Friday 11 February 2011

NFR -Joe Wallace

The student smoke bomb at Quebecor's HQ in Montreal was just clearing the building  yesterday when TSF was told of another Sun Media loss down Niagara way.

A TSF tipster says Joe Wallace, the much-respected city editor of the Niagara Falls Review, has called in quits in favour of a job with Post Media at its Hamilton location.

"When a guy like that moves on - wow," says the tipster. "He was/is a rock - a good solid guy who has done that job for years. He is from Niagara Falls and knows/knew everything going on.

"With the losses mounting, it seems just a matter of time of amalgamation of the three dailies’ news rooms."

The merging of the Niagara Falls Review (1879), St. Catharines Standard  (1891) and Welland Tribune (1887) does seem inevitable, with the siphoning of manpower and assets.

That's a whole lotta newspaper history just waiting to be crunched to improve the bottom line.

Quebecor did it in 2009 with the Corbourg Daily Star (1831), Port Hope Evening Guide (1878) and Colborne Chronicle  (1959) from the ashes of the Colborne Express (1866) and Colborne Enterprise (1886).

Today's three-in-one paper is called Northumberland Today and it is filled with a lot of recycled not-so-local QMI content and shopping flyers.

13 comments:

  1. With so many great people moving on, or being let go, there won't be much of a paper left after an amalgamation.

    There are so many more great news outlets starting up. The competition will totally crush them.

    In my opinion the Niagara region papers' days are numbered.

    Bottom line, Quebecor doesn't care about the people, or the product, just greed.

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  2. Heres a big tip. The papers have less than a year to live. All the Ontario papers, most of the Albertas for sure. When the SUN TV launches the papers will be closed, a handful of reporters might e kept on to be TV reporters but the unions will be done and a natinal sales team will handle the ads. After a few months, a new daily paper will pop up with no local news, just flyers, ads and rewrtes from the TV channel. The web sites will be the main print source with short items about local news. This is not a theory this is what some of us have been told and if you look at the pattern of the last days or two you will see it makes sense.

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  3. So they will kill off profitable papers? I'm sure there are a few still left in Ontario? Seems unlikely with an unproven TV station. They just invested millions in a new press in Islington.

    This "tip" seems highly unlikely...

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  4. By no means am I sticking up for Quebecor, but the Feb. 13 poster needs to back up this theory with some facts. All papers will fold within a year? Is that why PKP is continuing to buy up smaller weeklies? And I seem to get the impression the print side will be feeding the TV network, not the other way around.

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  5. I hate when you publish comments like Anonymous at 12:31 AM Feb. 13. It's just speculation, but scares the crap out of existing employees nonetheless.

    In my opinion, comments like that should be attributed or simply deleted. We already fear our futures as it is, the last thing we need is someone who could possibly be Quebecor management saying this crap without attribution.

    I'm only speaking on a personal level here, but you have to understand where I'm coming from. I love the blog, but posts like that are really unnecessary and downright frightening.

    Sadly, I think Quebecor is stupid enough to do something like this. I hope like hell I'm wrong.

    Because I work for Sun Media, clearly I have to post anonymously ... which sucks.

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  6. I heard this past weekend that the Welland Tribune is going to stop having newspapers for sale at stores. If you want the newspaper you will have to subscribe to it. Can anyone tell me if there is any truth to this?

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  7. Other papers are coming out of store, too, as I have heard. There has already been a removal in some areas from rural retail sales. Moving to a subscription-only model makes sense in the face of what Q is doing by reducing the relevance of the print product and shifting to a web/TV focus. Publishers, editors, sales managers and even many staff have already been told this as clear as day.

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  8. As an employee at the Tribune, and I am sure they'll be hunting me down after this, we haven't heard anything about what the last poster is talking about. Doesn't mean it won't happen, because we are usually the last to know.

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  9. Just a note: Lucky Northumberland Today, which has a publisher who came from the advertising manager's position at the Niagara Falls Review. We miss you, Mark Holmes.

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  10. What about the papers that are free to residents? Are they going to rid delivering those and making them pay for an online subscription?

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  11. To the 6:01 post - yes, Mark Holmes is missed, but do you think anything would be different if he was still there? There's a reason all these people left Niagara.
    By all accounts, the woman who replaced him - Daria Zmiyiwsky - is a dream to work for, but even her hands are tied.

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  12. I agree... Daria is a Great boss!

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  13. Oh brother... This has completely devolved. Things are bad period. By all the postings and the inordinate number of people jumping ship on a constant basis things are more terrible in this Region. We're not seeing the same type of ship jumping from the other Ontario Regions. It seems that all of this animosity is missing the mark. Shouldn't the top brass of this Region be the one responsible for rallying the troops, being sympathetic, etc. rather than scurrying around either in a wild panic or forcing false enthusiasm? Weird culture that's being cultivated in the Niagara Region. That's for sure.

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