CanWest newsrooms tense amid fears of layoffs, centralization fears

Canadian Press
November 11, 2007

TORONTO - Tensions are running high in CanWest newsrooms from Montreal to Vancouver in the wake of recent layoffs at the company’s television stations and fears that more cuts are ahead amid an apparent push to centralize editorial operations.

“Everybody in the newsroom has received a letter with the buyout offer,” said an editor at the Vancouver Sun who didn’t want to be identified.

“And in the case of the Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal - those are non-unionized newsrooms so the company can do whatever it wants to do in a non-union situation. People are very fearful not just about layoffs but for the industry; deskers are quite depressed about the future of newspapers in general.”

CanWest, Canada’s biggest media company, is defending its decision to centralize some of its television operations and lay off 200 people at local Global stations, saying it was part of an effort to make their newsrooms more “leading edge.” Buyouts have also been offered - and taken - at some of the chain’s largest daily newspapers, including the Montreal Gazette and the Vancouver Sun and Province.

CanWest, based in Winnipeg, employed 10,645 people at the end of its 2006 fiscal year at newspaper, Internet and broadcast businesses in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe.

“The media landscape has changed fairly dramatically and traditional newsroom structures have not evolved enough to be able to fully respond to this new ‘always on’ environment,” Dervla Kelly, CanWest’s corporate communications officer, said in an e-mailed exchange.

“Our papers are each looking at how they need to evolve their newsrooms to be more … fluid in their approach to content. Each of them are deciding locally what changes make the most sense for their paper, but a key focus for all is to look at how they can place more resources on delivering ‘hyper-local’ news, creating unique content, as well as place more resources focused on the web.”

Contrary to fears inside CanWest newsrooms, Kelly said, the company is not centralizing its newspapers and cutting back on local coverage - the goal, in fact, is to bolster local coverage and simply defer some pagination duties to CanWest Editorial Services in Hamilton.

“This will allow them to put more focus and resources on generating content and less on packaging and moving content around. This does mean that some production-type jobs have been eliminated, but new positions have also been created that are focused on content and on the web.”

Many aren’t buying it, suggesting CanWest is making a dramatic attempt to prove to their debt-holders that it can afford to buy Alliance Atlantis and its array of successful specialty channels.

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