A glimpse at new owners’ plans?
One of the key players in the successful bid for Canwest’s newspaper assets is John Paton, former city editor of the Toronto Sun, editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Sun, publisher of the London Free Press, former head of Spanish-language publisher impreMediacurrent and current CEO of the Journal Register Co. According to the Financial Post, Paton was instrumental in convincing Paul Godfrey, his former boss at Sun Media, to become the public face of the bondholders’ bid for Canwest LP, which employs about half of Local 2000 members.
Godfrey is clearly enamoured of Paton’s accomplishments in the USA and has spoken of a ‘digital first’ model pioneered by Paton.
In order to help us understand what might be coming our way under the new ownership group here’s some excerpts from an interview with Paton on the BuzzMachine blog:
“The first thing we did was to decide that in our company, a print company, when it came to products we would be digital and brands first and print last. It was our radical way of focusing everyone on the future. By recognizing our competitors and our future were digital everything we built and did had to follow that decision.
“More than two-thirds of any newspaper company’s expenses are in support of the core business of content, marketing and sales. Our digital competitors don’t have that two-thirds cost structure, so we attacked. it. We outsourced all printing, distribution and pre-press ad make up and page make up. We plowed a big part of the savings into expanding our digital resources – web, online video, mobile platform and widgets. We standardized I.T. We then outsourced the back end of all our digital support. Then we started cross-training journalists into one-person multi-media journalists – an ongoing process. …
“[In his new company at the time of the interview] One of the first steps will be to establish community E-Journalism labs in our communities where we have dailies. There is no way to be hyperlocal without harnessing the power of entrepreneurial journalists and the labs help do that by making content and more importantly sales arrangements with those entrepreneurial journalists.
“Second step will be to initiate and, in some cases, expand relationships with companies like Daylife, Outside.In, SeeClickFix, GrowthSpur – any company that lets JRC expand its resources in content, audience and sales while allowing it to re-allocate and focus on its core business. I am very excited about ideas like explainthis.org and others that look at community crowd-sourcing for assignments.
“The third step is to tackle the two-thirds infrastructure cost bucket.”
To read the complete interview, click here.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Local News.
