Postmedia has announced the people who will comprise a new community advisory council for the Montreal Gazette, a group that president and CEO Andrew MacLeod hopes will bring more support from local advertisers and subscribers.

First announced last week, the advisory council is made of up business, political and community leaders meant to represent “a cross-section of Montrealers” who will offer advice and strategies to help drive revenue at the Gazette. The council will play no role in editorial direction or content.

The members of the council, announced today, include Joan Fraser, a retired Canadian senator who also had a long career as a reporter and editor at the Gazette, later serving three years as its editor-in-chief. The other members are David Bensadoun, CEO of Aldo Group; Tiffany Callender, CEO of The Federation of African Canadian Economics (FACE); Gurveen Chadha, business operations lead at Shopify; Jonathan Goldbloom, partner at Avenue Strategic Communications; Tasha Lackman, executive director at Le Dépôt Community Food Centre’ Eric Maldoff, partner at law firm Lapointe Rosenstein Marchand Melançon; Andrew Molson, chairman of Avenir Global; Angelo Pacitto, Postmedia’s regional director of media sales for Montreal; and Michael Prupas, owner of Muse Entertainment. In addition, Bert Archer, current editor-in-chief of the Montreal Gazette, will act as Postmedia’s management representative on the Council.

Postmedia’s ad and circulation revenues fell by 13.3% and 11%, respectively, in Q1, the latest in a long series of disappointing financial quarters for the publisher, leading to a number of cost-cutting measures. Those have included cutting Monday print editions for the Gazette and eight other Postmedia titles last fall, laying off 11% of the chain’s 650 editorial staff and scaling back its printing and real estate expenses.

MacLeod hopes that the Gazette community advisory council will help reverse Postmedia’s financial and circulation woes.

“There was a great outcry from the community about concern about the Gazette,” MacLeod told Media in Canada about reactions in Montreal to the company’s cost-saving measures. “I wanted to engage positively with the community and I wanted to explain to people that in order for us to stabilize and start to regrow local coverage, and to put institutions like the Gazette on a sustainable path towards the future, we needed support from the community in the form of subscriber growth and in the form of advertising growth.”

To that end, MacLeod says one of the advisory council’s main functions is to provide that outreach to the community and communicate their role in changing the Gazette’s fortunes.

“It’s working in conjunction with them to disseminate and harness community support,” he explained. “The advisors will have deep relationships into the community from an individual perspective and also from a business perspective – to the extent that they can open doors and we can engage with different business leaders; that we can engage with different pockets of the different community groups within Montreal – and work with them to build subscriber growth and build advertising support.”

He’s hoping that the results will yield a sustainable solution that will allow Postmedia to reinvest in Montreal, growing coverage and the number of journalists it has on staff.

MacLeod isn’t sure if the approach will work, but he says his biggest mandate is to convey to the community that newspapers are a business. Postmedia, like other news outlets, has been challenged by subscriber growth and ad revenue. Even in quarters where Postmedia has been able to grow its digital ad business, a big portion of that still goes to Google and Meta, and hasn’t been enough to offset declines in print ads or increases in expenses.

“That’s a problem for the industry, globally,” MacLeod says. “Our job is to course-correct around that and we’re going to continue to execute the strategy that we have.

“It’s one thing for the community to be deeply concerned about institutions like the Gazette, but they need to understand it’s not a government utility,” he adds. “We need to have positive and sustainable revenue streams. And that involves subscribers and advertising. These are, historically, the two main areas of focus for media companies.”

MacLeod figures he’ll “have an understanding over the next three to nine months” as to whether the advisory council experiment will work. But if it doesn’t?

“We’ll just continue on with the strategy we have. We’ll continue to work with governments. We’ll continue to work with businesses. We’ll continue to highlight the need to ensure that business allocates a reasonable portion of their advertising spend towards Canadian owned and operated media.”

If it is a success, MacLeod says the community advisory council would extend to other Postmedia markets.

“Ultimately, Canadians need to have an honest conversation around the future in news media. It’s on a path that needs to find new avenues and start to course-correct in terms of the revenue trends,” he says. “And that’s not a Postmedia issue: that’s a news media issue right around the world. So, the time is now for us to engage with community leaders, with politicians, and have a wholesome conversation on how we put these venerable institutions on a more sustainable path for the next century.”