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pdotb finished reading The Postmedia Effect by Marc Edge

Marc Edge: The Postmedia Effect (Paperback, 2023, New Star Books)

The Postmedia Effect by Marc Edge

Even as their readers move on-line and their advertisers look elsewhere, daily newspapers continue to be our main source of …

pdotb reviewed The Postmedia Effect by Marc Edge

Even as their readers move on-line and their advertisers look elsewhere, daily newspapers continue to …

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...

pdotb quoted The Postmedia Effect by Marc Edge

Even as their readers move on-line and their advertisers look elsewhere, daily newspapers continue to …

MacLeod, however, cast his political re-positioning of Postmedia as more of a marketing strategy. “We looked at the media landscape in Canada and we found there was a shortage of viewpoints that come from a pro-innovation, pro-free-market, smaller-tax, smaller-government perspective,” he told an interviewer in 2019. “We saw an opportunity to fill that from a strategic point of view.” He took exception to suggestions that this was damaging the journalistic integrity of his newspapers. “This has absolutely nothing to do with the centralization of editorial strategy. And it in no way, shape or form touches on journalistic integrity or credibility. We want to fill that market opportunity and we want to make sure that we offer a wide range of voices that aren’t always represented in the media landscape.

— The Postmedia Effect by Marc Edge

pdotb quoted The Postmedia Effect by Marc Edge

Even as their readers move on-line and their advertisers look elsewhere, daily newspapers continue to …

The Irving name was everywhere in the Maritimes, adorning 700 gas stations and a fleet of tanker trucks. What started with one gas station in 1924 turned into a web of more than 300 privately-held companies engaged in oil and gas, forestry, real estate, retailing, construction, shipping, trucking, shipbuilding, and other businesses. The Irvings owned sawmills, pulp and paper mills, hardware stores, marine terminals, shipyards, and oil tankers. They owned Canada’s largest oil refinery, which accounted for more than 40 percent of the country’s petroleum exports. By 2008, the secretive family was the second richest in Canada, behind only the even more secretive Thomsons, who were perhaps not coincidentally also a newspaper family. By 2022, the Irvings owned all three of the province’s daily newspapers, eighteen of its 25 community newspapers, and four of its radio stations. ... A biography noted that Irving’s newspapers “shied away from any meaningful investigation of industrial pollution in New Brunswick” while maintaining a “long-standing conspiracy of silence about Irving’s business dealings,” including “secrecy about its own ownership.” Irving’s picture was never to appear in the newspapers, noted journalist Jacques Poitras, and if an oil spill or similar mishap involved Irving Oil, it was to be referred to as simply “a local oil company.”

— The Postmedia Effect by Marc Edge