Free-newspaper publisher Metro International SA is launching its seventh Canadian daily in Halifax, drawn by the city's large student population, the chance to offer national advertising rates for the first time – and the shutdown of the Halifax Daily News.
Metro Halifax will begin publishing this Thursday, Valentine's Day, the company said Monday in a joint announcement with its two Canadian partners in the new venture, Torstar Corp. of Toronto, and Transcontinental Media GP of Montreal, which has owned the Daily News for the past five years.
“Halifax is a university town and the demographics we are looking at are young, urban and mobile,” Marc-Noel Ouellette, senior vice-president of Transcontinental's newspaper group, said of the new free daily, in which his company will be a minority shareholder and which it will print.
“There's a large population of that in Halifax,” he added in a telephone interview from the Nova Scotia capital, shortly after announcing the shutdown of the Daily News to its 92 employees.
The Halifax census metropolitan area has a total population of about 375,000, and rough calculations suggest that the city's eight universities and colleges boast about 38,000 full-time students among them, ranging from a little more than 12,000 at Dalhousie University down to about 140 at the Atlantic School of Theology.
The partners said they plan to “ramp up” to a total daily circulation of 25,000 copies of the new Halifax paper each day, with distribution through a mix of promoters, street boxes and other “strategic locations.”
Founded in Sweden but now based in Britain, Metro publishes papers in more than 100 cities in 21 countries, and says it targets readers in the 18-to-49 age range.
With several Canadian partners, it already publishes free dailies in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver and, according to the company, they boast a total daily circulation of more than 825,000. Metro said that, with Halifax, it is now publishing in cities that account for 46 per cent of Canada's population.
(Transcontinental is the majority shareholder in the Montreal paper, while Torstar is an equal partner with Metro in Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Ottawa.)
Besides youthful demographics, Halifax's other key appeal is that its addition will enable Metro company to offer advertisers a “coast-to-coast presence” and national package rates, said Bill McDonald, the company's Toronto-based group publisher for English Canada.
“We have a local focus editorially, but we believe from an advertiser's perspective, there is growing interest in a national product such as ours,” he said in a telephone interview. “It definitely will help us.”
Veteran media buyer Sunni Boot, who heads ZenithOptimedia in Toronto, said the appeal to national advertisers, such as automobile makers, will, of course, depend on the rates Metro decides to charge.
She also said that newspapers, paid or free, remain “a very strong local medium.”
However, she also said the Metro papers have been a “very good vehicle” for her firm's clients, “and having one in an important market like Halifax is good.”
In an era where many newspapers have been losing readers, Metro's papers have “done very well,” she said. “Metro readers like the editorial,” she said. “For them, it's a quick read, a quick catch-up on local news.”
Greg Lutes, the first publisher of Metro's Toronto paper, will head the new Halifax edition, also with the publisher title.
As for shutting down the Daily News, Mr. Ouellette at Transcontinental, cited heavy losses at the paper.
“We've been losing a lot of money in Halifax. . .and for several years we've known we had to do something here to turn around this place,” he said. “Our efforts within the traditional model of newspaper, which is to invest in the newsroom, cut costs and so on, were not enough to offset the losses.”
He said the annual losses have been “in the millions” but would not elaborate.
Mr. Ouellette said the Daily News's management team had been aware of the seriousness of the financial situation for a year, and although this had not been officially communicated to employees, “many of [them] knew the situation was not rosy.”
Transcontinental said that shutting down the daily will not affect the company's Halifax-area distribution network, its four locally published weekly newspapers or its real estate guide, Transaction.
The Montreal printer and publisher said it is offering severance pay and outplacement services to the displaced workers. It also said that “a few” of them may find jobs at its other Nova Scotia operations, which have about 800 employees and include 11 weekly papers in all, four dailies, and two printing plants. The new free daily will be printed at one of those plants.
Mr. McDonald said Metro Halifax will likely hire most of the 20 workers it expects to employ from the Daily News.
Transcontinental bought the Halifax daily, and a number of other papers, in 2002 from CanWest Global Communications Corp. of Winnipeg, which had acquired it in 2000 from disgraced former publishing magnate Conrad Black's Hollinger Corp. It has a circulation of about 20,000 copies.
The Daily News can trace its roots back to 1974 when two local families launched Great Eastern News Co. Ltd. and began publishing a suburban weekly named The Bedford-Sackville News. In 1981 it moved to downtown Halifax, went daily and adopted its current name.
It was sold to Newfoundland Capital Corp. in 1985 and, in 1997, to Southam Newspapers which was then controlled by Hollinger.
The Daily News's key print competitor is The Chronicle-Herald, a much larger paper with a circulation about 114,000 copies a day, which dates back to 1875 and has been controlled since 1904 by Halifax's Dennis family.
The Transcontinental paper is not the first Nova Scotia daily to bite the dust lately. Late last month, The Valley Today, the first evening newspaper to be launched in Canada in years, shut down after barely three months on the street, saying it had failed to attract enough readers and advertising.
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