A headline at one of the local radio station web sites — Possible strike could stop newspapers from printing — led to a story about the typical labour-management negotiation tango: one side serves strike notice, the other a lockout notice, talks continue. The story indicates that a strike (or lockout) is unlikely.
But it got me thinking that the state of the industry has probably changed negotiating contracts as much as it has changed everything else.
In traditional terms, CanWest, which owns both of Vancouver’s paid dailies, is in a good position to weather a shutdown. First, there are all those savings that come with not producing a newspaper. Meanwhile, some of the lost advertising revenue would continue to flow to CanWest through its one-third ownership of the Vancouver version of Metro, through its chain of suburban weekly, bi-weekly and tri-weekly newspapers, and through the Canada.com web site.
In the new mediascape, though, that’s more than offset by the longer-term implications of not producing a daily newspaper. Readership is already falling; disrupting the habit of daily newspaper subscribers will accelerate that and, unlike the situation in the past, there’s a question about how many readers will come back. A lengthy strike/lockout could also bootstrap the region’s other freesheet into a more prominent place among readers and advertisers.
And then there’s the internet: those news-hungry readers who haven’t already started migrating their reading to the net will, and they’ll discover alternative sources. For that matter, it wouldn’t take much for someone to bring together the best of placeblogging, local news coverage and whatever journalism was produced by the striking/locked-out journalists into a single site.
For all of that, it seems to me that newspaper strikes/lockouts make no sense. There’s too much at stake for both the newspapers and the journalists (fewer jobs at weaker products at the end of a lengthy stoppage). Which makes me wonder what new structures are going to emerge to handle the relationship between ownership and employees as the old ways go away.
TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, BUSINESS, LABOUR RELATIONS
I agree that strikes in the past have cost the Sun/Province readers and helped bolster the community newspapers. The internet, and the general trend (strikes/lockouts or not) to fewer newspaper readers exacerbates the effects of a newspaper stoppage: more than ever there would be fewer reasons to go back.
Marc Edge’s excellent and very readable labour history of the Vancouver Sun/Province, Pacific Press, makes this point very well. Thanks in large part to the many lengthy labour shortages in the past 40 years, he concludes, the two papers are selling fewer copies than they did in 1970, at a time when Vancouver’s population was barely over a million. The rise of BCTV and Vancouver’s community newspapers (more prevalent in this urban market than pretty much anywhere else in Canada) was fuelled by strikes at the dailies.
[...] Striking out [...]