New papers eat 100 trees a week

All three companies launching free daily papers should be ashamed of themselves for not even operating like businesses

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

“Unfortunately, I do not yet have a rate card I can e-mail as we’re still setting up the office here,” the ad sales manager from the brand-new Jim Pattison-owned 24 Hours Vancouver daily newspaper told me—more than a week after their launch. The advertising rate sheet from Metro Vancouver, one of the other new daily papers—this one owned by a huge multinational company as well as CanWest Global and Sun Media—was available by email, but appeared to be thrown together right after my phone call asking for one. The people at Dose wrote me back to give me an alternate name and phone number to call, after three email exchanges involving me posing as a potential advertiser wanting only to know what the ads cost. A message left at the new number never was returned.

All three papers are quite obviously advertising sales businesses first and newspapers only secondarily. Word of the impending launch of all three had been around for months giving the huge, well-financed organizations launching them plenty of time to get themselves up and running. Like any new business, the first week or two of operations are the most critical—this is when publicity is at a peak and is all free, when people are talking about you, and when new sales relationships are most likely to be forged.

How, then, can three large, professional and well-financed companies all come off looking so small, amateur and cheap? It’s not as though the projects are inconsequential. One of the papers’ executives expects the longest-established and second-most circulated daily paper in Vancouver, The Province, to fold under the new pressure. The Georgia Straight, the entrenched entertainment weekly no one in 30 years could dislodge, is reportedly in a panic. The newspaper situation in Vancouver is so dire, a Senate committee set up last month in downtown Vancouver to hear testimony from everyone in the industry.

Ads in these papers pull serious dough. A full-page ad in The Metro for one day costs $5,800. In 24 Hours, a one-day full-page ad, which is about half the size, costs $4,400. The Dose advertising staff never did get back to me, but their rates are no doubt in a similar range. Certainly there are deals being made with the current advertisers since none of these papers have been around long enough to substantiate any reliable readership figures. On the other hand, between the three of them there are only 15 advertisers at last count, six of which are with companies owned by one or another of the newspapers’ owners.

Estimating some of the basic costs of these papers also produces serious figures even without considering (albeit anorexic) editorial costs. The Metro probably costs about $190,000 a month just to print and distribute. 24 Hours is likely in the $225,000 per month range. And The Dose is likely close to $375,000 per month. Those kinds of bills can add up pretty fast, especially in a small market like Vancouver where there isn’t likely $800,000 per month of untapped potential in the print advertising market.

Arrogance and waste

One might presume all three companies have decided to just lose loads of money in the six months it takes to get circulation numbers that advertisers can use to assess their rates. But that isn’t the case. Ad salespeople from at least two of the companies have been around to small independent businesses far from downtown trying to sell ads to businesses that have minimal or zero advertising budgets and serve no larger than a neighbourhood market.

It makes no sense: if a call comes in asking for advertising rates, you’d think all three papers would fall over themselves to secure a contract. Instead, they admit their offices are not set up, they scramble to whip up an incomprehensible rate sheet, or they blow the call off to an associate who never calls back. Presuming these operations might need something like twice the figures above to cover all their costs, or about $1.6 million per month in total between them, it’s obvious not all these papers, if any, are going to survive. Those that scramble first improve their chances. But none of them are even stirring. And this is in the first few weeks of operations for all of them, the period when all good businesses are scrambling their hardest after already hitting the ground running.

A unique combination of arrogance and ignorance is a possible explanation. The people setting up one of the companies, 24 Hours, couldn’t believe how the others were so dim witted as to overlook the possibility of placing distribution boxes at bus stops. That was until the City informed the company such placement of boxes is disallowed since they get in the way of bus passengers getting on and off the bus. No matter, the boxes were chained in place. The City then removed the offending boxes and impounded them. That was when a friend of the president of the newspaper company who sits on City council piped up and said the rules would be relaxed to make way for the diversity of voices the new newspaper represented. (The paper, 24 Hours, is so trashy it makes The Province look highbrow, and can only be considered a contribution to a diversity of voices if a kick in the ass can be considered a transportation policy). Though hundreds of boxes were seized, the $300 per box impound fee was immediately paid, it’s impact on the project dismissed as a mere nuisance. That fee alone is more than twice the total expenses for The Republic in its entire four-year history.

Since the arrival of these papers, litter has filled the streets. They are being handed to commuters, or rather shoved in their hands, and then promptly dropped on the ground where City staff, shopkeepers, or no one, is picking up the mess. The Skytrain cars are ankle deep in the garbage. No wonder: the three papers together consume the equivalent of over 100 trees each week. A whole forest is being ripped out of the interior, ground to a pulp and poured into the streets of Vancouver each week.

And for what? They’re not even going to make sustainable businesses out of their halfhearted efforts and will only destroy other existing businesses in the time it takes for them to realize their business plans were weak. It is truly a crying shame that 400 years of the newspaper, a history soaked in the blood of those who defended the freedom of the press, has come to this: utter heaps of crap even a bunch of college amateurs would be ashamed of turning out.

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