Businessman Mitch Garber pitches taking over Montreal Gazette as paper faces more cuts

Businessman Mitch Garber says he's ready and willing to buy the Montreal Gazette either by himself or with a group of local shareholders as the city's oldest newspaper could soon lose up to a quarter of its staff.

Businessman Mitch Garber says he's ready and willing to buy the Montreal Gazette either by himself or with a group of local shareholders as the city's oldest newspaper could soon lose up to a quarter of its staff.

In a series of tweets on Wednesday, Garber, a Montreal-based investor, lawyer, and minority owner of the Seattle Kraken hockey team, said executives with the Gazette's owner, Postmedia Network Corp., have "ignored" an offer to explore local investment of the newspaper.

In a brief text message exchange with CTV News on Wednesday, he said, "I want to be part of a group that could pursue some [or] all ownership of The Gazette as a means of saving the paper."

The future is as uncertain as ever for the Gazette, Montreal's only English-language daily newspaper and one of the oldest papers in North America. Last month, Postmedia, which owns the Gazette, The Ottawa Citizen, The Calgary Herald, and several other papers across the country, announced it was laying off 11 per cent of editorial staff across the company. Postmedia employs about 650 journalists across Canada.

Sources have previously told CTV News that Gazette is expected to take an even bigger hit, with about 25 per cent of staff cut.

Garber says he wants to stem the bleeding at the storied newspaper, but suggested on Twitter that it would be an uphill battle to get local advertising dollars to prop the paper up when it's owned by a "foreign hedge fund."