Canwest has announced Dose, it’s nationwide, hip, free daily is no more. (CBC report here.)
The title will continue as an online publication, but according to CanWest, 50 people will lose their jobs.
I’m not surprised that the plug has been pulled. Dose never seemed to be sure what it was (it wasn’t a newspaper, even by the pallid definition of the typical free daily; it strove for a hipness and cutting-edge-image that I never saw), and it did some plain dumb things: plastering ads over its front page image at one point and allowing product placement in stories at another.
Whenever I polled my students about which of the three local free dailies they preferred, Dose had its supporters but generally ran third, after 24 Hours and Metro.
Dose was, in the end, an interesting experiment but without a clear definition of what it was, it was hobbled from the start. I rarely a reason to pick the thing up, even if it was free, and apparently neither did many members of the 18 to 34 target demographic.
That leaves the free daily field here in Vancouver to 24 Hours and Metro, neither of which as shown significant growth in the year or so they’ve been publishing. The death of Dose may not significantly benefit either of the survivors, either. Dose was a national, not local, publication and the sense I had from the issues I would occasionally scan is that the advertising was primarily sold nationally and not locally, so it may not be a case that this frees up any extra ad dollars.
MORE: There’s more blog commentary here, here and, especially, here.
MORE MORE (updated Thursday): There’s a lot of blog talk about this and its fascinating: some young readers seem genuinely angry, some are perplexed, a marketing blog castigates Canadian marketers for ignoring Dose…. Technorati results for a search on “Dose” and “Canwest” produces this.
TAGS: DOSE, NEWSPAPERS, CANADA
