The digital transition of the six member newspapers of the National Cooperative of Independent Information (CN2i) will take a decisive step by the end of the year: they will completely cease to be printed. About a hundred employees, or nearly a third of the workforce, will lose their jobs as part of this shift.
At the end of March 2020, daily newspapers The sun, The right, The Daily, The Voice of the East, The gallery And Le Nouvelliste, which cover local news from different regions of Quebec, had ended their paper editions during the week, retaining only a weekly edition published on Saturdays. The measure, which was initially intended to be temporary in the context of the pandemic, was made permanent in the summer of 2020.
This transition will continue at the end of 2023, when the Saturday print edition will also disappear, making these six dailies fully digital publications.
Paper costs more and more to produce and distribute and there are fewer and fewer people to read it
The information revealed on Wednesday by CN2i was nevertheless expected by the employees of the six dailies, who were therefore not shaken by the news, assured the Duty the president of the union of employees of the Sun, journalist Ian Bussières. “Since the co-ops were created, the fact that we are going to end up completely abandoning paper, everyone was aware of it. All the employees knew that we were going towards that, ”he evokes in an interview.
The last paper edition of these six dailies is therefore scheduled for the end of December 2023.
“It was written in the sky,” also launches Jean-Hugues Roy, professor at the School of Media at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM). “Paper is more and more expensive to produce and distribute and there are fewer and fewer people to read it”, which encourages several media to opt for a digital shift, summarizes the professor.
CN2i’s decision fits precisely in a context where its member dailies have seen their paper subscriptions melt away like snow in the sun in favor of digital. “Paper subscription was steadily declining and digital subscriptions were steadily growing. The two lines crossed and, now, we have more digital subscribers than paper subscribers”, notes the Duty the general manager of CN2i, Geneviève Rossier.
Affected jobs
In order to prepare the ground for this shift, CN2i will launch new digital applications and renew the web interfaces of its member daily newspapers. The latter already currently offer a limited number of free articles each month; readers wishing to read more are then invited to purchase a paid subscription.
This transition will also lead to the creation of a voluntary departure program, which will be announced in June, as certain positions entirely associated with the production of print editions will become obsolete. Employees will then be able to leave in exchange for financial compensation; CN2i thus hopes to avoid having to proceed with layoffs.
Ian Bussières fears, however, that they will still occur if the number of employees wishing to leave is not sufficient. In an interview, he also raised the fear that this reduction in the workforce will lead to an overload of work for the employees who will remain. “Even if these are just voluntary departures, if in my union unit, I have a drop in a certain number of employees, will the workload of the employees who remain increase, which will make us losing the gains we made on employee conditions? That’s what worries me, ”says Mr. Bussières.
Geneviève Rossier ensures for her part that CN2i does not wish to “overload” the employees of the six dailies. The cut positions will mainly be those currently associated with paper production, while editorial jobs will be protected “as much as possible,” she said in an interview. “We don’t want to come up with a model where people run out. We don’t want to ask people to do more with less. We want a model where they adapt well to the digital model. »
A general shift
CN2i, which was created at the end of 2019 following the bankruptcy of Groupe Capitales Médias, has 350 employees. The creation of solidarity cooperatives made up of employees and executives of the six newspapers concerned had then made it possible to ensure their survival, by means of a rescue plan of 21 million dollars.
This announcement comes a week after the newspaper 24 hours, which published its latest paper edition last Thursday. The daily is now only available in digital format, while its immediate competitor in Montreal’s public transit system, the daily Metrohas only published one paper edition per week since June 2022.
In Quebec, only the Montreal Journal and the Quebec newspaper continue to print seven days a week. The duty offers its paper edition from Monday to Saturday, while Montreal Gazette stopped printing its Monday edition last October.
Thus, when the six dailies that are members of CN2i stop printing their Saturday edition, “more than half of the French-language dailies in Quebec will no longer be printed,” observes Jean-Hugues Roy. A situation which risks posing an issue of accessibility to information, in particular for the elderly, notes the professor.