Calgary’s only “alternative” independent weekly has folded after four years of butting heads with a similar arts and entertainment paper owned in part by newspaper tycoon Conrad Black’s Hollinger, says the owner who stopped the presses last week on the Calgary Straight.
Dan McLeod, editor and publisher of the Georgia Straight in Vancouver, said the deck is stacked against truly independent urban weeklies, particularly when their corporately backed competition is affiliated with the major daily newspaper in town.
“It never made money, and didn’t look like it was going to,” McLeod said last week, after the Calgary Straight’s nine staff were told their paper was being shut down.
“The basic problem is that Hollinger put a fake alternative into the market.”
McLeod was referring to Fast Forward Weekly, an arts and entertainment paper launched by the St. Albert-based Great West Newspaper Group in 1995. Great West is 70-per-cent owned by Hollinger, of which Black is chairman and CEO. In 1995, Hollinger also owned the Calgary Herald and most of the other major daily newspapers across Canada.
Hollinger has since sold the Herald and other Southam properties to CanWest Global Communications.
“Fast Forward will never grow, and that’s a sad thing,” McLeod said in a telephone interview from Vancouver. “It wouldn’t be so bad if Fast Forward was a real alternative, and allowed to have unfettered growth, but it will never be allowed to grow to challenge the daily product.”
But Ian Chiclo, publisher of Fast Forward Weekly, said the Calgary Straight simply failed to create its own identity when it launched in a market dominated by his established newspaper, which has operated in the black since 1999.
“They came in with a very similar product, and tried to do similar things,” said Chiclo. “We’ve had a slow and steady business plan, and we’ve worked hard on circulation and distribution and content. Whether or not there’s room for two (papers) doing the same thing, I would agree there isn’t.”
Chiclo also addressed the Hollinger ownership issue, saying editorial independence is determined by a paper not being influenced by its owners, advertisers or any other third party.
“It’s not like Hollinger has ever had any say in the actual day-to-day running of the paper,” he said. “In seven years, every decision about this paper has been made in this office.”
The publisher of another independent alternative weekly in Edmonton says he’s facing the same David-and-Goliath battle.
Ron Garth, publisher of Vue Weekly in Edmonton, said his seven-year-old paper is facing the same challenge as the Calgary Straight in competing against See Magazine, also a Great West property. “We’re independent, we can’t write anything off,” said Garth. “We have to be successful every single issue.”
The Calgary Straight “had the potential to be a voice independent of corporate ownership,” added Garth.
“While it had ownership that wasn’t local, it still wasn’t tainted by a corporate stigma.
“The people who pick up these papers and read them are amongst the most highly idealistic around. They expect something other than a corporate take. They don’t want the potential to exist of corporate influence of what they’re reading in an alternative paper.”
The Straight’s McLeod says Edmonton’s Vue – in which he once held an interest – was able to carve its own market share by being first on the scene.
“It looks like the rule is, in hindsight, the one that gets there first is the winner,” he said.
Besides a lack of advertising, McLeod says he was also concerned with declining quality of the Calgary product, which also carried some Vancouver-based content. Production was moved to the West Coast several weeks ago, but September revenue figures convinced him it was a losing game.
“With a free paper, everything depends on advertising. It just wasn’t there for us,” he said.
“It’s always sad when an independent voice goes down, but the truth is the conglomerates are by far the dominant media force in this country. And it’s very hard to go against them. The independent press, in the face of that kind of competition, is a very fragile thing.”
Elsewhere on the Alberta media scene, staff at Edmontonplus.ca and Calgaryplus.ca websites have also received pink slips in the past fortnight.
Robert Duhamel, general manager city sites and local traffic for Sympatico-Lycos Inc., a Canadian communications, commerce and media company owned 71 per cent by Bell Globemedia, says four people in Calgary and one in Edmonton were let go.
“It’s just a reality check,” Duhamel said in an interview from Montreal.
“When these sites were launched, it was a different time and a different economy, and it was on a different scale.”
Both websites are part of a national network of similar properties that offered locally generated reviews, entertainment and event listings.
Editorial content and promotions will now largely be shared and centralized, although individual sites will continue to offer a mix of reader-generated reviews and faxed-in events listings.
Duhamel says the company will concentrate on promotions that are revenue generating and attractive to regular visitors to the sites.
“The individuals we had to let go were extremely professional – if it was my choice, I would have kept them,” said Duhamel. “But at the same time, we have to look at the bottom line and make those adjustments so our business would be viable.”
