Tuesday 19 January 2010

Canwest cheer

Lise Lareau, president of the 6,000-member Canadian Media Guild, welcomes word of an offer from a consortium interested in purchasing three major dailies from Canwest.

News reports say a group of investors wants to purchase the National Post, Montreal Gazette and Ottawa Citizen. The group is led by former Senator Jerry Grafstein.

Lareau tells readers of her -30- blog:

"What's so encouraging about this news is that not only does the group have background in the business (Grafstein was a founder of Citytv in Toronto, Ray Heard used to be an editor at the Montreal Star then he was an executive at Global TV and Beryl Wajsman is editor of a weekly newspaper in Quebec), they are actually talking about content!

"The three are not talking about "synergies", not making this about bottom-line cost-effective delivery of news on all sorts of platforms. That's the kind of talk that led to Canwest's troubles."

We couldn't have said it better, Lise.

Time to dismantle media conglomerates and return control of the news to "news" people.

Synergies. We are so tired of reading that word in Quebecor press releases.

1 comment:

  1. well at least we can sit back and wish it was us!
    Who would have thought that working for a company broken by debt would be a God send. Canwest folks should count themselves lucky, how sad is that?

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