The Postmedia Effect

Paperback, 288 pages

English language

Published April 30, 2023 by New Star Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-55420-197-6

(1 review)

Even as their readers move on-line and their advertisers look elsewhere, daily newspapers continue to be our main source of information, shaping citizens' understanding of the world, and their reactions to events. At the same time, continuing a long-term trend in media ownership, newsrooms have been gutted as new owners prioritize double-digit profit margins. Dwindling reporting staff is able to do less and less actual reporting, as they become more and more reliant on official releases and carefully tailored public relations handouts.

In The Postmedia Effect, Marc Edge takes Canada's dominant newspaper chain, Postmedia, as a case study laying bare the changes in news economics that over the past two generations have hollowed out the nation's newsrooms, undermining not just citizens' trust in what is reported to them, but the very foundations of a democracy steered by an informed electorate.

1 edition

pdotb reviewed The Postmedia Effect by Marc Edge

Comprehensive and alarming

4 stars

In-depth examination of the increasing concentration of the Canadian media landscape (speaking here from a city where I have the 'choice' of five daily newspapers, four of which are owned by Postmedia...). Covers the process by which Postmedia has gradually bought up more and more newspapers, closing many of them, and shifting the increasingly-centralized editorial take to the right. Also covers the complicated financial structure of Postmedia and its ownership by various, mostly US-based, hedge funds and other opaque financial institutions. Because the book is so new, it's also able to cover the various forms of subsidy provided by the Liberal government, and how they've often ended up just propping up the debt payments of the hedge funds, while being inaccessible to smaller independent news outlets. Not a cheery read, but useful in understanding the way Canada's democracy is going...