14 Jan The looming showdown at the Herald

The Halifax Chronicle Herald and its newsroom union are hurtling toward a head-on collision, with management threatening a lockout in 10 days unless it gets painful concessions. To back up the threat, the paper is reportedly seeking replacement workers that will let it keep publishing through the work stoppage.

Newsroom staff are angry, hurt, and lashing out with vehemence that betrays the weak hand they are playing. It’s hard to imagine the paper that emerges from the pending confrontation will much resemble the Herald we know.

In fact, today’s Herald doesn’t much resemble the paper of 10 or 15 years ago. The once plump classified ad section has vanished—taking with it $12 million per year in revenue (about 150 newsroom salaries). That’s for copy that readers wrote themselves, and paid for in advance. More recently, display ads have gone into free fall.

As the confrontation looms, anger has focused on President and CEO Chairman and Publisher Sarah Dennis, the third generation of her family to run the newspaper, and her husband, Mark Lever, Manager of Business Development President and CEO.

Writing in the alternative weekly, The Coast, veteran Herald reporter and editor Rick Conrad, who took a buyout in 2014, said the pair, “have done more in seven years to endanger exceptional journalism than any pissed-off politician or irate advertiser ever could.”

In a Facebook Post, former NDP Finance Minister Graham Steele lavished praise on the Herald’s newsroom staff before vowing to cancel his subscription if management carried out the threatened lockout—as if further reducing revenue will somehow help the reporters he admires.

At HalifaxExaminer.ca, Tim Bousquet declared, “The union is right: if, as seems likely, these cuts are made and if the paper continues to embrace advertorial, the Chronicle Herald will become irrelevant. I believe the paper is in a death spiral, and it won’t surprise me if it becomes a three- or four-day-a-week publication, or if it sells off to the Irving empire or [Transcontinental] Media.”

In fact, back in the real world, the Dennis family have had countless opportunities to sell the Herald over the years—to the Irvings, the Thompsons, TransContinental, and likely even Conrad Black. The wonder is that, unlike almost every other newspaper family in North America, they never did sell out. That’s why Halifax finds itself in the unique position of hosting Canada’s largest independent daily—and by some counts, the largest independent in North America.

The broadsides quoted above run to about 2,250 words, but not once do Bousquet, Steele, or Conrad mention the internet. It’s as if their posts had been written by ostriches—or by Rip Van Winkle, rousing from a 20-year snooze.

The Herald is not contemplating further cuts in staffing, salaries, and benefits because Dennis and Lever are rapacious beasts, bent on destroying the legacy bequeathed to them. (Nor, as is sometimes implied, because the fair maiden Dennis has fallen under the spell of the Svengali Lever.) It’s contemplating these things because the internet has obliterated the economic model that supported newspaper journalism for the last 100 years. The further cuts are desperate efforts to keep the Herald afloat when buoyancy is by no means assured.

Publishers face similar struggles all across the world. In a comment on Bousquet’s post, Colin May offers some perspective:

In Britain, the Guardian is losing $40 million £40 million a year (about CDN$81 million), asking online readers to voluntarily pay $100 £100 to support the paper. It is the 5th most read online newspaper in the world, the print edition has just 150,000 readers.

The Telegraph had a pop-up online ad during Christmas and New Year offering 12 weeks for 12 pounds with a deadline of January 3rd. The offer remains available without a deadline.

The Independent has lost money since inception and is kept alive by a wealthy Russian.

I read them all. A paywall is not a hindrance as it is easy to get around the limit of free views.

Or consider the Boston Globe, sold to the New York Times in 1993 for $1.1 billion. The Times unloaded it two years ago for $70 million, or six cents on the dollar. Except the Times kept $110 million in pension liabilities, so the effective selling price was minus $40 million.

On the Canadaland podcast this week, panelists wrung their hands over the halting progress toward new ways of sustaining print journalism. Joshua Benton, Director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, said local and regional papers face the hardest path to sustainability:

I think there is going to be a demand for a New York Times. I think there is going to be a demand for something like a Globe and Mail going forward. It’s much more questionable what the demand is going to be like for a daily paper in Edmonton or in Halifax…

The inability to achieve scale in audience has a sort of spiralling effect where you’re not big enough to be able to invest in a technology team, your ad sales team is still going to remain small [and] it’s going to be targeting local businesses that are going to be finding better returns at a cheaper price by advertising on Facebook instead of advertising on your news site. I really do worry about local- to regional-size newspapers.

Rage against the capitalists if it makes you feel righteous, but it won’t save a single reporter’s job. Pretending the Great Disruption never happened, and the problems at the Herald are solely due to Sarah’s and Mark’s greed, offers little evidence of journalistic discernment.

We need new models for storytelling and vehicles for holding governments and institutions to account.  We need AllNovaScotia.com and the HalifaxExaminer.ca. We need Mark, and Sarah, and the passionate journalists in the Herald Newsroom, and their union, working together in a full-court press to find ways to make the Herald work in 2020.

Note: I will be on the Rick Howe show, 10 a.m., Thursday, discussing the pending lockout at the Herald.