Source: nationalobserver.com
So how long can Postmedia, Canada’s largest newspaper chain, stay afloat?
A sign of the company’s fiscal crisis came in September when unionized journalists and sales staff at the Ottawa Citizen and Ottawa Sun voted 32 to 24 to accept a Postmedia contract that reduces sick pay, dental and other health benefits. The company had threatened to lock out the workers if they didn’t accept the deal.
Read entire story here: nationalobserver.com
Source: editorandpublisher.com/
After a series of management shake-ups and unpopular policies, the Los Angeles Timesmade history in January when its newsroom voted 248-44 to unionize. It was the first time in the organization’s 136 years of operation.
So, why now?
Sally Davidow, communications director at the NewsGuild-CWA (who helped the Times organize), said the environment is changing in favor of unions for a number of reasons: “The victory at the L.A. Times has certainly sparked interest in other places, but also the atmosphere in general was sort of ripe for before that. The situation in the industry is very dire. People feel they can’t earn a decent living and they have no control over their work schedules. They really want a voice at work and equity for women and people of color. So, there are a lot of very important issues.”
Source: newsguild.org/
Jan. 19, 2018 – The results are in: Newsroom employees at the Los Angeles Times voted 248-44 to join The NewsGuild-CWA, ending 136 years of unfettered rule by management. Those voting in favor of the union captured 85 percent of the vote.
Reporters, copy editors, graphic artists and photographers who organized the union drive were elated.
“Today we made history,” they wrote in a letter to their co-workers. “For the first time since the Los Angeles Times printed its inaugural edition in 1881, our journalists have voted to form a union.
“We’ve long been a proud voice for our readers. Finally, we can be a proud voice for ourselves. Anyone familiar with the history of The Times— and of Los Angeles itself— knows the significance of what we’ve just accomplished.”
Jon Schleuss, a graphics and data reporter who was on the union Organizing Committee, said the vote sends a message to Tronc, the paper’s owner: “You have to work with us and you have to begin working with us today.”
‘My Dream’
The union drive was initiated by newsroom employees, who spent months talking with their co-workers to build support for the union. By the time on-site voting took place on Jan. 4, the newsroom was awash with pro-union signs and the group’s Twitter feed was filled with workers explaining why they were voting “yes.”
“My dream was to work here since middle school. I wanted my communities — Latinos, youths and LGBTQ — reflected in our coverage. That’s why I’m voting today @latguild. Let’s continue to open doors for others,” tweeted digital editor Brian De Los Santos.
“After 136 years of giving a voice to others, it’s time Los Angeles Times journalists had a voice of their own,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Bettina Boxall.
Changing Landscape
The workers’ victory is part of a national trend, said NewsGuild President Bernie Lunzer. “The media landscape is changing, with the demands of private profiteers pushing against the hallowed traditions of quality journalism.
“The journalists of the L.A. Times are taking control of their own future,” he said.
Columnist Steve Lopez said, “Maybe unions can’t save the news biz. But they can raise the voices of those who can — journalists. Having written for decades about economic justice, I’m with Los Angeles Times Guild colleagues committed to a mission I share at a newspaper I love.”
Moving Quickly
The Guild is moving quickly to tap into the enthusiasm of the campaign. “We encourage everyone to get involved, even if you were not a part of the union election campaign,” the Organizing Committee’s letter said. “The union we’ve created belongs to everyone. There is no better time to get involved.”
Organizers will soon seek volunteers for a committee to negotiate a first-ever collective bargaining agreement with L.A. Times management. Workers are seeking improved pay, better benefits, pay equity for women and people of color, greater diversity and better working conditions.
More about the decision to vote yes:
Business reporter Geoffrey Mohan tweeted, “After three decades in journalism, I won’t stand by while outside, nouveau investors try to turn local journalism into a sweatshop. I support @latguild.”
“There’s a lot of emphasis on our ‘independence’ in [management’s] anti-union email. But @latguild isn’t a third party. It’s us, the journalists of the L.A. Times. We’re standing up for each other, together,” tweeted copy editor Kristina Bui.
“When I moved to LA I was shocked at the low morale and high turnover. I was also shocked at how dependent we are on interns, trainees, and contractors who are underpaid, underappreciated and overworked. The ONLY people who are addressing this is @latguild,” wrote designer Bakr Saliq.
“I’m voting YES for the #latguild in tomorrow’s historic election at the L.A. Times to preserve a great institution’s ethical standards and quality of journalism. Any erosion of them and the paper is doomed, including financially,” said investigative reporter Paul Pringle.
“I love the Los Angeles Times, and I want to make it better,” transportation reporter Laura Nelson said. “Big breaking news stories and investigations are proof that we’re at our best when we collaborate. We should stand together to fight for our workplace, too.”
“Our newspaper has no problem pointing out inequalities outside our building,” said reporter Jaweed Kaleem, who covers race and justice. “It’s time to seriously address them inside — locking in pay, benefits and editorial independence.”
Source :j-source.ca/
By Lisa Taylor, Brian MacLeod Rogers and Ryder Gilliland
Canada has a new law that offers significantly enhanced protections to reporters’ confidential sources and recognizes the societal value in protecting the journalist-source relationship.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Journalistic Source Protection Act, which became law on Thursday, Oct. 19 after being approved unanimously by both the House of Commons and the Senate. This Act amends both the Criminal Code and the Canada Evidence Act in favour of giving considerably more weight to a journalist’s promise of confidentiality to a source.
Source:globalnews.ca
Editorial staff at the National Post, the flagship publication of Canada’s largest newspaper company, announced Wednesday that they are beginning a union drive with CWA Canada. The paper’s beleaguered parent company Postmedia, which has suffered steep revenue declines affecting the entire print media industry, offered buyouts last week, just months after completing a company-wide salary cost reduction of twenty per cent.
Source: poynter.org
Two decades ago, I wrote a critical essay titled “Goodbye Copy Desks, Hello Trouble.”What prompted that Newspaper Research Journal piece was a brief experiment in eliminating free-standing copy desks – an approach taken in the mid-’90s by a few regional newspapers.
Those papers thought that moving copy editors onto reporting or production teams would solve some long-standing problems and, not incidentally, save money by realigning staff resources. Some viewed the change as a way to replace an archaic assembly-line model of news production. The approach ultimately was copied by very few papers, and some that eliminated their copy desks soon found it wise to start rebuilding them. Too many mistakes were appearing in print, and headline-writing suffered. The papers mostly abandoned the experiment, and the lessons learned have been forgotten.
With The New York Times planning to dismantle its free-standing copy desk, it’s a good time to remember them. Do the questions remain valid today? Do they point to what The Times risks by implementing this plan?
Related Training: ACES In-Depth Editing Online Group Seminar (September 2017)
The Times’ idea is to reduce its 100-plus-person copy editing staff by reassigning some into a hybrid role – “strong editors” who will be expected to handle both assigning and copy editing duties. The rest will lose their jobs, either through buyouts or layoffs. How many will be reassigned remains unclear.
The copy editors understandably were hurt and angry. They agree that change is necessary, but they say they’re ready and willing to adapt. According to a letter they wrote to Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joe Kahn, the company insultingly views much of what they do as “low-value editing” and the decision to eliminate the free-standing desk “betrays a stunning lack of knowledge” of what copy editors do. Reporters agreed, sending their own letter to management. The reporters said that the plan “is ill-conceived and unwise, and will damage the quality of our product. It will make us sloppier, more error-prone.”
Baquet responded in a July 6 column about the decision, telling readers that the paper is not eliminating its free-standing copy desks to save money, nor, he said, is it eliminating copy editing. He said the paper needs to reduce its longstanding system of layers of editing, which was created for a print era. “Our goal with these changes is to still have more than one set of eyes on a story, but not three or four,” he wrote. “We have to streamline that system and move faster in the digital age.” The Times “will use the savings from these cuts to bring in more reporters and other journalists who can build a report that acknowledges the changing world of journalism,” Baquet said.
Indeed, it is a different era. In the mid- to late ’90s, the internet as a journalistic medium was barely out of diapers. Print advertising revenue was still fairly strong, though significant cracks were appearing in the revenue façade. Newspapers were only a few years into the modern era of staff purges.
The big issue for newspaper copy editing and production in the late ’80s and early ’90s was pagination, computer-based page production that we now take for granted. The concern, felt most at the time by copy editors, was whether one really couldn’t do more with less. In fact, they knew that they couldn’t even produce at the same level of quality if they had to take on the additional work of putting pages together on a computer screen.
Around this time, a variety of experiments in newsroom organization arose, including the move to eliminate free-standing copy desks at papers like the Wichita Eagle and Minneapolis Star Tribune. The implementation differed a bit by newspaper, but the general idea was based on several beliefs:
This mid-’90s experiment wasn’t quite the same approach as the Times is proposing, but it’s close enough to raise similar questions. The change did lead to some easing of staff tensions, but the downside was too great. Among the concerns I raised in 1998:
Would elimination of the copy desk as an entity lead to a loss of editing expertise? Would quality suffer, because less is not more when one is faced with additional tasks? Perhaps most critically, would newspapers lose a critical independent eye on stories before publication?
Baquet insists that eliminating the copy desk will not eliminate copy editing. But what will remain? What does a free-standing desk do that the proposed restructuring will struggle – and likely fail – to accomplish?
The expertise issue. Copy editing, assigning desk editing and reporting draw on different skill sets. Reporting involves getting the story, sourcing, organizing and writing. Assigning desk editors work closely with reporters, focusing on the story at a macro level, its focus, completeness and organization. Copy editors pay strict attention to the detail level – the mechanics of writing, clarity and style, as well as accuracy. They also provide a crucial level of review on broader issues such as structure, fairness and libel, and they write crisp, accurate headlines. This division of labor may seem puzzling to the uninitiated, but it has been applied successfully for more than a century, especially at larger papers. Smaller papers often blur those lines, but they wouldn’t if they had greater resources. Some reporters are good editors, but most aren’t. It’s no surprise that the Times reporters wrote an impassioned plea to save the copy desk. Some assigning editors are good copy editors, but they have other tasks that will necessarily take priority. This can compromise expertise and lead to…
The quality issue. The lesson from pagination applies today – when you have too many things to do, you cut corners. When you cut corners, you cut quality. The concern I raised in the ’90s was that copy editing would be compromised when editors had to prioritize production. A similar concern about doing more with less exists today. An assigning editor – a “backfielder” in New York Times parlance – is likely to favor the story-shaping role and pay less attention to the detail-level editing, even if he or she has been a copy editor. It’s difficult to not see quality suffer, and it’s puzzling that top management doesn’t seem to acknowledge it. Their claim about creating a “strong editing” system seems a bit Orwellian.
The independence issue. Has anything in the digital world changed to make an independent copy desk passé? One could argue that an independent eye on stories before publication is more important today when the safety net is shredded because of earlier staff cuts and a chief executive is willing to wage a Twitter war on any real or imagined factual issue. Copy editors add considerable value to the news precisely because they are independent. They represent the readers, and they watch out for the organization’s reputation. Sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, this independence leads to disagreement or even outright conflict with reporters or assigning editors. But the result is an improved story – one where tough questions are asked and answered.
Other problems emerged 20 years ago. For example, headline-writing suffered. A free-standing copy desk is designed to produce good headlines in part because critique is built into the slot-rim structure. A paper such as the Times has highly experienced copy editors, but I’d bet half of the headlines published in the Times have been tweaked, massaged or rewritten because of a copy chief’s critique. The result, unsurprisingly, is better headlines, and ultimately better headline-writers.
Why does any of this matter? The New York Times is just one paper, albeit a highly regarded one, and if this restructuring is a mistake, so what?
It matters because quality matters. Commenters on Baquet’s Q&A column worried that editorial quality would be compromised. One wrote, in part:
“Over and over in the reader comments below, I’m seeing the same thing: that readers DON’T USE THE New York TIMES FOR VIDEO! We want to read, and we want to read well-written, well-edited journalism. … Please reconsider your direction.”
A more subtle issue is internal. A free-standing copy desk demonstrates that copy editing is valued. Eliminating a free-standing desk, as Baquet says, may not eliminate copy editing, but it will surely weaken it in the eyes of the rest of the staff.
To the rest of the U.S. journalism world, the NYT is a bellwether. It is one of a tiny handful of U.S. newspapers widely known for top-tier copy editing. Other newspapers look to the Times for ideas – about news judgment, multimedia innovation or staff organization. One danger in the Times’ plan is that other newspapers will say, if it’s good enough for one of the world’s greatest newspapers, why not for us? It may be unfair to say The New York Times has a responsibility to journalism not to make big mistakes. But the paper can’t have it both ways – to bask in its reputation, which it likes to do, and to take actions that threaten its quality.
The bottom line is that this experiment is likely to fail because, despite Baquet’s assertions, the demands of the digital era do not make a free-standing copy desk obsolete. Not if quality matters. It may cost money, but it’s money well-spent. And if the plan does fail, it will be difficult to restore a top-notch copy desk. As papers learned in the ’90s, it’s a lot easier to dismantle a copy desk than to rebuild one.
Source: https://cwacanada.ca/
OTTAWA – CWA Canada, the country’s only all-media union, is calling on the federal government to ensure that any subsidies for newspapers go to creating journalism jobs, not to executive bonuses or hedge fund lenders.
Today, News Media Canada, which represents the country’s print media industry, released a proposal calling for the creation of a government-financed Canadian Journalism Fund. It recommends a subsidy of 35 cents to newspapers and digital media companies for every dollar spent on journalism.
CWA Canada supports aid for the news media industry but cautions that there must be a mechanism to ensure that any subsidy creates jobs and improves journalism.
“Under the current proposal, there is nothing to stop companies like Postmedia from taking millions of dollars in taxpayer money and not creating a single job,” CWA Canada President Martin O’Hanlon said.
“We must ensure that any government subsidies go toward creating front-line journalism jobs and increasing quality civic journalism. They must not be used for executive bonuses, to feed hedge fund lenders, or to outsource jobs overseas.”
Postmedia, which has cut over 3,000 jobs in the last decade, paid CEO Paul Godfrey and other top executives $2.3 million in “retention” bonuses last year.
“Postmedia has been hurt by its self-created debt and hedge fund ownership as much as by declining print ad revenues and should not get taxpayer money unless it spends that money on journalism,” O’Hanlon said.
CWA Canada represents about 6,000 media workers at companies across the country, including the CBC, The Canadian Press, VICE Canada, Thomson Reuters, and many Postmedia publications.
For more information, contact:
Martin O’Hanlon
President, CWA Canada
(613) 867-5090
mohanlon@cwa-scacanada.ca
Source: cjr.org
Photographs by Cara Barer
ROGER FIDLER IS A FOREFATHER of digital journalism. In the early 1980s, he wrote and illustrated an essay on the future of news. When Fidler presented his ideas around Knight Ridder, his co-workers sometimes laughed. “It was not quite like Roger had descended from another planet,” a colleague of his once told me, “but he was saying some things that were simply very hard to believe at the time.”
The idea he spoke of most was one Steve Jobs would have many years later—a tablet on which to read electronic newspapers. Fidler’s design and execution of a prototype were so similar to the eventual iPad that when Apple sued Samsung over design infringements, Samsung used Fidler’s early device to argue the idea was in the public domain.
In Fidler’s vision of the future, news and information were headed to the nascent internet, where stories would be instantly published from one computer to millions more, eliminating the need to operate an expensive press run by expensive workers. A tablet, he thought, was the perfect device to replace paper. Readers could click on boxes that revealed data or more information about a particular subject. Advertisers could produce immersive, interactive ads. And the tablet could be slipped into a briefcase or bag. Fidler was right, of course. Apple has sold several hundred million iPads, and more than a billion phones that serve much the same purpose.
Now, Fidler wonders if he was wrong. “I have come to realize that replicating print in a digital device is much more difficult than what anybody, including me, imagined,” he told me this summer, and he wasn’t just referring to tablets. Fidler is equally concerned about the reading experience and economics of all forms of digital news. Now retired from teaching journalism at the University of Missouri, he has watched newspapers struggle to move their content and business online. The idea of interactive advertising has clearly not panned out, he says. Readers are annoyed and distracted by it, so many block it with browser extensions. He and others have observed that print offers a limited amount of ad space, which is infinite online, driving down ad prices and sending publishers racing around a hamster wheel. To make money, they need more content to advertise against. Some of this content is—how to put this?—lousy, giving readers another reason not to pay for news.
They have killed print, their core product, with all of their focus online.”
Even though his iPad is never far away, Fidler still subscribes to the print editions of The New York Times, the Columbia Daily Tribune and the Columbia Missourian. “I have been wondering,” Fidler says, “whether we have completely underestimated the viability and usefulness of the print product.”
Me too.
I am not a dinosaur; I’m a tech dork who waits in line outside the Apple Store for new iPhones. If my wife ever divorces me, she will testify that I spent too much time on Facebook and Twitter. I’ve been an enthusiastic and vocal supporter of digital news at my workplace, The Washington Post, so much so that my colleagues and bosses might be surprised I’m even posing the following question: What if everything we’ve been led to believe about the future of journalism is wrong?
Two decades have passed since newspapers launched websites, and yet here we are. Big city papers have gone under, thousands of journalists have lost their jobs, and the idea that digital news will eventually become a decent business feels like a rumor. The reality is this: No app, no streamlined website, no “vertical integration,” no social network, no algorithm, no Apple, no Apple Newsstand, no paywall, no soft paywall, no targeted ad, no mobile-first strategy has come close to matching the success of print in revenue or readership. And the most crucial assumption publishers have made about readers, particularly millennials—that they prefer the immediacy of digital—now seems questionable, too.
I wish I were being hyperbolic, but Iris Chyi, a University of Texas associate professor and new media researcher, has been collecting facts to support these assertions. Like me, Chyi is not anti-technology. She enjoys her travels around the Web. While pursuing her PhD in the late 1990s, Chyi conducted audience research for the Austin American-Statesman. But looking at reader metrics nearly a decade later, it became clear to Chyi that online penetration and engagement weren’t growing. This got her wondering, like Fidler, whether newspapers were pursuing a future that would never come.
Chyi began conducting surveys and collecting readership data, analyzing it all in academic papers and a recent book titled, Trial and Error: U.S. Newspapers’ Digital Struggles Toward Inferiority. She has come to believe that the digital shift has been a disaster for media organizations, and that there is no evidence online news will ever be economically or culturally viable. “They have killed print, their core product, with all of their focus online,” Chyi told me in an interview.
To help explain her position, Chyi devised a metaphorical symbol for news online: Ramen noodles. Compared to dinner in a nice restaurant, ramen noodles are an inferior good. They are cheap. You can cook and consume them just about anywhere, including a dorm room sink, in five minutes. To make them profitable, you have to sell them by the metric ton. As for their taste, typing the phrase “Ramen noodles taste like…” into the Google search box produces this result: “Ramen noodles taste like soap.”
In her book, Chyi writes that “the (supposedly dying) print edition still outperforms the (supposedly hopeful) digital product by almost every standard, be it readership, engagement, advertising revenue,” and especially willingness to actually pay for the product. In a paper published earlier this year, Chyi examined data collected by Scarborough, a market research firm owned by Nielsen, for the 51 largest US newspapers, finding that the print edition reaches 28 percent of circulation areas, while the digital version reaches just 10 percent. Digital readers don’t linger. Pew Research Center data shows that readers coming directly to news sites stay less than five minutes. Readers coming from Facebook are gone in less than two minutes.
Publishers argue that print readers are just getting older while younger readers move further away from even considering print, but Pew surveys and Chyi’s analysis of the Scarborough data show that considerable interest in print still persists, even among young readers. Pew reports that print-only is still the most common way of reading news, with more than half of readers last year opting for ink on their hands every day. The percentage who only read news via a computer? Five percent in 2014…and in 2015? Also 5 percent.
Chyi’s findings show that among 18- to 24-year-old news readers, 19.9 percent had read the print edition of a newspaper during the past week. Less than 8 percent read it digitally.
Chyi has been making this argument for several years, but when I spoke to her this past summer she told me that few people in the industry were paying attention, including media reporters. Now they are. Jack Shafer, a sharp media critic at Politico, highlighted her research in an October column on the enduring value of print, but missed the larger context—that her numbers don’t exist in a vacuum. Print is rebounding or stabilizing in other areas of daily life. Sales of print books have risen every year since 2013, while e-books have leveled off and in some genres declined. University students prefer printed textbooks over electronic ones, according to surveys. And independent and used bookstores have made a comeback. Yet as book publishers double down on print—even raising the price of e-books to make paper more attractive—the cost of printed newspapers is going up, not down. Publishers are watering down the lemonade and asking for more quarters. You don’t have to be an economist to see this won’t end well.
It’s undoubtedly true that Americans read less print news year after year. In fairness to the digital gurus, I won’t hide this fact: The number of print newspaper readers has been halved in the last 20 years. But what if the big decline in print readership has more to do with a lack of quality than a lack of interest? By cutting staff, eliminating sections, and moving up deadlines hours (further aging the news before it’s delivered), publishers have communicated that print really is only useful for lining the bottoms of bird cages.
Corporate titans often say that you must be willing to sacrifice your best products to develop new and potentially bigger ones. Apple killed the iPod with the iPhone. We all know how that worked out. But what if newspapers are killing their iPod without an iPhone in sight?
Newspapers still get the vast majority of their revenue from print. Meanwhile, a growing number of online readers use ad blockers, less than 10 percent of readers are willing to pay for more content online, and the digital advertising business stinks—and not just because of the oversupply of ad space. In October, executives at The Guardian bought ads on their own website to see how much money they were left with after Google and the various ad auction companies took their cuts. The result? Thirty cents on the dollar. Given all this, you might think there would be some serious soul searching in the industry. You would be wrong.
Instead, there is evidence that publishers are ignoring the writing on their monitors. Chyi writes in her book that “a well-known newspaper association, which is supposed to inform its members with research relevant to the state of the industry, once declined to publish a research synopsis they invited me to write.” In a letter explaining why, the group told her that because her findings showed that moving to digital might not be the best strategy for newspapers, the organization didn’t want to share them with its members.
Online news…could make it impossible to be informed—even for those who want to be.
Fidler, Chyi, and others concerned about digital news aren’t just worried about the future of journalism; they’re worried about society. In recent years, a flurry of studies has shown that the reading experience online is less immersive and enjoyable than print, which has implications for how we consume and retain information. Studies show that readers tend to skim and jump around online more than they do in print—not just within individual stories, but from page to page and site to site. Print provides a more linear, less distracting way of reading, which in turn increases comprehension
“The cornerstone of democracy,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “rests on the foundation of an educated electorate.” But how educated can a society of skimmers really be? A 2013 study in the Newspaper Research Journal found that Times readers recalled more stories and specific details in print than they did online. The study’s authors blamed the poor online results on distractions (ads, links, etc.) and fewer design cues about which articles were newsy and significant. The results are important, the study said, in elucidating “the modern role newspapers play in maintaining an informed citizenry.” The electorate has never been fully informed, but that’s typically by voter choice. Online news, the research says, could make it impossible to be informed—even for those who want to be.
In her book, Chyi quotes a study in which an unnamed newspaper publisher says, “Our website wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have the print edition, because it wouldn’t make money.” The publisher was then asked, “Would the print product exist without the online edition?” The publisher was a bit perplexed. “Now that’s a good question,” he said, “and one that I’m sure has occurred to everybody in our industry: ‘What if we just didn’t do it?’ We are batting our heads against the wall. All the effort that is going into the website is hurting the print edition. Could we just not do it? I don’t know.”
At least one publisher is trying. Michael Gerber is not a scion of the Sulzberger family. He has never worked at a newspaper. He’s a humor writer. Last year, he launched The American Bystander, a humor magazine publishing some of the biggest names in comedy writing, including George Meyer, the genius behind The Simpsons, and cartoonists such as Roz Chast. Gerber has a website, but there is no writing from the magazine on it. The site exists solely to let readers pay for printed copies, which are then mailed to them.
“If you put quality content online, you are tethering it to a business model that is cratering and dying,” Gerber told me, adding that it’s undeniable that “very, very few formerly print publications are better off now than they were prior to the Web.”
The American Bystander is printed on thick paper and looks and feels substantial. The first two issues had more than 100 pages each. Gerber just raised nearly $40,000 for the magazine on Kickstarter. He gets the irony, but “[w]e are going for it,” Gerber says. “We’re going where everyone else isn’t.”
By that, he means paper. He’s placing a bet on the future by choosing the past. “There’s this assumption that online is inevitable, that it is like the steam engine or something,” Gerber says. “Maybe it is. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it can’t be.”
I logged into Kickstarter the other night and made a pledge.
JOURNALISM IS ABOUT REPORTING. Reporting is paying attention and taking good notes. For me, that means using a good pen—a fountain pen. I used to spend a lot of time searching Staples for the best gel pen. I had crushes, but I never fell in love. Then I tried a fountain pen. Love. They glide over the paper. There are a million different ink colors. They aren’t messy. They’re fun to play with. And you can get a great one without spending a fortune. The best part: I find that I pay closer attention to note-taking. Now that’s innovation.
Source: theglobeandmail.com
Amid another year of dramatic restructuring at Postmedia Network Canada Corp., the company’s five most senior executives were awarded nearly $2.3-million in retention bonuses.
The payouts, which are outlined in company disclosures filed on Wednesday, are tied to a recent debt restructuring that wiped out more than $268-million (U.S.) in debt, thereby reducing the company’s interest payments by about $50-million (Canadian) each year.
Source: theglobeandmail.com
In the past year, Postmedia Network Canada Corp. has shed the equivalent of 800 full-time jobs. On Thursday, the company said the job losses will deepen, announcing a target of a further 20-per-cent saving on salary costs.
The latest round of planned staff reductions – through voluntary buyouts, followed by involuntary layoffs if necessary – comes amid a worsening slump. In earnings unveiled on Thursday, the company said its net loss spiked by 84 per cent to $99.4-million in the fourth quarter as print advertising sales fell by more than 20 per cent.