Could It Be The End of Local News At The Montreal Gazette

From Rush PR News:

MONTREAL(RushPRnews)3/11/2008–Readers of the Montreal Gazette may have gotten their first glance into the newspaper’s fate, as pages produced by the Financial Post (a part of the National Post newspaper), were inserted into The Gazette’s business section and into all ten Canwest-owned daily newspapers this Saturday. The Montreal Gazette has been in a fragile position, as parent company Canwest Publishing Inc. refuses to back down on its outsourcing demands or its forward attempts at centralizing Canadian news. RushPRnews contacted Director of Communications of Canwest Publishing, Phyllise Gelfand, hoping to interview her for further details into the company’s actions. Gelfand responded to an initial phone message with an inquiry about what information this reporter was seeking. Subsequent requests were not answered.

Not only putting the job security of many Gazette workers at high risk, but also greatly minimizing the production and quality of local content, Saturday’s business page was just the tip of the iceberg as to what could become of the sanctity of Canadian journalism as a whole. In order to fit these Financial Post pages in the Gazette’s Saturday Business section, the amount of locally-produced content shrunk from five pages to less than three. Some of the cuts included bond listings, TSX industry indexes and mutual fund listings. Even the number of foreign currencies listed, dropped from 40 to 10.

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