing Inc, but the move needs court approval. A hearing is set for Friday.

"The National Post Company has been unprofitable since its inception, recording annual losses as high as approximately C$60 million in 2001," Canwest said.

For the year ended Aug. 31, the newspaper is projected to have suffered a net loss of C$9.3 million ($8.7 million).

It looks like my earlier observation about the Post's unpopularity was quite correct in the medium term. Certainly I've seen plenty of copies of the National Post at newsstands long after the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, sometimes even the New York Times, are sold out.

I will actually miss it if it goes under. Yes, at its worst it could be rather unthinkingly, reflexively right-wing, but as James Bow observed in his post, notwithstanding a fair amount of creativity in its arts and letters section it began its career rather counter-productively.

It seems irrational for me to have such ill will towards a newspaper, and it is irrational, but the National Post started out on the wrong foot with me when Conrad Black set it up specifically to go after what he perceived as a leftist-liberal bent in Canadian media and politics. I realize that Black’s stance harkens back to the old days of newspapers when they were started out as the publication arm of various political parties, but I did not feel that this approach had a place in this day and age. And in the various persecution complex of some conservatives, they would often point to the financial success of Fox News and the Post as proof that their way of thinking was the right way of thinking because, when that way of thinking was brought out and sold on streetcorners, people picked it up.

But today, not so much.

It just shows to conservatives that, if Canadians are too liberal for their taste, the fault rests not with the politicians or any media bias, but with the Canadians themselves. It’s not enough to put out a newspaper and tell us what to think and expect that we’ll think the “right” way, in your opinion (as Black tried to do); instead, you’ve got to engage us ‘liberal’ Canadians personally, in an honest debate — a debate that you enter into with an open mind. That’s the only way to bring real, lasting change about.

The marketplace decided. Ah, what might have been had Conrad Black, well, not been Conrad Black!