Here's the reason behind all the gloom:
Bond rating agency DBRS said yesterday that it was putting Canwest Media Inc.'s debt ratings under review for a possible downgrade, citing a Canadian advertising market that has "weakened substantially." DBRS said it was "likely" the situation could have a material impact on Canwest's advertising-dependent conventional television business and could put pressure on the company's debt covenants.
Similarly, Moody's Investors Service on Thursday also put the long-term debt ratings associated with Canwest companies under review.
"Moody's also believes it is more likely that Canwest will have to sell assets in order to address 2010/2011 refinancing milestones related to last year's acquisition of the former Alliance Atlantis' specialty television operations, and that the related divestiture proceeds will be below earlier expectations."
Update: Jerad has photo evidence of the Natty Post's demise in Toronto.
19 comments:
If no one posts a comment tearfully lamenting the loss of another voice in our national conversation, I may just be forced to do that myself.
My real worry is the Globe and Mail, the only national paper English Canada has will become that much more "conservative" (ie. irrational) in the process.
Keep cancelling print subscriptions for all newspapers, I recommend, until all these rags are forced to compete on the basis of real standards of excellence, whatever they decide those are going to be.
What's the National Post?
Maybe we should pool our resources and buy it. Then we can replace Johnathon Kay and his ilk with some real journalists.
It should not cost too much...
Then we can replace Johnathon Kay and his ilk with some real journalists.
There aren't that many left. Most "journalists" these days are like Jonathan Kay. If they're not, they don't have a career for very long.
Watch l'il Johnny land a sinecure somewhere else...most likely Macleans, which has been chatting up The Post lately. Or maybe his boyfriend Steve Paikin can get him something at TVO.
The left, if it had its way, would suffocate whatever little discourse we have left in Canada.
ti-guy doesn't read newspapers but still considers himself informed concerning them. As if.
gayle thinks miserly progressives would actually want to run a newspaper. They don't. Progressives only goal is to silence any opinion that deviates from, and therefore threatens, their own received wisdom.
For a progressive, journalists should only be dull, preprogrammed replicas of themselves.
By the way, has the mob managed to lynch Wente yet?
Count on the reich-tard to start with the personal attacks.
I'm too stupid and Gayle's out-of-touch with reality. And progressives are all lazy, cheap intellectual narcissists.
A persuasive argument, if ever there was.
Oh, and by the way, Paul S. It's not "The Left" that's responsible for CanWest/Global going tits up. It's your beloved market.
If it dies maybe something I would be interested in reading will take its place. One can hope.
I doubt it. Newspaper readership in is in disastrous decline.
I'd really like an English Canadian version of Le Devoir; high quality, influential and...lean. It could even be as right wing as it wanted to...as long as it avoided being stupid.
In the Business and Technology section of the Ottawa Citizen today was an sudden and inexplicable appearance of 2 facing pages of the Financial Post.
Well, not so inexplicable now...
Paul S, Tiguy is right - CanWest can cut the mustard in the market, it deserves to go the way of the Dodo. Tell you how popular far -right opinion and parroting the neo-cons is.
Andrew Coyne was smart to leave.
Off-topic: I thought this interview with the BBC's Adam Curtis was an interesting take on media, bloggers, the future and everything.
Don't read it, Paul S. You'll get explosive diarrhoea.
and meanwhile, in the real world, the Liberal Party implosion continues, the impending leadership race is as interesting as watching cow pies dry, Martin throws fresh hand grenades on the open wounds of Chretien's infections and you guys are all hot about the National Post.
Good focus guys, keep up the great work. Killing the Party slowly but political murder, however entertaining as in this case, is still fun to watch.
Fred
The "look, over there, something shiny" thing, only words on conservatives.
The end does, indeed, seem nigh. After the recent announcement that the NP would be discontinued in both Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the Calgary Herald today announced a "merger" between the Financial Post and the Herald's own business section. As of today, Calgary Herald readers were treated to facsimile pages of the Financial Post of the same day (including the FP banner logo).
Frankly, with most of the NP content reproduced in the Calgary Herald, and now the incorporation of the FP, I fail to see why this duplication of service should be continued. I think the NP will be an online-only electronic newspaper and/or blog (like the Western Standard) by the end of the year.
Add the Vancouver Sun to the list of CanWest papers now proudly publishing Financial Post "content" (their word).
I wonder if that means good columnists like David Baines and Don Cayo (yes, rightwing-ish, but a straight shooter), will find themselves appearing less often. Be a pity if it happened, but CanWest has done something similar already at least once that I'm aware of.
Used to be Alex Strachan was the TV critic for the Vancouver Sun only, then one day he was appearing nationally, in every CanWest paper. Don't know what happened to all his opposite numbers in the other papers, or if he got a raise commensurate, but at the time (two-three years ago) I wondered if CanWest was cutting back to save money, sorry, I mean "leveraging the synergy".
" . . . and meanwhile, in the real world, the Liberal Party implosion continues . . . " - fred
All is well in Liberal Fantasy Land fred. No worries.
You will no longer be able to buy copies of the National Post out of a vendor box in Ottawa as of Midnight tonight.
Technically there's no proof you ever could buy a NP in a vendor box. Sure, we've all seen them in the boxes, but we've never seen anyone actually buy one. How do we know we actually could have?
You have to appreciate the surgical precision with which the National Post is excising its various cancers in order to preserve its health for as long as it can.
I checked the neighbourhood Post box yesterday. No indication that it's being abandoned soon. Just a sticker showing the increased rates.
Did it have a Saturday edition in it though?
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