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ONE

No Country for Old Media: Our Shrinking Public Square

IT IS PROBABLY fair to say that on any given day, in the hushed halls of power in Canada—on the oaken newspaper racks in our cities’ private clubs, in the lobbies of Fairmont hotels, in the offices of Cabinet ministers from coast to coast, on coffee tables in the carpeted confines of our corporate titans—you will be hard-pressed to find a copy of the Tofino-Ucluelet Westerly News.

A fatal crash on the Pacific Rim Highway between Tofino and Ucluelet, or a good-news story about the Clayoquot Oyster Festival—“Oyster Fest. shucks locals out of winter’s shell”—just won’t win many people’s attention when thousands of refugees are at the gate, Bombardier is once again at the trough, Rob Ford has breathed his last, and oilman Murray Edwards, shortly after climbing onto a stage with Alberta’s NDP premier to vaunt the coming of a carbon tax, has decamped for a more tax-friendly Britain.

Even by the standards of the traditional local rag, the weekly Westerly News is a poor excuse for a newspaper. After you’ve forked out your $1.25, the paper’s girth immediately drops by two-thirds when you extract inserts from Home Hardware, No-Frills, Staples, the Brick, and Buy-Low Foods. What’s left of the actual newspaper, all 16 pages of it,¹ loses another half to ads. There is one page of amusements (crossword, Sudoku, etc.) and a total of eight stories written by the paper’s sole reporter, along with a sprinkling of other stories written by community members whose bylines qualify as “Local Voices.” That’s it. As for the stories themselves, well, let’s just say there are none that would cause even the slightest murmur in the aforementioned chambers of power. Nothing comes remotely close to fulfilling Finley Peter Dunne’s oft-cited maxim that good journalism is that which “comforts th’ afflicted [and] afflicts th’ comfortable.”²

From sea to shining sea: Journalism’s rocky shores

TOFINO AND UCLUELET are hardly alone in being dished up truly execrable fare when it comes to local “news” in Canada. They are two among hundreds of communities across the country that suffer the effects of getting news from one media monopoly or another. The Westerly News is one very small link in a chain of “some of the oldest, most trusted community newspapers in North America,” if you believe what you read on the website of Black Press, which claims to be the largest independently owned newspaper company in Canada. Its chairman, David (not Conrad) Black, bought his first newspaper in BC, the Williams Lake Tribune, in 1975. His company now owns 150 titles in BC, Alberta, Washington state, Hawaii, California, and Ohio.

What “elevates” (their word, not mine) Black Press titles is their “diversity” (ditto); their investment in “grass-roots journalism” (whatever that is) is carried out in “newsrooms with history dating back to the 1800s.” If that’s a tear of nostalgia threatening to break loose from the corner of your eye, wait till I tell you that, having become rich in inverse proportion to the impoverishment he has wished upon the journalistic quality of dozens of local newspapers a cross the West, Black also fashions himself as an emerging industrial mogul in the manner of his East Coast concomitants, the good family Irving.

Not content merely to make buckets of money (in 2013, the Financial Post estimated Black Press’s revenues to be more than half a billion dollars),³ Black announced in 2012 that he wants to build a multi-billion-dollar oil refinery in Kitimat, a port town in north-central BC that is already home to an Alcan aluminum smelter and a shuttered pulp mill, the town having been built in an era when environmental assets were routinely sacrificed for economic ones. Black correctly predicted that Enbridge’s poorly executed Northern Gateway pipeline project would founder, and certainly the 2015 election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government seemed to put the last nail in the Northern Gateway coffin when Trudeau vowed to ban tanker traffic of unrefined tar sands fuels from the West Coast.

Black claims his refinery plan is superior because it will ship refined product. He wants to diversify into the oil business because, as he says, “I am for creating thousands of good permanent jobs in BC. . . billions of new tax dollars for government coffers . . . r educing the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions . . . building an oil pipeline that will never leak . . . [and] building a new tanker fleet, owned by a BC company that cannot shirk its liability for a spill at sea, and that carries refined fuels that float and evaporate if spilled.”⁴ These goals have been freely expressed by Black and dutifully recorded in Kitimat’s Northern Sentinel newspaper and the nearby Terrace Standard, along with other northern papers. Both papers are owned by Black Press.

Although his claim that he can simultaneously refine Alberta bitumen and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions seems preposterous, it remains journalistically unexamined by two of his newspapers, although these papers did note that Black has since changed his mind and now champions rail over pipelines for getting crude to tidewater. “It’s safer and way easier,” he said.⁵ That claim, too, has gone unchallenged in newsrooms, historic or otherwise, populated by Black’s “grassroots” journalists.

SWITCH COASTS FOR a moment, and consider the case of J.D. Irving Limited, the sprawling New Brunswick conglomerate that, unlike David Black’s company, started out in the resource-extraction business and later moved into newspaper ownership. The Irvings have massive holdings in just about every walk of Atlantic Canada’s industrial life, and a stranglehold on East Coast journalism that once attracted the attention (and repelled the recommendations) of not one but two federal commissions of inquiry—the Davey Report (1970) and the Kent Commission (1981). The ownership concentration of Irving-owned Brunswick News was left unimpaired by Senator Keith Davey’s recommendation of passing legislation that would “require the break-up of regional monopolies, such as that of the Irving family in New Brunswick, by prohibiting the ownership of two or more newspapers having 75% or more of the circulation, in one language, in a defined geographical area.”⁶ Instead, Brunswick News today has 20 titles big and small, and boasts that “more than 60% of people in New Brunswick’s major cities read one of the publications” owned by the company.⁷ Good for them, you might say, but not so good for the citizens of New Brunswick, who are notoriously poorly served when it comes to anything approaching objective reporting about the biggest economic operator in the province—the owner of all its newspapers. “The newspapers shy away from covering internal divisions or leadership issues within the Irving family and companies,” Bruce Livesey wrote in Report on Business,⁸ then quoted Ken Langdon, a former publisher of one of the Irving papers, as saying, “The problem with the Irvings owning the papers is that none of that ever comes out.”

New Brunswick, which the Davey Report described as one of two “journalistic disaster areas” at the time (the other was Nova Scotia), was the subject of an episode of Jesse Brown’s cage-rattling podcast Canadaland in November 2014.⁹ “It’s like North Korea. It’s like the hermit province of New Brunswick,” Brown said. His show recounted a pretty thorough litany of all the ills you would expect of a powerful, rich, “notoriously secretive,” politically manipulative family monopoly. But it was an exchange from a later Canadaland episode that stood out for me. In February 2015, during a live broadcast from St. Thomas University in Fredericton, there was a panel discussion about a local controversy regarding the awarding of timber licences (the Irvings are major landowners, forest harvesters, and lumber millers, among many other things¹⁰). One of Brown’s guests was Green Party MLA David Coon, who had sponsored a bill in the legislature that would have favoured small, independent forest owners and operators. Coon complained that his bill was barely, and poorly, covered by the Irving-owned Telegraph-Journal. There is, Coon said, “a chill on the way that people speak about Irving-related businesses or forestry activities that they [Irving companies] are engaged in.”¹¹

Coon: It’s also not just the way that Brunswick News is covering the stories but also what they’re not covering . . . Like in BC, the land has never been ceded by the First Nations in New Brunswick, but you would never know that was the case or that there were even First Nations in New Brunswick by reading Brunswick News.

Brown: The [proposed] legislation is directly contrary to the interests of the Irvings, and they did cover it in their paper. Your complaint is that it’s on page 5, it’s marginally covered, and the way it’s covered characterizes it as something of interest to fringe voices and nothing to be taken too seriously. Is that accurate?

Coon: Media tends to talk to the powers that be and tends to reflect the conventional wisdom. If you are not connected to the powers that be, or if you are not speaking in the narrative or the voice of conventional wisdom, then you don’t tend to have much of a place in the media.

Or much of a place in New Brunswick society at all if you are an Aboriginal person whose existence, according to Coon, is effectively unacknowledged by a media monopoly whose owners happen to have a competing interest in the land and its uses. As for an Aboriginal narrative contributing to the province’s conventional wisdom, let alone being acknowledged as part of Atlantic Canada’s traditional wisdom, or Canada’s, that evidently is in no danger of occurring through New Brunswick’s conventional media channels.

In a way, the Black and Irving newspaper oligopolies serve to rather tidily bracket a Canadian media landscape that is shockingly out of step with developments occurring around the world, and that profoundly ill serves Canadians. The West and the East aren’t the only places where media concentration exists in Canada (more on that below), but they are arguably where its worst effects manifest themselves in the connection between powerful industrial, natural resource, and other economic interests; those interests’ ownership of local media; their subsequent authorship of dominant local, regional, and national narratives; and their overt use of that confluence of interests to comfort themselves and afflict Canadians, a mari usque ad mare, with a narrow, self-serving, pro-business (theirs), monocultural view of Canada. If Keith Davey were alive today, he might be heard to utter, “Plus ça change.”

Newspaper ownership concentration mattered in 1970, when the Davey Report was issued, it mattered in 1981, when the Kent Commission recommended breaking up monopolies, and it matters now. Ownership concentration harms democracy, which thrives on a free press. But “in a country that has allowed so many newspapers to be owned by a few conglomerates, freedom of the press means, in itself, only that enormous influence without responsibility is conferred on a handful of people,”¹² as the Kent Commission concluded 35 years ago. The commission also said flat out that “Industrial conglomerates produce poor newspapers.”¹³ Twenty-five years later, a Senate report on the state of Canadian media revealed how little things had changed, referring to the Irvings’ holdings as an “industrial-media complex.”¹⁴

Dancing with the Devil

CONCENTRATION DOESN’T JUST allow owners and publishers to peddle their impoverished (but self-enriching) views of the world; it also gives rise to brazen political interference. Look at the notorious directive made in October 2015 by Postmedia CEO and president Paul Godfrey that a ll 1 6 major newspapers in his stable endorse Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives in their doomed bid to retain power in Ottawa.¹⁵ Even more egregious was what John Barber described in the Guardian as “the company’s chain-wide blitz supporting Harper [that] culminated a few days before the election when virtually all Postmedia publications replaced their front pages with a pro-Conservative advertisement masquerading as an official notice from Elections Canada, the independent agency managing the vote.”¹⁶ This struck many Canadians as a new low for newspaper journalism, or at least for newspaper publishing. In fairness, says Margo Goodhand, who was editing the Edmonton Journal at the time, “while Godfrey ordered up pro-Tory editorials in all four of his papers in May [during the Alberta provincial election] and across the country federally in October, he was willing to sell any and all front pages to any political party that asked . . . Because the Tories bought so many front pages that day in the East, it has become some kind of urban legend that Godfrey gave away his papers to the Tories in a political move. Purely fiscal.”¹⁷

Meanwhile, also on the eve of the federal election, the Globe revealed the extent to which it has become little more than an oil-soaked rag when it plumped for the Conservatives in its pre-election editorial. Its former editor, John Stackhouse—then recently departed to the hallowed halls of Canadian banking—writes in Mass Disruption, a memoir that came out in October 2015, that “editorial boards at major newspapers . . . [remain] the high church of journalism,”¹⁸ stating that a “well-argued editorial” helps define an organization, by which measure the Globe confirmed its status on October 16, 2015,¹⁹ as Canada’s village idiot for the day—on arguably the most important day of the year for political journalism save election day itself.

For working journalists, how their paper’s owners spend their editorial coin can be utterly demoralizing, and decrees like Godfrey’s only illustrate how downright desperate the business prospects are for major newspapers—some would say deservedly so, given the soul-selling behaviour of the Postmedias of the world. “Eight of Canada’s daily newspapers disappeared last year,” Barber wrote in 2015, “and the leading titles are all operating at [a] loss.”²⁰

Godfrey’s Postmedia already owned the most major city newspapers/web portals in Canada before it earned federal approval in March 2015 to greatly expand its empire by acquiring Quebecor’s Sun Media national chain of 173 titles.²¹ Postmedia gained its dominance when, backed by a US hedge fund, it acquired much of Canwest’s newspaper holdings, which were already saddled with merger debt²² that had pushed that media conglomerate (TV, print, and digital) into bankruptcy. Since acquiring Canwest’s print assets, Postmedia (itself more than $670 million in debt),²³ has bled money and staff²⁴ while cashing out its real-estate assets. Canada’s ever-somnambulant Competition Bureau, at least under Stephen Harper’s gimlet-eyed control, saw nothing wrong with the Postmedia/Quebecor transaction,²⁵ blithely concluding there was no real competition between Postmedia’s broadsheets and Sun Media’s tabloids, so, by implication, ownership concentration would do no harm. The bureau also said there was an “incentive for the merged company to retain readership and maintain editorial quality in order to continue to attract advertisers to its newspapers,” that there was healthy competition “from digital alternatives in an evolving media marketplace,” and best of all, there was “existing competition from free local daily newspapers,” which, I believe, are those things that people in coloured bibs thrust at commuters when they’re struggling to work every morning. That’s like saying you really don’t need modern medicine because we’ve still got leeches.

Results that speak volumes

BRAZEN POLITICAL INTERFERENCE? Check. But is ownership concentration the only way to maintain quality and commercial viability in these tough economic times? What would Conrad (not David) Black say? Well, Conrad Black did say this: “Some of [Postmedia’s] newspapers have deteriorated a long way from what I remember. Some of it you can’t avoid. Some of it you can. But please build the quality. Otherwise, you’re going to retreat right into your own end zone, if you’ll pardon the sports metaphor.”²⁶ Or continue your death spiral, if you’ll pardon a metaphor from the insurance industry. By the time December 2015 came around, the Globe and Mail’s business section sported a fetching headline: “Postmedia’s S&P credit rating is now the same as Greece’s.”²⁷ Postmedia had earlier announced plans to cut an estimated $50 million in operating expenses over two years, much of them salaries, but meanwhile had forked out $69 million in interest in its 2015 fiscal year. “A Postmedia spokesperson declined to comment,” and honestly, why would they?

Indeed, why say anything in December when you are planning to announce in January another 90 job losses in the chain by merging newsrooms at multiple city newspapers into one each in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa? “We will continue to operate separate brands in each of these markets,” Godfrey said in a memo to staff on January 19, 2016. “What is changing is how we produce these products.”²⁸ This, in complete contravention of what he originally told the Competition Bureau, with layoffs to match. And still the debt piles up,²⁹ with Postmedia “sitting with its own unique time bomb of financial constraints,” according to the Canadian Press, and “operating under debt obligations that come due over the next few years at astronomical amounts.” Its long-term debt of $25.9 million vaults to $302.7 million in 2 017, according to its annual report filed in November 2015. “If Postmedia is unable to repay those debts, or find a solution to refinance what it owes, the company is almost certain to wind up in bankruptcy,” the CP reported. Second-quarter losses reported in April 2016 totalled $225 million, amid attempts by the company’s largest shareholder to get out altogether.³⁰

In truth, people living in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Ottawa—actually in every media market in the country—have been subjected to such insufferably middlebrow journalism for so long now that it’s tempting to ask who even cares if Postmedia eventually goes under. Well, the prime minister for one, who tweeted after hearing the company’s January announcement that “Journalists are vital to our democracy. . . I’m saddened to hear of the cuts at #postmedia today and my thoughts are with the affected.”³¹ The affected, of course, being not just journalists but all of us. “Centralized news gathering and opinions, including in local news, do not add to the national debate that helps build a functioning democracy,” said Unifor president Jerry Dias. “With each quieted voice, our democracy suffers.”³² Not so fast, says Kelly Toughill, director of the school of journalism at Nova Scotia’s University of King’s College, who questions how important newspapers are to democracy when there’s so much good content online. “Journalism matters, but the future of newspaper companies should not be confused with the future of journalism,” Toughill writes. “The demise of newspapers breaks my heart—but it won’t break democracy.”³³ Chantal Hébert begs to differ, writing in the Toronto Star about La Presse’s almost complete move to digital, save a Saturday print edition, that “the jury is out as to what toll, if any, the shift [to digital] will take on the quality and breadth of [Quebec’s] public conversation.”³⁴

Just think for a moment about what just happened in the preceding passage: informed Canadians debating the importance of newspapers to democracy, a debate waged—democratically—on the editorial pages of newspapers. In a Facebook world, where the most that is demanded of readers is that they “like,” “love,” say “haha” or “wow,” be “sad” or “angry,” and/or share or comment on a story (and keep it under 20 words or folks will scroll down), it is fair enough to be anxious about the quality and breadth of the public conversation, if it can be considered a conversation at all. That’s what’s in danger of going missing in Canada if newspapers become extinct.

And then, days later, on January 25, 2016, this: “The Guelph Mercury, one of the oldest newspapers in the country, is the latest casualty of a wave of austerity that has swept through Canadian newsrooms this winter.”³⁵ The paper, whose publishing history dates back to Canada’s Confederation, published its last print edition four days later. Out on the West Coast, the Nanaimo Daily News went dark the same day.³⁶

“I’m pretty startled by how quickly things have declined,” Dwayne Winseck told the Globe.³⁷ He should know, not only being a Carleton University professor of journalism but a lead researcher for the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project. “Perhaps the most dramatic tale of doom and gloom in the network media economy comes from the experience of newspapers,” Winseck wrote, even before the latest round of cuts and closures. “Newspaper revenues drifted downward slowly between 2 000 and 2008, but have shrunk immensely since from $5.8 billion to $3.7 billion—a plunge of one-third in half a decade.” Of all media in Canada that his study encompasses, newspapers are “the most clear cut case of a medium in decline.”³⁸

The irony here is that concentration and consolidation have always been seen—at least by owners, and by negligent competition watchdogs—as a justifiable sine qua non for media profitability, a bulwark against the vagaries of competition in diminishing markets, a keystone support for keeping the newspaper industry from imploding altogether, taking media diversity down the drain with it. So regulators have tended to approve mega mergers, believing that Canada, with its relatively small, dispersed population, needs to offer corporate media clear pathways to efficiencies so as to retain capacity to do significant journalism—or just survive.³⁹ In return, as part of the bargain, merging media giants promise to develop and subsidize vital, original Canadian content. However, bottom-line pressures inevitably win out. Today’s reality is that concentration and consolidation are simply exacerbating the industry’s lack of profitability (Postmedia being essentially now just a debt-service agency for an offshore hedge fund), driving out what little quality journalism is left, but even more damagingly, serving as a huge barrier to the sort of vibrant, variegated media innovation ecosystem, most of it digital, that has begun to flourish elsewhere. Or as John Stackhouse describes it in his book Mass Disruption, it is a case of an “innovator’s dilemma, the creative deadweight of an old business that not only wouldn’t die but kept showing enough signs of life to prevent anyone from trying to break it.”⁴⁰

Our so-called “legacy media”—newspapers in particular, but broadcasters, too—are committing a kind of economic and editorial seppuku: they have lost the will to invest in the sort of journalism we used to take for granted, which guts their credibility (and audience), which erodes their revenues, which leads to cutbacks in journalism quality. . . and so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say. Our legacy media today are too busy servicing debt to adequately serve their public, although to be fair this isn’t just a Canadian problem. “Predicting a turnaround in newspapers’ fortunes is a loser’s bet”⁴¹ wrote the New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, in a column fretting about the threatened state of local investigative reporting. Sullivan said that “with newspaper profits hit hard by the sharp decline in print advertising, and with newsroom staffs withered after endless rounds of cost-cutting layoffs, local investigative journalism is threatened.” She cited the American Society of News Editors as saying newspaper staffs in the US have declined by 40 per cent since 2003, thereby “leaving crucial beats vacant and public meetings without coverage . . . Of course, local newspapers aren’t the only places doing local investigative journalism. More and more, nonprofit news organizations, digital start-ups, university-based centers and public radio stations are beginning to fill the gap—sometimes in partnerships. But they probably won’t fully take hold while newspapers, even in their shrunken state, remain the dominant media players in local markets [emphasis added].”

And there we balance, uncomfortably—our legacy media teetering on the edge of oblivion, and what few upstarts there are tottering along on insufficient capital, their access to revenues blocked by the wounded giants of yore. In “Postmedia-land,” former National Post and now Walrus editor Jonathan Kay says, “The business model has evaporated. . . Newspapers aren’t dead: A generation from now, I believe, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will still be publishing paper editions. And Toronto likely will have a paper, too—likely a single merged upscale product arising from the consolidation of the National Post, Toronto Star, and Globe and Mail. But the era of the medium-sized, medium-quality daily is in its final act . . . [a] shrinking newspaper industry means there will be fewer resources available for holding government and business to account—especially when it comes to the big, complicated investigative stories that just can’t be done by local broadcast media, or clickbait-oriented web sites.”⁴²

Say goodbye to those Gazettes and Heralds and Citizens and Leader-Posts, those StarPhoenixes, those Suns and Stars because, Kay says, “the coming media landscape is U-shaped. Which is to say, there will be plenty of mass-produced, ad-financed low-quality content to be found at the cheap, Business Insidery end of the content spectrum. And there also will be people like me and my Walrus colleagues creating quality content at the charitably financed top end . . . In the modern media market, go low, or go high. Hanging out in the middle of the road will put you on the path to corporate extinction.”

Hébert contends that print media are “not the only casualty of this ongoing meltdown. Mainstream commercial networks are struggling to adapt to digital viewing habits of their audience—leaving less money to devote to their news coverage. After decades of budget cuts, Radio-Canada and the CBC are shadows of their former selves. So far, the reaction of Canada’s political class has mostly ranged from indifference to public hand-wringing. On Twitter. . . the mayors of the cities involved in the Post-media announcement expressed regrets at the news. So did Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But there must be a point when the steady disintegration of our fifth estate’s news-gathering and news-getting functions becomes a public policy issue.”⁴³

The government goes AWOL

THAT POINT HAS surely been reached. It is worth remembering that, in a different age, “Much of the impetus for the creation of the [Kent] commission was the virtually simultaneous closure, on August 26–27, 1980, of two major daily newspapers: the Ottawa Journal (owned by the Thomson Corporation) and the Winnipeg Tribune (owned by Southam Inc.). These closures gave each chain a monopoly in the two markets, Southam with the Ottawa Citizen and Thomson with the Winnipeg Free Press.”⁴⁴ It seems almost quaint, given what has happened since, to think that the closure of two newspapers in two markets could give rise to a national inquiry into the state of the rest of them.

True, Clifford Lincoln has since chaired a two-year House of Commons study of Canadian broadcasting whose 872-page report sank with barely a trace upon its release in 2003.⁴⁵ There was also a 2006 Senate inquiry into Canada’s media landscape by a committee led by Lise Bacon, which, writes Hébert,

warned that Canada was tolerating a concentration of media ownership that most other countries would find worrisome. And it noted that the consistent depletion of these resources of the country’s public broadcaster compounded the problem.

Some take solace in the notion that Trudeau’s government is committed to reinvesting in the CBC. But a news environment dominated by one media organization—even the public broadcaster—does not amount to a healthy one.

In any event, what followed the Senate report was a decade of laissez-faire that often saw owners sympathetic to the government of the day given free rein over larger media empires, combined with ever-closer-to-the-bone cuts to the CBC.

What we have today is a weaker public broadcaster in a field of journalistic ruins and Canada’s national fabric is the poorer for it.⁴⁶

In early 2016, Liberal MP Hedy Fry declared that she would try her hand at heading a Commons committee to study “how Canadians, and especially local communities, are informed about local and regional experiences through news, broadcasting, digital and print media . . . The thing about politics is that the time comes one day when stuff is facing you so hard that you have to do something about it. That time has come.”⁴⁷ Of course, for successive Canadian government media inquiries spanning more than 35 years now, “doing something about it” has meant studying it. The record of action resulting from those studies brings to mind Kitty Muggeridge’s famously delaminating comment about British media star David Frost, whom she dismissed 50 years ago as having “risen without a trace.”⁴⁸ So too our governments’ interest in the state of our media, and our newspapers in particular.

In a follow-up column to her New York Times lament for the future of investigative journalism, Margaret Sullivan wrote that while “digital-era economics have devastated newspaper staffs,”⁴⁹ digital platforms like ProPublica have come to fill some of the space vacated by local media. She interviewed Richard Tofel, president of ProPublica, which has emerged as the early gold standard for how a loss of ink doesn’t have to mean a lack of stink (as in creating one, like any good news organization should). While understandably bullish about his own organization, Tofel told Sullivan that investigative journalism’s transition online won’t be a smooth one. With newspapers still dominant in many cities, he said there’s not enough of a gap to create great need for new players, funded in new ways, including through philanthropy. “Mr. Tofel told [Sullivan], ‘There’s still an irrational amount of print advertising’ supporting newspaper economics. ‘But the next recession will be very unkind to newspapers.’ By the time it’s over [Tofel said], ‘seven-day-a-week newspapers will be the exception, not the rule.’”