Fox News North Owner Freeps Own Poll

MONTREAL - The CEO of Quebecor, Pierre Karl Peladeau is the person most prominent in the economic sphere in 2010, according to respondents to a Leger Marketing poll conducted on behalf of the Agency QMI.

Just to be clear: Peladeau owns Quebecor, and Quebecor owns QMI.

Quebecor To Acquire CanWest Newspaper Assets?

Quebecor and Canwest have signed a deal whereby their carriers will be able to deliver either newspaper, thus paving the way for Quebecor to take control of Canwest newspaper assets down the road.

Die media die.

Sorry Bloggers, It Isn't You Killing The Newspapers

The main cause of the demise of newspapers, according to Wolff, is the arrival of CraigsList and other sites like it. In a debate with the CraigsList's Craig Newmark, he argued that classified adds are what 'supported newspapers for 100 years' and now with CraigsList, which he says is more efficient and free, newspapers are losing their auto, real estate, job and other service advertisements to the web. This accusation is definitely not new and has been discessed [sic] for years since CraigsList started in 1995.

And I would also agree that bloggers cannot ever replace the news-gathering function of professional reporters.

No, what bloggers can do is battle it out in the ruins after Journageddon with the professional pundit class. After all, quality-wise there is a definite over-lap between the top tier of bloggers and the lower rung of columnists. In fact, I suspect you could create a computer program that replicated the ink emissions from Quebecor's (T.O. Sun) stable of scribblers.

And, remember, we bloggers are already used to working for free.

So, if you earn your meals by cranking out your "views" on this or that issue, there's going to be alot of Kraft dinner in your future.

Print Vs. The Net

Exhibit A in the argument that Sun Media print newspapers tower over the Internet is a chart showing Quebecor Inc.'s 2003-2008 performance.

It was created by a reliable TSF source using Quebecor's own financials fed through Excel to see just how 'badly'' the newspaper segment was performing.

[...]

"Although it may not be apparent from looking at the chart, the Internet/Portals segment and Interactive Technologies and Communications reported profits in all the years from 2003 to 2008," says the source. "However, they are so small in comparison to the newspaper profits that they barely register on the chart.

Very small profits for the online unit, it's true, but the cost of producing a web-page vs. producing a paper product must be far less as well. A couple more years of data will tell the story better.