CP link

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The Halifax Daily News ceased publication Monday as the tabloid's owner, Montreal-based Transcontinental Media, moved ahead with a plan to offer a free daily called Metro.

The company said all but a few of the 92 employees at the Daily News will be let go.

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Nova Scotia Business Journal

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The Daily News staff received word at about 10:00 a.m. today (Feb 11) from Transcontinental managers that the newspaper would be shut down. Eighty-five Halifax staffers are affected by the closure.

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Stephen Kimber, acting director of the school of journalism at the University of King's College, expects the loss of the Daily News will have an effect on the Herald.

With no competition, the Herald will likely reassess how it chooses what stories to cover, such as investigative pieces or stories that require travel overseas, Kimber said.

"Those were editorial decisions that suddenly become economic decisions. 'Why do we have to put that much money into this? We don't have anybody to compete with anymore,'" he told CBC News.

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[ 12 February 2008: Message edited by: M.Gregus ]

I, for one, will miss The Daily News. There are several things about it that I like. We get both papers and I will say that, except for Ralph Surette (whom I used to publish regularly on rabble.ca), there is not one must-read columnist for me in The Herald.

And of course, who would deny that The Daily News has much better comic strips? Much better!

ETA: Michelle, the workers who lost their jobs will get two weeks severance pay for each year they've worked at the paper.

[ 12 February 2008: Message edited by: Sharon ]

Meanwhile, one industry publication provided an analysis of the situation.

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[I]t's basically yet another case of a PM newspaper not being able to survive in a newspaper world where the AM newspaper dominates, in this case the family-owned Chronicle-Herald with some 114,000 circulation.

In its coverage of the Daily News closure the Chronicle-Herald interviewed at length Marc-Noel Ouellette, senior vice-president of Transcontinental Media. “It was costing a fortune. I won’t put a figure, but I’ll tell you it’s in the millions,” he said.

And so his description of why a new business model was necessary: “We’re all fighting for the same advertising dollars; we’re all fighting for the same eyeballs. It’s a tough game out there and we’ve decided we’ve had enough of losing the amounts we were losing and decided to put our eggs in what we think is a very, very interesting venture.”

That’s all sweet music to the Chronicle-Herald. “We’re always open for business and would love to have more advertisers and more subscribers, so, we’ll gladly take them (subscribers and advertisers from the Daily News) on board,” said Vice President Sarah Dennis.

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Halifax...will turn out to be a great test market for this new business model – kill the paid-for newspaper with more staff and more pages that published every day of the week, and replace it with a free newspaper with about the same circulation, produced by far less staff with a lesser journalistic product and publishing just five days a week, and see if the freebie can make a profit where the paid-for could not.

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