Effective July 1st, 2012 there will not be a printed Sunday edition.
By John Connolly May 28, 2012
A note to our readers
For the last 109 years the Edmonton Journal has evolved to reflect our readers and the community we serve. Our goal has always been to be the most valued and credible source of local news and information in our community.
That goal has not changed. However, the newspaper industry worldwide is facing widespread challenges as reader and advertising habits evolve and competition online increases. The unprecedented pace of those changes has led us to make some difficult decisions.
Effective June 15, we will no longer publish TV Times in print. The audience for printed TV guides has been declining because there are other more up-to-date alternatives online and elsewhere and because TV Times has become uneconomical to produce.
We are also re-evaluating our distribution strategy outside Edmonton’s census metropolitan area, which might lead to digital delivery only for Journal content or other more cost-effective delivery means in rural areas outside suburban Edmonton.
Effective July 1, we will return to a six-day publishing cycle in print and suspend our Sunday edition. News will continue to be updated online, on mobile and tablet so you will continue to receive the very best local news on our digital platforms.
We believe these changes will allow us to better focus our resources to provide you with excellent local journalism in print, online and on your mobile devices.
Postmedia cuts copy editing jobs, stops some print editions
by Craig Silverman Poynter.org PublishedMay 28, 2012
At company-wide meetings held late this afternoon, Postmedia Network, the largest newspaper publisher in Canada, announced it is cutting editing positions at several of its largest city dailies and will stop printing paper editions on certain days.
This change is similar to recent announcements from the Denver Post (reducing copy editors) and the New Orleans Times-Picayune (stopping print editions on certain days). Journalism school professor and Postmedia adviser Jeff Jarvis tweeted today in response to the news (which he says he did not know in advance):
1.5 dozen daily papers in NAmerica are no longer daily. How fast will this trend spread?
Postmedia hasn’t issued a public statement, but media reporters in Canada, including The Globe And Mail’s Steve Ladurantaye, began tweeting the news from the 3 p.m. meetings held in cities including Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and Toronto.
The company announced it will no longer publish Sunday papers in Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa. (Papers in Saskatoon and Montreal previously cut their Sunday editions.) In Canada the Sunday paper is the smallest, rather than the largest, edition of the week. The Saturday paper is king in Canada.
The National Post, which does not publish on Sunday, will not publish a print edition on Mondays during the summer. This has been the case over the past three summers, but the internal company memo obtained by The Huffington Post Canada states that the company will “look closely at its publication schedule going forward.”
Postmedia is also cutting a significant number of jobs from its newsrooms. This is in part to enable it to move print page production to a centralized facility in Hamilton, Ontario. That means a lot of copy editors will lose their jobs.
Numbers have not yet been confirmed across the chain, but The Ottawa Citizen and the Gazette in Montreal are each losing more than 20 editing positions. (The Citizen has 105 people in its newsroom, according to its managing editor.) Other papers are also losing jobs.
“While the changes we have been making are about creating the company we need to be, it also means changing the way we have done many things in the past,” reads the company memo. “While some areas are expanding, some roles across our operations will be eliminated.”
This is the second time this month Postmedia has announced job cuts. In early May, it eliminated 25 jobs when it ceased operating its own national newswire and signed a contract with Canadian Press.
The company is carrying more than $500 million in debt and lost $11 million last quarter. (All figures in Canadian dollars.)
Not a surprise at all considering the shift from newspapers to on-line. The Journal conceding Sunday to the SUN is smart business. For the longest time, it's been the Saturday Journal and the Sunday Sun for weekend dominance.
Most of us are well aware that newspapers are under attack. Kijiji has robbed the newspapers, Bargain Finder and Autotrader of millions of dollars of lost revenue from classified advertising, which used to be a profit center for the papers. Not only is Kijiji free, it's better - you can post several images of your product for absolutely nothing.
One note. There is one area of print that is alive and doing well - Smaller community publications. This is why Warren Buffet recently purchased 63 smaller newspaper outlets in the US for 142 million. People in a smaller center still read the local paper from cover to cover for community news, events and sports. Here's the link...
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