The union representing Toronto Star employees calls a new round of layoffs “a punch in the gut” for the country’s largest daily newspaper.
The Star’s parent company Torstar announced Tuesday it was laying off 50 people, including 19 full-time staff in the Star newsroom and 26 contract staff from its Star Touch app product and other digital areas.
Paul Morse, president of Unifor Local 87-M, called it a “very difficult day” for Star employees, saying layoffs of such magnitude were a “heavy blow.” Morse said the union would work to ameliorate the impacts of the latest round of downsizing.
In a staff memo posted on J-Source Tuesday, David Holland, acting publisher of the Star and acting president of Star Media Group, said the cuts represented “another important step” in the newspaper’s evolution along a path towards “the multi-platform news media organization of the future.”
He also said the Star newsroom was evolving its structure to place greater emphasis on breaking news, investigations and special projects. He re-affirmed the company’s “continued commitment” to Star Touch, calling it an “integral part” of the publication’s “multi-platform future.”
The Star launched the free ad-supported Star Touch product last fall, abandoning the paywall it erected in early 2013. The product was developed in association with the Quebec daily La Presse, whose free La Presse+ product attracts a reported 450,000 weekly readers and generates one third of its revenues.
Earlier this year, the Star reported that the Star Touch app had been downloaded nearly 200,000 times, but Holland admitted in Tuesday’s memo the current audience “is not yet what we had initially anticipated.”
He added, however, that the product has developed an engaged and loyal audience, and indicated that growing the core audience base is a key priority for the publication.
The key for Torstar in the near-term is finding a way to slow the continued loss of vital advertising revenue, which contributed to a second quarter loss of $23.9 million.
Torstar’s announcement came just two days after a biting segment on the HBO show Last Week Tonight examining the perilous state of the newspaper industry.
The 19-minute segment, which mocked familiar newspaper tropes like “digital-first” and highlighted the mistakes being made by newspapers in the race to break news first – best exemplified by The Boston Globe’s infamous tweet informing readers that the FBI had “investifarted” 70 leads in a case – earned widespread media attention.
It also earned Oliver a strongly-worded rebuke from Newspaper Association of America president and CEO David Chavern, who accused the comedian of engaging in “petty insults” and stating the obvious about the plight of the daily newspaper industry.
Chavern chastised Oliver for mocking everything from the recent rebranding of Tribune Publishing as tronc (which he described as “the sound of a stack of print newspapers being thrown into a dumpster”) to the technology experiments currently being conducted in newsrooms across the country.
“Making fun of experiments and pining away for days when classified ads and near-monopolistic positions in local ad markets funded journalism is pointless and ultimately harmful,” said Chavern.
Unifor Local 87-M represents an estimated 2,400 media works across Southern Ontario at publications including The Globe and Mail, as well as Metroland publications and 14 Postmedia dailies.
