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The “Daily Black”
has been the talk of the chattering classes across the country for months.
It’s one more symptom of further concentration of media power and a bully
pulpit for its owner. Conversely, it’s being characterized as a blast of
much-needed competition to the established market leaders. It will fragment
the market into shards too tiny to turn a profit for anybody.
On the other hand,
it could be a rising tide that lifts all the boats. Eager journalists — both
grizzled veterans and freshly-minted J-school greenhorns — have been
flooding its human resources people with résumés. It will appear five days a
week. Or seven. It will be a tabloid. Or a broadsheet. It will be a truly
mass-appeal product. Unless it’s aimed solely at the élite. It will be
launching early in 1998. But don’t look for it until a year after that.
In truth, only a
handful of people have even the slightest idea what the Southam/Hollinger
national daily will look like, what its mandate will be or when its launch
is scheduled for. And they’re not very forthcoming.
If Conrad Black’s
Hollinger Inc. does decide to launch a new national newspaper, it will be
the fifth daily based in Toronto.
The ad industry is rife with rumors on what niche the paper would fill.
That hasn’t stopped
everyone and his dog from offering an opinion on what the paper should look
like. And it hasn’t stopped the more brazen pundits from fearlessly
predicting what the paper will look like or when it will appear. The fact
that Hollinger Inc.’s chair, Conrad Black, has yet to decide whether to
launch a paper — never mind when — seems a detail too small to consider.
All this amuses
Gordon Fisher, Southam Inc.’s editorial vice-president.
“There’s been a lot
of speculation in the marketplace, and frankly, I don’t know where a lot of
it comes from,” he says, chuckling. “Our timetables are dependent on Conrad
Black’s timing of his announcement of this project. I expect him to announce
some time before the end of this year whether it’s going ahead. And at some
time concurrent with that I expect him to announce a launch date. But that’s
another one of those things that even if I knew it I couldn’t tell you.”
A month ago,
Hollinger was unable to buy out Sun Media Inc.’s Financial Post,
which would have made any plans for a new national daily easier. Even if the
two papers had continued as separate entities, the Post could have served as
business news source, marketing mule and talent bank. But that won’t happen.
In all the eager
anticipation surrounding the new daily, there are also varying scenarios
about how the paper could work and what another daily would mean.
Ann Boden, president
of McKim Media Group of Toronto, says the paper would further fragment the
Toronto newspaper landscape, adding a fifth contender to a city that already
has two dailies — The Globe and Mail and The Financial Post —
fighting for business leaders, while the Toronto Sun aims for the
tabloid proletariat and the Star sets its sights on the suburban
bourgeoisie.
Fisher says Southam
people have visited marketers and agencies to discuss the prospective
publication, but for obvious reasons he’s remaining quiet about who’s been
visited and what was said there. Through the preparation for a possible
launch, the various uninformed pronouncements of all and sundry haven’t
helped, especially when they’re way ahead of what anybody at Southam is
doing and wide of the mark on what the paper will look like.
“The reality is that
we’re still at the testing phase with a lot of this stuff,” says Fisher.
“Some of it we don’t even know ourselves yet. Some of it we just prefer to
keep to ourselves, frankly.”
Anticipation is
running high. The day before this interview, Fisher said the new paper had
received its first subscriber: “We got a letter from a man wanting to take
out a subscription,” despite the fact that Black has yet to decide whether
to go ahead with the paper.
Media directors know
the paper is coming, too, and they have an idea of what they’d like to see
in it.
“We don’t need
another business paper,” says Terry Sheehy, vice-president at Leo Burnett.
“We need something that doesn’t exist in the market; anything like that
would be better than fragmenting the market further.”
David Harrison,
president of Harrison Young Pesonen & Newell in Toronto, is almost as tired
of the speculation as Southam’s Fisher: “We’ve been talking about this for
six months. I haven’t got an opinion about it anymore.”
More seriously,
though, Harrison admits he’s not sure what will emerge from Southam.
“Personally, I’d prefer The Daily Telegraph (one of Hollinger’s
British papers), but that’s unlikely. You’ve got a lot of papers going after
the same relatively small group of professionals. How many times can you
slice that one piece of the pie? They might take the Ottawa Citizen
and expand it nationally; they could change it to The Citizen.”
That scenario has a
definite appeal for media directors, who seem to agree with aiming at a
broader audience than that sought by the Globe and Financial Post.
Hollinger’s Ottawa Citizen has been doing well as a result of its
redesign and editorial initiatives. And many observers saw that remake as a
dry run for launching a national paper.
It’s also
interesting to note in all of this that Conrad Black has yet to launch a
paper from scratch. He’s revitalized existing titles, but starting a brand
new publication is one challenge he has yet to take on. It’s also important
to remember that he’s never closed a paper either, and is apparently willing
to wait for a publication to become profitable.
“Whatever happens,
I’d like to see a paper that can deliver a rich mass — and I don’t mean
individually rich readers,” Terry Sheehy says. “I mean a large, diverse
readership; something aimed broadly; lots of sports coverage, lots of
lifestyle news — like a national version of the Toronto
Star or
USA Today.”
“Unless market
research shows us we’re nuts, this will be a high-quality newspaper,” Fisher
says. “It will be a national newspaper, and it will be representative of all
the regions of Canada. My sense is that Mr. Black is very close to making a
decision. I honestly believe it will be within the next few weeks at the
outside. That’s about all I want to say about this newspaper. If I could
tell you more, I would.” |
