Going digital is what’s hurting Canadian newspapers, not a lack of revenues or readers, which are both up, a publishing industry spokesman said Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“Newspapers don’t have an audience problem,” John Hinds, president and chief executive of industry association Newspapers Canada, told the Vancouver Sun.<\/p>\n
“There’s a big fallacy out there. We have a revenue problem as we transition to cross-platform materials — how do we pay for those? Our audiences are bigger than ever and actually growing.”<\/p>\n
The comments come after Glacier Media this week announced the closure of the Kamloops Daily News after 80 years, citing insufficient cost-cutting.<\/p>\n
Hinds noted that advertising revenues dipped along with the economy, but have rebounded.<\/p>\n
According to NADbank, which measures circulation, half of Canadians read a printed newspaper every day.<\/p>\n
And three-quarters read a printed newspaper at least once a week.<\/p>\n
These figures remained steady while online news readership has grown in recent years.<\/p>\n
Yet last year, four Canadian dailies switched to weekly publication and the free daily 24 Hours stopped publishing in Ottawa, Edmonton and Calgary.<\/p>\n
Canada’s largest newspaper publisher, Sun Media, also eliminated more than 1,000 jobs at its newspapers nationwide as part of a restructuring to meet “unprecedented changes in the print media industry driven largely by the digital revolution,” it said.<\/p>\n
A union representing Sun workers accused the company of diverting healthy newspaper profits to its “laughably bad” start-up television network Sun TV.<\/p>\n
“All the newspaper companies are struggling because the world has changed, consumers have changed, technology has changed, but you have readers,” NADbank’s president Anne Crassweller told the Sun.<\/p>\n
“Isn’t that the bottom line? The audience is there.”<\/p>\n
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