New media underpins dumb-ocracy

Three new newspapers are launching into the Vancouver market this month, all chasing the readers the big dailies and community weeklies have lost. The men behind them would be better off getting themselves vintage 65 Mustangs if chasing lost youth is what they're trying to do

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

The world's first newspaper, Relation, was launched in Strasbourg exactly 400 years ago, in 1605, by Johann Carolus. Since then, one critic or another has proclaimed print media to be collapsing under a state of siege. And yet the World Association of Newspapers estimated this year that since Carolus's inaugural edition, over a billion people now read a daily paper. Only the stock market endures more premature obituaries.

It's no wonder then that observers of the media industry are ambivalent about where it's at and where it's going. Vancouver, infamously the city with the highest degree of media ownership concentration in the Western world, and the one place where that degree of monopolization is supposed to have granted the largest player in the market a lock on all available ad revenue and readers, is this month awash under the tsunami of three new newspapers each produced by major global corporations.

They are all free: The Metro is the product of a Stockholm-headquartered media and industry conglomerate. The paper is similar to what this company launched earlier in Montreal and Toronto and 61 other cities in 16 other countries around the world (in 15 other languages besides English). It is a popular but editorially disinterested paper containing virtually random assemblages of words and images vacuumed up from the heaps turned out by those word factories, the wire services, and just enough of them to keep some open water between the flotilla of ads.

The Dose , due for launching before this month's end, promises to be even more brain-numbing than the Metro . If you know what “the dose” usually means, you are intentionally excluded from the reading market the paper is aiming to target. CanWestGlobal hired a market research firm that recommended the name exactly because it would turn off anyone over 35—that is, anyone who knows the sexual-disease meaning of the word—and thereby (they hope) attract the 18 to 35 age group who, the reasoning goes, will note their elders' disgust at the title (but not the reason) and will rebelliously flock to it as a result.

24 Hours , the third entry in the market, is seeking to attract the very same apparently lost generation of youth as the other two and is the product of the Sun Media newspaper company, makers of trashy tabloids in Montreal and Toronto.

Because they are all going after the same youth market, all three entries represent the average mid-40s media executive's predictable definition of youth, probably arrived at by studying what the average mid-40s executive at a large advertising company thinks is youth.

One may suppose that three very large media companies engaging in expensive new launches might have sought access to in-depth and accurate knowledge of the newspaper-reading market, and in particular, of the 18 to 35 year-old market that has been slipping away from them so frustratingly and is the target for all three new products. These three new newspaper products, then, Metro, Dose , and 24 Hours , could be taken to be the combined result of the corporate media industry's very best efforts to reach out to that segment of the market and give them, finally, what the companies are sure they want.

But judging from these newest of new media products, either 18 to 35 year-old readers have a very simple view of the world that can best be characterized as shallow, profoundly disconnected and unable to concentrate for one minute, or these corporations are hopelessly lost in the woods and profoundly out of touch with the world, and not just the youth who inhabit it. Given who ultimately stands behind these new media products, the latter is most likely the case. It is the men behind these papers who have a simple view of the world and who are shallow and disconnected from it. The kids, on the other hand, are probably all right.

Metro is owned by Modern Times Group, itself owned by AB Kinnevik, a Swedish investment firm launched in 1936 by three bold and audacious capitalists, Hugo Stenbeck, Robert von Horn and Wilhelm Klingspor. The chair of the board and presidency of Kinnevik has been continuously occupied by these three men or their sons ever since. Their families remain the majority shareholders in the parent company, which the founders grew to include steel manufacturing firms, TV satellites (the third largest in Europe), telephone companies, radio stations, and car dealerships, among other interests.

Count Carl-Gustaf Klingspor, son of Wilhelm, became Chair of the board in 1977, to be replaced by Jan Hugo Stenbeck, son of Hugo, in 1985, only to be replaced by Edvard von Horn, son of Robert, in 2002. Jan Hugo's son, also a Hugo, is a busy boy heading up the Victory Challenge team for the 2005 America's Cup yacht race, which, as the corporate prospectus relates, is expected to provide lots of spectacle this year for the company's vast and varied media properties to broadcast. Expect lots of pictures of sailing boat races in Metro— just what the youth market wants!

Dose is owned by CanWest MediaWorks, a subsidiary of CanWest Global which was formed out of a merger between Ontario Global television network and CanWest Capital Corporation founded by Izzy Asper in 1975. Asper was a newspaper columnist for the Globe and Mail , a tax lawyer, and an out-of-work politician before he and partners raised about $750,000 to buy KCND, a bankrupt television station broadcasting to Winnipeg from Pembina, North Dakota—population 343, but just two miles over the border—to circumvent CRTC content rules.

Asper and partners made terrific money peddling popular American television shows to Winnipeggers, and after acrimonious splits with his partners and purchases of other bankrupt television stations to expand his market for American shows, Asper emerged by the late 1990s a media tycoon sitting on television, radio, and extensive newspaper properties across the country. He passed away in 2003 leaving his young son Leonard suddenly alone as president and CEO of the CanWestGlobal media empire.

24 Hours is the product of Sun Media, owned by Quebecor, founded in 1965 by Pierre Péladeau. Péladeau got his start buying defunct weekly community papers around Montreal in 1950 and jazzing them up with entertainment news. He eventually launched Le Journal de Montreal , which soon dominated the market. He parlayed his success with tabloid entertainment-oriented newspapers into a printing empire turning out magazines and books as well as newspapers that today is the largest printing company in the world. In 2002, Pierre Karl Péladeau, his son, was named CEO of Quebecor by the company's Chair of the Board, twice disgraced ex-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

Vancouver, then, is the stage for a battle between 45 year-old Edward Von Horn, 40 year-old Leonard Asper, and 40 year-old Pierre Karl Péladeau, all sons anxious to escape the long shadows of powerful, self-made, but now dead, entrepreneurial fathers. And they've all chosen to do so by launching risky, free newspapers aimed at young readers not interested anymore in the media their fathers created.

They all bring very deep pockets and much clout to the battle: Metro, Dose , and 24 Hours are each part of multibillion dollar global media empires. Once in, none are likely to give up easily on their Vancouver forays, and all can afford to lose a great deal of money fending off the disappointment of the lingering and sour-faced ghosts of their fathers.

But two of them must give up, if not all three, eventually, for the Vancouver advertising market is simply not big enough to provide revenue for all. Metro has already closed down a few of its launches in cities in Europe and South America, and so has proven itself unafraid to admit mistakes and back out, but it doesn't make mistakes often. It certainly won't be the first to quit Vancouver.

The Dose is clearly a defensive maneuver that CanWest would not of its own volition have launched were it not for the huge Metro paper moving into its own backyard to steal its market share. Judging by its name, it does not come with a well thought-out business plan. But because Vancouver is CanWest's best, most productive and profitable market, it is unlikely to back out no matter how awful things go and no matter for how long. Still, CanWest doesn't have the experience with free commuter papers that Metro has and won't last as long.

24 Hours is probably the weakest of the three launches and comes with the least commitment on the part of the ultimate person behind the paper. It is likely to give up first. It must be noted however that all three global companies had recent revenue-generating troubles as a result of overreach by all three youthful and impetuous leaders. Shifting financial situations could force any of them—if not all three—into a retreat at any moment.

All of this raises serious questions for existing free weekly entertainment-oriented newspapers in Vancouver, chief amongst them the venerable and aging Georgia Straight . Ultimately, all three new papers are doomed to fail in the Vancouver market because they don't know what the 18 to 35 year-olds want, will therefore fail to secure reader loyalty, and will eventually be abandoned by the advertisers who jumped aboard.

But by the time they finish the whole process and pull back out, they may well have laid waste to the revenue streams of any free newspapers that preceded them in this market. The Georgia Straight stands as much chance of surviving as an old-fashioned general store would, planted between a new WalMart, a new Home Depot, and a new Costco.

Don't worry about The Republic though, or other newspapers like it. We play a different game: we don't chase readers to support the ads we've already sold, we chase advertisers to support the readers we've already earned.

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