Phillip Crawley is standing in his downtown Toronto office showing off the Globe and Mail of the future, which looks very much like the Globe and Mail of the present—only smaller and somewhat shinier. This is the 18-inch-wide by 21-inch-deep prototype of a new format slated for rollout in the fall of 2010. The Globe’s CEO and publisher is particularly stoked about the new capacity to run colour on coated stock where desired, reflected by the many mocked-up high-end ads, among them a full page for the jeweller Tiffany & Co., whose serene blue background portends a lucrative oasis in the parched advertising landscape. Finally, he says, the Globe will be able to offer advertisers heat-set colour with the timeliness of a daily 24-hour deadline, rather than the weeks required by magazines: “That’s a significant advantage.”
So captivated was Crawley by the technology that he signed an 18-year, $1.7-billion printing deal with Transcontinental Inc. in August 2008, minutes before the economic downturn decimated advertising sales and 24-hour news cycles were replaced by Tweets. In the current print media landscape the commitment seems a high-stakes gamble by the self-anointed “Canada’s National Newspaper”—either the 21st-century equivalent of investing in state-of-the-art buggy technology at the turn of the 20th century or a shrewd counterintuitive vision of how people will still want to read news two decades hence.
The news about newspapers of late has been bleak. Earlier this month, the New York Times Co., beset by losses, hired Goldman Sachs to sell the Boston Globe, which it acquired in 1993 for US$1.1 billion. The money-losing San Francisco Chronicle, with whom Transcontinental signed a 15-year printing contract in 2006, is on the brink of being shut down or sold. Respected outlets such as the 146-year-old Seattle Post Intelligencer and 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News have shifted operations completely online. In late May, the Newspaper Association of America gathered top executives in Chicago to share ideas about how to preserve traditions of newsgathering in a digital age. Last week, the association reported that newspapers are increasingly being read online, a platform they have yet to figure out how to monetize: the number of unique visitors to U.S. newspaper websites grew 10 per cent in the first three months of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008. (Similar statistics aren’t available for Canadian newspapers but anecdotal reports suggest a similar trend.)
In the essay “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” new-media thinker Clay Shirky lays out a compelling rationale for why newspapers as we know them are dying: “It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves—the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public—has stopped being a problem,” Shirky writes.
Yet the British-born Crawley, a 64-year-old Fleet Street veteran, expresses confidence about the future of print printed on newsprint, even as the Globe looks into other delivery systems such as Kindle and e-editions. “But people don’t want to get it that way,” he says, a fact another industry veteran chalks up to inertia: “Newspapers still have forward momentum partly because baby boomers don’t want to change.” Of Shirky’s thesis, Crawley is dismissive: “There are a million experts out there. But not many models with a track record.”
As Crawley presents it, the Globe, the country’s ruling-class broadsheet of record, differs from many American papers. “I’ve said it to a lot of advertisers: don’t lump us together, we’re not all equal,” he says. What makes the Globe special, he avers, is its ability to deliver an affluent demographic to advertisers. That he attributes to the paper’s strong brand identity, stemming from its respected journalists and the fact it projects a world view through Canadian eyes via a phalanx of foreign correspondents, unlike many U.S. papers which cut back on bureaus and turned to syndicated copy. He boasts of the support of its parent CTVglobemedia, a private company whose stakeholders include BCE Inc. (15 per cent), Torstar Corporation (20 per cent), Ontario Teachers’ Plan Board (25 per cent), and the Woodbridge Company Limited, the private holding company for the billionaire Thomson family (40 per cent). Being partly owned by Canada’s richest clan, who also owns Thomson Reuters, is a strength, says Crawley: “These people have a track record on a global scale over decades.”
The paper’s circulation drop—to some 295,000 average on weekdays, and 369,000 on weekends, as of March 31, down markedly from five years ago—was deliberate, the publisher says, the result of putting an end to giveaway copies to hotels and airlines to boost circulation numbers, a legacy of the battle with the National Post. “We’re making twice as much money,” he says. Combining print and online, readership is larger than it has ever been, at 2.9 million a week. The paper’s fully paid subscription base remains steady, Crawley says: “That’s the gold standard.”
Still, the Globe’s venerable history dating back to 1844 hasn’t insulated it from industry malaise. Revenues have slid in key advertising niches: jobs and careers, real estate and automotive. The paper laid off 30 staff earlier this year, its first job cuts since the 1982 recession. Last weekend, its union almost unanimously rejected a proposed six-year contract that demands wage rollbacks for 30 per cent of staff, a week’s unpaid vacation, extended work hours without additional pay, a pension plan restructuring that would cut benefits by up to 50 per cent for future retirees, and the ability to reclassify jobs. A strike or lockout could take place at midnight June 30.
Crawley is known to thrive on such combat. When he arrived in Canada in 1998 as the Globe’s president and COO, his first task was to stave off the upstart Conrad Black-backed National Post. Named publisher and CEO in 1999, he travelled to the U.K. to recruit Fleet Street journalists to tart up the “Grey Lady of Front Street.” With him was then- editor-in-chief William Thorsell, unaware he was selecting his successor in Richard Addis. That skirmish is now long over, the Brits returned home, and the Post’s current owner, CanWest Global Communications, is scrambling to restructure its massive debt to avoid bankruptcy protection.
