NEWS
1. SaltWire files for creditor protection
Yesterday, the Examiner reported that SaltWire would seek protection from its creditors. In a story published yesterday afternoon, Tim Bousquet writes:
The private equity fund that financed SaltWire’s purchase of most newspapers in Atlantic Canada is moving to dissolve the company.
In documents filed with the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia Monday, Fiera Private Debt Fund (FPD) says that SaltWire owes it more than $32 million.
Moreover, says the filing, SaltWire owes more than $2.6 million in pension payments and “over $7 million in outstanding HST payments (prior to accounting for any available tax refunds).”
An emergency court hearing has been set before Justice John Keith for Wednesday at 2pm.
The move comes a week after Justice Gail Gatchalian ordered SaltWire to pay $500,000 by the end of next month, to cover potential court costs, should the company lose its lawsuit against Transcontinental. SaltWire Network was formed in 2017, to facilitate the purchase of Transcontinental’s assets in Atlantic Canada, including dozens of newspapers.
Click or tap here to read “Private equity firm puts SaltWire in receivership.”
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2. Aftermath: What happens next?
With the news that SaltWire is seeking protection from its creditors, Tim Bousquet looks at how we got here, and what’s likely to happen next.
He starts off with what’s at stake: “the jobs and livelihood of hundreds of reporters, printers, delivery drivers, and related staff across three provinces.”
Bousquet outlines the collapse of SaltWire’s finances — millions owed to the Canada Revenue Agency, to its employees’ pension fund, and missed payments to its lenders.
So, what’s next? Bousquet says an asset sale is coming, and while some of the SaltWire businesses may be profitable enough to be appealing to buyers, it is likely the end of the line for the smaller newspapers. He writes:
It’s speculative at this point, but it’s seems likely that there will not be a buyer for any of the rural newspapers. They’ll just close, and all the employees will lose their jobs.
There are three or four papers that might interest a potential buyer or buyers: the Halifax Herald, the Charlottetown Guardian, the St. John’s Telegram, and (maybe) the Cape Breton Post. Perhaps some buyer(s) will think the branded names of those papers have some value and they can piece together a business model for those papers. Or maybe not.
But even if those four papers continue to exist in name, it won’t be in anything like the current version of the papers. They’ll basically be ad sheets. And in the process, most, probably the vast majority, of current employees will lose their jobs.
This also means the end of the unionized jobs at the Halifax Herald, as it’s certain that even if the paper continues to exist in name, no buyer will recognize the union.
That’s an enormous personal tragedy for hundreds of people working in an industry where they’ll be unlikely to find similar work.
And, let’s be clear, this will also be a disaster in terms of people who want news, especially in smaller communities:
Even through the repeated downsizing and restructuring, the SaltWire papers provided the basic community news that won’t be replaced any time soon, if ever, and that is an enormous loss for communities, and ultimately, democracy.
Click or tap here to read “The end of SaltWire: What happened and what happens next?”
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3. Grand Parade
“As of Monday afternoon, only one person remains in the former designated encampment in Grand Parade in Halifax,” Suzanne Rent reports:
Grand Parade, Victoria Park, Geary Street green space, and the ball field on Cobequid Road remain closed off to the public. Saunders Park is now open.
There are still four designated sites in HRM: a greenway on Barrington Street, Lower Flinn Park, the berms on University Avenue, and Green Road Park in Dartmouth. The site on Barrington Street has power.
The population of people living at Green Road has more than doubled to 30 people.
Click or tap here to read “One person remains in former Grand Parade encampment.”
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4. Traditional eel fishing
At CBC, Sis’moqon has a feature on the importance of the traditional adult eel (katew) fishery to Mi’kmaw communities and culture, and the threats to that fishery. The story is illustrated with striking black-and-white photography by Mackenzie Pardy.
Sis’moqon writes:
Winter harvesting of katew today — with its whipping winds, long arduous hours and a good chance you may go home empty-handed — is a selfless act, done to provide for the community.
It’s a sacrifice that traditional eel fishers from Eskasoni like Aaron Prosper, Floyd Prosper, Bob Denny Jr., Terry Denny and his sons made on a recent February afternoon.
Terry Denny is a knowledge keeper, storyteller and practitioner of traditional harvesting methods passed down to him from his father, who told him that eeling is done for the community. They battle the wind and cold for those who cannot do it themselves…
Aaron Prosper is a Mi’kmaw artist and health consultant who is deeply involved with efforts to preserve and revitalize Mi’kmaw culture, language and traditions in Nova Scotia. His family used to clean and package the eels they caught and give them out to different families, elders and people in need, he said.
He’s noticed a change in the number of eels they catch over the past 15 years. It used to be that they could bring home about 50 in a day, meaning they only needed one trip to provide enough eels for the community. Today the outings yield much smaller numbers.
“There’s been a couple of guys that have come out, make about 20 holes, and they don’t catch any,” he said. “That’s concerning.”
We have seen a lot of stories on the elver fishery and how lucrative it is, the conflicts driven by it and so on. I appreciated the perspective Sis’moqon brings.
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5. NSCC strike possible
Instructors and staff at NSCC could go on strike as early as next Monday, March 18, Aaron Beswick reports at SaltWire:
On Feb. 27, some 75 per cent of the Atlantic Academic Union rejected the school’s latest offer.
AAU negotiator Susan Thompson-Graham said management offered a contract that would have included a “large increase” in pay to members at the lower end of the seniority ladder but little for those higher up…
After conciliation between the two parties failed, they entered a mandated cooling off period.
On Thursday, there will be a final meeting between negotiators.
If that doesn’t bear fruit, the union will be in a position to strike — something it warns could happen as soon as March 18.
“Morale is pretty darned low,” said Thompson-Graham.
Stressful times for all involved, including students.
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VIEWS
The news business in decline
There is a simple narrative for what’s going wrong in the news business, for all the layoffs, and the disappearance of local news. It goes something like this: Newspapers were not prepared for the digital age, Craigslist killed classifieds, and then the tech giants took away the rest of the advertising (while profiting from content without paying for it), and with the rise of the internet, nobody wanted to pay for news anymore anyway.
SaltWire CEO Mark Lever leans on this story in SaltWire’s own article (by Aaron Beswick) on why the company is seeking creditor protection:
“Revenue from traditional media advertising has long supported the production of journalistic content, but in recent years, revenue from traditional advertising has undergone significant change. In addition to these global challenges, Canadian media companies are under pressure from domestic government funded competitors, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Canada Post.”
I would much prefer to see the word “journalism” to “production of journalistic content” in that paragraph, but that’s just me. I find it curious that Lever blames CBC, which, sure, may be a “government funded competitor” but has been around for decades, including during the Chronicle Herald’s heyday.
And the Canada Post competition affects the flyer side of SaltWire’s business, as it competes with the post office’s direct mail. However, my understanding is that the Government of Canada owns Canada Post, a Crown corporation, but does not provide direct funding.
From the 2022 Canada Post annual report:
Canada Post has a mandate from the Government of Canada to fund its operations with revenue from the sale of products and services, rather than with taxpayer funding, and to conduct its operations on a financially self-sustaining basis.
Regardless, the simple narrative tells part of the story of course, but it oversimplifies. It creates a sense of inevitability.
Now, I have no idea whether SaltWire was sustainable or not, and what if anything could have been done for the business to survive, so I am not commenting on that directly. I’m just saying that, well, when it comes to news it’s complicated.
One of the best recent discussions of this that I have heard was on Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. A recent episode features Marx interviewing Victor Pickard, Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.
To his credit, Pickard steadfastly refuses to argue that there is a single cause for the crisis. (My own personal over-simplification narrative is to blame private equity ownership of newspaper chains, including Postmedia). And, while exploring new models, he also doesn’t idealize the past or indulge in the facile thinking that scrappy little digital startups will quickly provide a replacement for major newspapers.
I won’t get into all the points Pickard makes — it is a lively and informative conversation, and it’s worth listening to the podcast — but I do want to note what he says happens when we lose local news:
I try to remind my friends on the left, that for all of our causes, newspapers are absolutely essential, or at least I want to say local journalism is absolutely essential. We all have such high stakes in the survival of local journalism. There’s so much data to show what we already intuitively know, that we all learn in school that democracy requires a free, and by implication, a functional press system. But now we have the data to show what happens to local communities when they lose their local newspapers. Sure enough, we see that they’re less likely to vote, less civically engaged, less likely to run for office. And yet we see higher levels of corruption, higher levels of extremism. So we know it’s bad. We’ve got to figure out structural alternatives to these failing commercial models.
And, to be more blunt about it, Pickard adds:
I really think [the disappearance of local news] creates this fertile ground for fascism. We don’t have to say there’s a direct cause and effect relationship here. But I do think it…creates a context within which fascism thrives. That should get our attention from the get-go.
But beyond that, there are all these subtle, negative effects that happen — whether there’s no longer local reporters that are covering the local school board, or city council, or the state legislature. And oftentimes, it’s the boring stuff; it’s the news stories that are not sexy. It’s not clickbait, we’re not going to pay for this stuff. And yet, we desperately need it… As a society, we need a critical mass of people who are aware of these things going on, like the health of our local bridge, or what’s happening to our roads, and the railroads. Things that, again, are not going to really capture our attention. But, still, we need to know this stuff…
So those are some of the problems, you have some of the more lofty ideals of things like the Fourth Estate is supposed to keep a watchful eye on the powerful and to create a forum for diverse views and voices. And I think that’s all very true, but it also needs to go where the silences are, journalists need to bear witness. And that’s another subtle negative effect that happens when you don’t have journalists on the beat, especially for vulnerable communities who are often most at risk to, for example, state violence and police violence.
If you’ve got journalists on the beat, it’s not going to solve all the problems, but at least it’s going to create some kind of safeguard, social safety net, for folks to make sure there’s someone there to bear witness on this.
In addition to current coverage, there is also, as an Examiner reader comments this morning, the question of archives and what will happen to them — in particular for the smaller rural papers.
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Chillin’ with Dylan
I’ve been alerted to the existence of this video, featuring Bob Dylan hanging out in a parking lot in Hamilton in 1986, during the filming of Hearts of Fire. He chats about metal with these young Judas Priest and Ozzy fans (he asks what they think of Ratt), goofs around with a couple of young women with feathered hair, and meets local wrestler Ted Grizzly. “I’ve been a fan of Bobby’s for a long time,” Grizzly says. “All wrestlers are,” Dylan replies.
It’s a delightful few minutes, with Dylan actually seeming happy to engage with fans and hang out with them.
I don’t know much about Grizzly, other than that he was a mainstay on the wrestling scene in the Toronto area, including as a jobber who had fights at Maple Leaf Gardens against the likes of King Kong Bundy and Randy “Macho Man” Savage. If you watch the video, you will also see why he was in demand as a local Santa Claus. (I believe his daughter lives in Nova Scotia).
When Grizzly (real name Gary Wolfenden) died in 2009, the Hamilton Spectator remembered him like this:
He was a fall guy for Hulk Hogan in the wrestling ring, played Santa Claus at Lime Ridge Mall, and was so crazy about Christmas he kept his tree decorated year round.
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Government
City
Today
No meetings
Tomorrow
Special Events Advisory Committee (Wednesday, 9:30am, online) — agenda
Province
No meetings
On campus
Dalhousie
Today
No events
Tomorrow
Noon Hour Recital: Composition (Wednesday, 11:45am, Strug Concert Hall)
Cannabis and Psychosis Risk’ (Wednesday, 7pm, online) — Phil Tibbo will talk
King’s
MacLennan Lecture: Harry Benjamin, hormones, and the early history of transgender healthcare (Tuesday, 7pm, Alumni Hall) — Alison Li will talk
Saint Mary’s
Today
No events
Tomorrow
Reading + Q&A with SMU’s 2024 Writer in Residence, Casey Plett (Wednesday, 7pm, Atrium 101) — more info here
In the harbour
Halifax
08:30: CSL Tacoma, bulker, arrives at Gold Bond from Baltimore
09:00: One Grus, container ship, sails from Pier 41 for Singapore
10:30: Erving, container ship, arrives at Pier 41 from Tanger Med, Morocco
12:30: Hoegh Transporter, car carrier, arrives at Autoport from Dundalk
16:45: Hoegh Transporter, car carrier, sails from autoport for sea
Cape Breton
09:00: Evans Spirit, cargo, arrives at Mulgrave North Dock from Baltimore
Footnotes
I was buying something online the other day, and entered my library card number (which I know by heart) instead of my credit card number.
WHERE THE HELL THE MONEY IS COMING FROM?
Saltwire’s filing for court protection is a defense move to delay actions by any of it’s creditors to collection Saltwire unpaid debts. It is an extremely expensive process.
CCAA actions usually mean banks cannot collect on operating loans so sales $$ are used to pay all the professional fees.
I doubt this is possible with the private debt. It will be interesting once all the court filings are available on the court appointed trustee’s website to see WHERE THE HELL THE MONEY IS COMING FROM.