Editors say cuts at Montreal Gazette are bad for English news but local coverage can be done differently

Last week, when Postmedia announced it was slashing 11 per cent of its roughly 650 editorial staff across the country, journalists at the Montreal Gazette learned their newsroom could be hit even harder. 

The company, which owns the Gazette, wants to trim up to 10 full-time positions in Montreal — which would see the paper's staff reduced by a quarter, according to an internal memo obtained by CBC. 

The layoffs are just the latest in a string of cuts. Postmedia, which is majority-owned by Chatham Asset Management, a New Jersey hedge fund, has progressively used buyouts, outsourcing, centralization and downscaling to reduce expenses. 

Critics say those cuts have come at the cost of local news coverage. Asked how the layoffs would affect the Gazette's ability to cover the Montreal community, Bert Archer, the Gazette's editor-in-chief, declined to comment.

But as the Gazette scales back, smaller English-language newspapers in Quebec are investing in local news and hoping readers will respond. 

In 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Gazette stopped delivering weekday print newspapers to readers in the Eastern Townships. The decision affected the Sherbrooke Record, which had shared some delivery costs with the Gazette, but the Record continued to deliver the paper. 

"Our readers are largely seniors," Sharon McCully, the publisher of the Record, said in a recent interview. "If they didn't have their daily Record, they would not know what's going on. They wouldn't know where to go to get the shots, nothing. So it was so vital for them to continue to get the print copy of the paper."

Quebec's English-speaking minority community needs good local news coverage, McCully said. Cuts at the Gazette, she said, will lead to fewer stories and less scrutiny of government decisions, which, particularly on issues like language legislation, affect anglophones. 

"It will be a sad day, I think, when we don't have anybody reporting on this community and saying how the issues are impacting the English minority community of Quebec," she said. "When you lose that many reporters, it really is going to have a huge impact on how the community can react and mobilize for issues that are important."

The Record is facing many of the same challenges that confront the Gazette, Postmedia, and practically every newspaper, McCully said. Delivery costs are high, people are loath to pay for news subscriptions and digital advertisements don't bring in enough money to pay the bills.

But rather than downscale in an attempt to shave costs, the Record is trying to invest in its coverage, McCully said, relying in some cases on grants and federal programs like the Local Journalism Initiative to hire reporters — and hoping comprehensive local coverage will entice people to buy the paper.

"That's probably our saving grace, that we're hyper-local," she said. "Everything that happens in our paper affects people in the Eastern Townships. So that's 100 per cent our focus."

Brenda O'Farrell, a Montreal Gazette alumnus who had a front-row seat to some of the changes at the Gazette, said Postmedia consistently favoured its bottom line over considerations about journalism and how it could fund journalism.