Carle Jasmin
The news is recent, the newspapers of the Capital Media Group are bankrupt, or about to be, despite emergency assistance from the Government of Quebec to ensure the media the opportunity to continue their operations, time to find any solution, in the short term at least. But this crisis is not simply that in Quebec, it is global.
The Sun, The Law, The Nouvellist, The Tribune, The Daily and The Voice of the East are the media most recently affected by the situation. For the last five years, dozens of print media have stopped publishing due to lack of resources, often citing social networks, Facebook or Google as the source of their torment. It’s not just the big content aggregators that hurt the mainstream media, what about their narrow-minded leaders and some of the unions that still claim today the same privileges as in the ’70s?
In an interview with the newspaper Le Devoir, the editor of the gay guide « Fugues » said in August: « Not avoiding the pirouettes demanded by the media crisis, the publication must also adjust the shot in its content journalistic. As long as there are readers and it will be possible to print, we will do it. The corollary of maintaining the paper remains the vitality of advertising, which is no small task for Fugues. »
The rest is very difficult to predict for Fugues, says Yves Lafontaine. « Ten years ago, I could project myself two or three years ahead, but this is difficult. » The Gay Globe Group does not live this crisis in the first degree, far from it « because the publication and distribution model of our press group is already avant-garde for at least 20 years, » says publisher Roger-Luc Chayer, which has put in place well before the other media, a structure allowing the publication of the contents of the paper magazine in PDF, by electronic subscriptions and on the trilingual press wire, Le Point!
And there is the question of unions and associations like the FPJQ that have never been able to adapt to new realities, by punishing web publishers from the beginning to negative ethical decisions, while resisting arrival of new broadcasting technologies. « When a union that claims to protect its members and workers comes to make demands of another time, both in terms of wages and benefits, that’s when the crisis began to hurt. The media have lived on borrowed time, on credit and in the hope of seeing the Internet mode fade, and the opposite has happened, « said Roger-Luc Chayer who is responsible alone for the implementation on the page of the paper magazine, web services, PDF and image processing for Gay Globe Group. « It’s the arrogance of bosses and unions that puts these media out of business, never the efficiency! » Concludes Chayer.