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New book urges Ottawa to let the country’s largest newspaper chain go bankrupt
My new book The Postmedia Effect chronicles the machinations of Canada's largest newspaper chain, which is 98-percent owned by U.S. hedge funds that are bleeding it dry by also holding most of the...
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Meet the newspaper lobby behind the propaganda push for media bailout money
Since 2017, Canada’s newspaper industry has pushed relentlessly for bailout after bailout, first from government and more recently by asking Ottawa to force Google and Facebook to pay them for...
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SEC clips wings of American vulture fund feeding off Canada’s largest...
New Jersey hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, which owns most of Canada’s largest newspapers, paid US$19.3 millionrecently to settle charges of improper trading brought by the U.S. Securities and...
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Chapter 1 – A question of control
Paul Godfrey seated himself to testify. The wiry 77-year-old newspaper company executive had been called to account by the federal government for the latest devastation his chain had wreaked on...
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Excerpt: The bailout campaign
It was perhaps fitting that Edward Greenspon would head the Public Policy Forum think tank. After all, he had won its Hyman Solomon Award for Excellence in Public Policy Journalism in 2002, following...
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Excerpt: Project Ice
The last week of November 2017 should have been a fruitful one for John Hammill, with Christmas advertising pouring in to fill the pages of the newspapers for which he sold ads in the small Ontario...
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Excerpt: A perfect marriage
The only newspaper monopoly in Canada worse than Postmedia’s in the West was the Irving family’s in New Brunswick. Four generations of Irving industrialists monopolized that province’s media and used...
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Answering an unhinged Terence Corcoran
Cranky McCrankypantsI fear I may have pushed Terence Corcoran over the edge, to use one of my least favourite puns on my name. “I can’t go on,” the 80-year-old National Post columnist confesses at the...
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Panel set to discuss Canadian news media’s seeming descent into hell
There will be lots to discuss about Canada's news media when a panel of long-time media analysts convenes at 7 p.m. on Thursday in Room 1400 of SFU's Harbour Centre campus in downtown Vancouver....
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Answering a misguided John Cruickshank
John Cruickshank has seen the decline of Canada’s newspaper industry from the inside as publisher of the Toronto Star from 2008 until 2016, when he became a founding member of what I call the newspaper...
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