By Patrick Penner,
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Local news is set to become scarcer for about 600,000 Metro Vancouver residents, as three long-standing community publications prepare to shut down.

Glacier Media’s impending closures of the Tri-City News, Burnaby Now, and the New West Record will eliminate 60 percent of the journalistic workforce across five cities and two villages.

The only remaining sources of local news will be two small online newsletters, leaving New Westminster without any dedicated coverage.

Richard Dal Monte, the Tri-City News’s longest-serving editor (2001-2020), called the closures “heartbreaking.”

“The loss is huge,” Dal Monte said. “I don’t know that Glacier has a sense for the importance of these publications in their communities. It’s just their bottom line.”

On February 21, Glacier announced the three papers would cease operations before the end of spring, citing unsustainable financial challenges. All three outlets had already stopped their print editions on August 10, 2023.

The closures are part of a troubling trend in Canada, where the number of news outlets has nearly halved since 2008, according to the Local News Research Project (LNRP), an organization monitoring the decline of community journalism.

Over the past 17 years, 529 local publications have shut down across Canada, with 76 percent of them being community newspapers. While 406 new outlets have launched, only 278 are still operational. In B.C., there has been a net loss of 37 outlets.

Glacier Media and Black Press, which dominate B.C.’s local news landscape, have closed 33 and 32 outlets, respectively.

Legacy media companies have struggled to adapt to disruptions of their traditional revenue streams in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of big tech companies dominating online advertising.

Alfred Hermida, a UBC journalism professor and co-founder of The Conversation Canada, said industry leaders have been slow to adjust to major shifts in media consumption over the last three decades.

He pointed out that, rather than investing early in digital journalism from a strong financial position, many companies clung to old business models as their profit margins shrank.

As of 2023, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), and Amazon control 89 percent of Canada’s $16.6 billion online advertising market, while Canadian media companies capture only six percent, according to a report by the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project (GMIC).

“It’s almost too late to do anything, the advertising bus has gone now – that wasn’t the case 10 or 15 years ago,” Hermida said. “Leadership has been like the three wise monkeys: I close my eyes, I close my mouth, close my ears. This is not happening.”

Canada’s newspaper industry saw major consolidation following the 2008 crisis, leading to the closure of local papers across the country.

In the 2010s, Glacier Media and Black Press traded multiple publications in overlapping markets, creating local monopolies that went unchecked by federal competition regulators.

Despite assurances from the companies, 17 newspapers – including Glacier’s Coquitlam Now and Burnaby/New West News Leader – were shut down.

“The argument from big media groups has been, if we’re facing competition from Facebook and Google, we need to consolidate and get bigger,” Hermida said. “But that doesn’t serve the public interest of journalism.”

Newspaper revenue has continued to shrink, dropping from a peak of $4.7 billion in 2008 to just $1.7 billion in 2023, according to the GMIC report.

April Lindgren, the founder of the LNRP, said the main survival strategy of media ownership has been to cut their newsroom staff.

There’s less reason for people to read newspapers, and advertisers are expected to pay the same or more for fewer eyeballs, she said.

“It’s been a huge disaster for journalism,” Lindgren said.

Glacier’s financial statements are consistent with the broader trends across the industry. In 2008, its newspapers and trade publications generated $232.5 million in revenue. By the end of 2023, its community media division’s revenue had dropped to $63.2 million, according to its financial statements.

The company’s third-quarter shareholder report of 2024 stated they have been rapidly divesting from unprofitable legacy newspaper publications over the previous 15 months, shifting focus to digital content where there is more potential for long-term growth.

The three papers’ transition to digital-only just 18 months ago appeared to be a part of that shift. When Glacier announced the ceasing of print editions, publisher Lara Graham promised readers, “We’re not going anywhere.”

Both Glacier Media and Graham did not respond to the Dispatch’s inquiries regarding financial challenges at the publications.

Unifor Local 2000 President Brian Gibson, who represents staff from the three affected newsrooms, said the closures came as a “shock.”

“We thought we were doing okay,” Gibson said. “They told us switching to digital was part of the plan. We lost a few people, but they thought we had the right mix to keep going.”

Gibson suspected the closures may be connected to the fact that these three outlets are Glacier’s last remaining unionized papers in Metro Vancouver. The union and the company were in the midst of contract negotiations after the previous collective agreement expired in late 2023.

In a March 4 press release, Unifor pointed out that Glacier’s non-unionized publications newspapers have not been affected by the closures, and North Shore News and Delta Optimist continue to produce newspapers.

Gibson expressed surprise that Tri-City News’s print editions were considered financially unfeasible, given the amount of ad space still being filled in the paper. “How the heck are we losing money?” he said. “These things are huge.”

Dal Monte also noted the paper was still profitable when he was laid off in 2020, and able to staff a team of five full-time reporters.

The paper’s shift to digital had generally been successful, Dal Monte added. In his final year, the Tri-City News saw its online readership grow by 400 percent, generating more than 1 million page views in a single month.

“We used to cover everything, we had enough staff to do it,” Dal Monte said. “It’s crazy to me that they couldn’t make it work, especially considering how little money they’re putting into it.”

However, Gibson asserted the company had started letting positions go unfilled when reporters left or retired. Over the past five years, Tri-City News was reduced to just two reporters who shared an editor with Burnaby Now and New West Record.

Media companies fail to mention that shifts to digital-only formats are usually accompanied by cuts to newsroom staff, according to Lindgren.

She said these cuts generally lead to increased “news poverty” in a given service area. Access to local news becomes increasingly difficult to navigate, especially for older populations.

The vacuum left behind is often filled by rumour and false information proliferating across social media, Lindgren warned.