All the tea in China, and all the ink in Woodstock...
Sawmill and gristmill at King's Landing
Media concentration is something that exists in New Brunswick at an absurd level. I feel that the dam may be about to break however.
From "Feds must examine Irving media empire:Fraser" - CBC
The federal government needs to take a serious look at media concentration in New Brunswick, according to Senator Joan Fraser, co-author of a June 2006 report that raised questions about Irving media holdings... "We didn't find anywhere else in the developed world a situation like the situation in New Brunswick," Fraser told CBC News on Friday. The senate report examined the state of all of Canada's news media.This is being stirred up in response to the attempts by former Irving (Brunswick News) publisher William Kenneth Langdon to start up a newspaper called the Carleton Freepress. The Irving initially tried to get block him completely via court order but now simply seek to prevent him from contacting any of their writers, advertising clients, etc. which in a town the size of Woodstock amounts to the same thing.
Langdon says he left the Woodstock Bugle-Observer in relation to business tactics he was ordered to use against Gary Windsor, who operates a flyer service in competition with the Irvings. It is said the Irvings would slash their prices below cost to drive Windsor out of business.
The Irvings maintain a stranglehold on English-language media in New Brunswick and have been questioned about it for decades, but the government does nothing. Much of the examination is done at the national senate level and even though the Irvings own 99% per cent of the print media in New Brunswick, that's only a small fraction of print media in Canada as a whole and so they slip under the radar. The senate would much prefer to keep their eyes on companies like Southam, Global, or other media-specific giants.
After all, Irving isn't even primarily a media company. They're into oil and forestry. I can't promise this but it's my long-held belief that they never even got into the newspaper business for a profit but only to control the press in aid to their other ventures. This is why, for example, you only hear about the Canadian military using Agent Orange on New Brunswick civilians.
Some disclosure for closure?
So why dust off this blog to post on the matter now? It's not unrelated. If you scroll through the archives, you'll see plenty of references to the magazine I ran in New Brunswick back in 2004-2005. I never recorded most of what happened precisely because of the extremely competitive business climate I was in.
The basics? I turned down a job with the local Irving-owned paper. They wanted to haggle and I didn't. It gave me a bad vibe, as if everything from thence forward would be a conflict with management. I opted, instead, to go off and pursue a quite life publishing textbooks for South Korea. That was, until one day they fired a friend of mine and his bravado to start his "own damn newspaper" got the best of me instead and I decided to realize it.
Proudly, I can say that I made a profit on every issue, despite what shenanigans the local Irving-owned newspaper tried. They phoned and threatened my advertisers. They stole ideas from me for stories and features. They even started a competing publication to go against me but failed miserably. They shut it down after only a handful of issues.
Their problem was threefold. First, they didn't understand the market and assumed that as a younger person, I was going after the youth market when I was actually going after seniors. Why go after youth? Young people don't have any money in Miramichi, which means they're not a driving market force. You need readers with money, to spend with your advertisers, if you want to sustain business. In a high unemployment area like Miramichi, senior citizens have stable, fixed incomes (not to mention time to sit and read.)
Secondly, the amount of advertising revenue was finite. They ended up flipping ads from the regular newspaper into their competing paper, at lower cost. Ergo, they reduced their ad revenue but double their printing cost.
Why doubled? Because the third problem was logistics. They patterned it off the newspaper and started it up by charging a cover price the same as the paper and using the same trucks to deliver it (requiring an equal press run.) The cover price had to be dropped after their first issue, I should point out.
There were other things worth mentioning. The title was actually from a pre-existing independent magazine that ran five years before. For a moment, I was a bit worried because it had inherent credibility as a result -- the same credibility I was gunning for as an independent, non-Irving magazine.
How did the Irvings get an indy pub to begin with? The original founder was working for the paper when I came along with my magazine. They convinced him to let them start it up, which he did, and then one issue later they turfed him and installed the publisher's son as the new editor. Why not? Once they did a single issue, it essentially gave them copyright over the product in lieu of any other agreements.
However, they actually used the same five-year old material in the rush to beat me to publishing first. They had interviews with bartenders for bars that had long ago closed. They had stories dug up from the back of a computer hard drive somewhere. One of the best ones had a caption printed at the top saying, "If you wrote this story or know who did, please call ###-####." I'm guessing that they didn't have permission to republish.
A couple more issues later and the publisher's son was airlifted out of the debacle and the job of editor went to a junior photographer who'd signed on, fresh out of college. I believe, the final count was five issues for them.
Probably my biggest hit came from the strike at the local UPM mill, Miramichi's largest employer (which is shut down completely now, I hear.) My first issue was in September and the mill went on strike in November. While I'd gained a couple thoasand dollars revenue from issue one to issue two, I lost it and even came in a thousand dollars under my premiere issue when the November issue came out.
The silver lining came later when the mill opted to do some significant advertising with me the following year, but you could tell that pockets were empty around town, even when the boys went back to work. My best clients, who'd pay their bill the day after the magazine came out, were starting to go into 90 days in many cases. The war chests they'd used to get through the strike were gone and there just wasn't enough economic activity or hope that could fill them again, quickly.
I kept my magazine up for 13 issues. I wanted a year plus one, just to prove I left of my own accord. I had other projects in mind, but it was becoming clear that domestically, we were due for brighter lights and bigger cities. The move from Seoul (population 19 million) to Miramichi (population 19 thousand) was too much. A job came up in Halifax and I decided to take it, and close up my shop on Water Street. I made money, but could have made a lot more doing other things.
So there, I've broken this blog's silence with a record-breaking post to fill in the details that are missing from a few years ago, and that I'd never put down in print, here or elsewhere, ever before. There's so much to say about that year, publishing in Miramichi. I got to experiment with a lot of aspects of the business and I learned an awful lot.
Having my own little newspaper war was a lot of fun, but in the end, you'll fight for every penny and in New Brunswick, in 2007, there aren't a lot of pennies floating around. I wish Mr. Langdon luck, but I hope he's simply doing this for love of the business, and for the challenge -- not the money. As I learned, even if you win, the pot is pretty small.
Would I ever work for the Irvings? It'd depend on the project. I remember reading once that Jamie Irving had hopes to do something similar to something I'd still like to do. If it ever came to pass, maybe I'd cast my lot in. We're done with living in New Brunswick though. It received enough of my blood and sweat that year with the magazine. I've gone on to easier gigs with bigger pay cheques -- though maybe still not big enough as we're eyeing Toronto now. Who knows? Maybe someday I could even find myself at an English-language daily back in Korea. Stranger things have happened.
Labels: media, Miramichi Monthly
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