Some of Postmedia’s newspapers announced significant changes Monday. Its dailies in Ottawa, Edmonton and Calgary will cease publication of their Sunday editions while dozens of newsroom jobs are set to be cut.
The Edmonton Journal’s last Sunday edition will come out on June 24. The Ottawa Citizen’s will be in mid-July and the Calgary Herald’s will be on July 29.
Postmedia also announced that it would cease Monday and holiday publication of the National Post through the summer. It has dropped its Monday summer editions for the past three years.
“While some areas are expanding, some roles across our operations will be eliminated,” wrote Paul Godfrey, Postmedia’s CEO, in an internal memo to staff. “The only way we can be competitive is to create a new company that leverages its history and moves aggressively into the future. We are continuing on this path and looking to further reduce our print-related infrastructure costs, build out our digital platforms and invest in growth areas of our business.”
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The company has also said it will be expanding its Postmedia Editorial Services (PES) in Hamilton to do more editorial production.
As news about the job cuts spread through Twitter and a Globe and Mail story Monday afternoon, Postmedia director of communications Phyllise Gelfand told Marketing that PES in Hamilton, which currently handles a lot of the company’s newspapers’ pagination and page layouts, will be expanding to do more editorial production, such as copyediting and writing headlines.
“The overarching impetus for it is with print advertising revenues in decline, as we’ve seen across the industry, across North America and Western Europe, we’re looking for ways to reduce our overall print production costs, and what that means is centralizing some services, such as editorial production, where we can,” said Gelfand.
Godfrey said “we are now further expanding our PES operation to accommodate the editorial production of more of our newspapers’ pages allowing our newsrooms to concentrate on the creation of local content.”
