Following news in August that Metro Media would shut down all print and digital operations amidst a perfect storm of distribution woes, the Online News Act (and all that implies), as well as financial pressure, the media company has announced that it is declaring bankruptcy.
After attempts to restructure and digitally revitalize Metro Media, things seemed to be going well. “We were north of 3.5 million page views a month, growing our subscriber list — I think we plateaued right before shutdown at 110,000 subscribers — and experiencing app downloads in the tens of thousands,” Andrew Mulé, president and CEO of Metro Media, tells MiC. “All launched without a penny in the bank to market it.”
TC Transcontinental’s shuttering of its Publisac service (a weekly distribution of community newspapers and flyers in Quebec), as well as a new City of Montreal bylaw that ended universal distribution of advertising materials in the city without consent, “kneecapped” them, Mulé says. It forced Metro Media to do without the legacy business and distribution that was “key to financing our digital turnaround.”
Mulé says he lost 40 to 50 percent of his advertising dollars in physical print flyers on the announcement of the new bylaw that required opt-in for pamphlet distribution alone. “It had been demonized so much in the public eye,” he says, adding that his biggest advertisers no longer wanted to be associated with that type of media channel.
Compound that with the effect Meta and Bill C-18 had on Metro Media’s news coverage and distribution, and “it was hard to build that reach we needed to get critical mass.
“But we were doing it anyway, to be honest with you, through organic reach,” Mulé says. “One of our strengths was boots-on-the-ground and word-of-mouth. So, it was happening. It just wasn’t happening fast enough.”
In terms of the big picture from both an advertising and community journalism perspective, Mulé points to a massive void that now exists. “We were serving communities that have no voice in Quebec, and it would be a really bad thing if someone can’t fill that space. That being said, who in their right mind is going to put a penny into an industry that’s facing obstacles at every single corner?”
Mulé points out that there were only 100 weeklies in Quebec, most of which were independent. “Now they’re basically owned by two or three groups. My group was the one that had invested the most on the digital front. If you’re the other groups, are you really going to put all your money towards digital after seeing my group fail? I hope they do, but I don’t think so.”
“As we lose these publishers, we increasingly need to be reminded about Canadians who have information and those who do not,” says Sarah Thompson, president of Dentsu Media, in response to Metro Media’s bankruptcy news. “For advertisers, trusted and quality environments are being lost for their brands to connect with people at a meaningful community level.”
