Bostonian To Blaze New Trail at Edmonton Journal?

The Edmonton Journal finally has a new publisher 14 months after Linda Hughes resigned when she realized that her new bosses at CanWest Global value healthy profits over first-rate journalism.
Considering his academic and business background, her successor, John J. McDonald (the Third, no less), seems like a very odd duck...
Raised in Boston, Mass., where he attended a private boys' school, he got a BA in history and Russian language at Boston College. He apparently developed an interest in things Canadian while getting an MA in Russian and East European Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Then it was back to Boston for his MBA in 1986 at the prestigious Babson School of Business. For the next 20 years, he worked in the U.S. advertising business for Yellow Pages and then Verizon.
Ya gotta wonder what inspires a guy like that to suddenly jump into the Canadian newspaper business -- and here, of all places. Did he get on the wrong plane, thinking he was going to the power centre of Alberta?
It must have been a hell of a shock when he got here and realized that Calgary is 320 kilometres further south...
When McDonald's appointment was announced Jan. 14, he was quoted as saying that he wants The Journal to gain broad recognition for its journalistic excellence. Besides being the voice of Edmonton, "I want The Journal to be one of the most innovative papers in Canada and beyond".
It's hard to imagine how that will happen.
I was one of more than 20 senior reporters and editors who took advantage of a CanWest buy-out four years ago. Forty years after getting my journalism degree at Carleton University, it was a good time for me to quit.
CanWest slashed The Journal's newsroom budget and drastically shrank its staff. The few new reporters hired are on contract with no benefits. Requests for basic tools such as phones with call display are denied. Those who remain are expected to do more without added compensation.
For example, all those staff blogs in the online Journal are done for free.
It was everything we feared Conrad Black would do (but didn't) when he bought the former Southam newspaper chain, including The Journal.
McDonald's arrival coincides with a second major buy-out of newsroom staff which will see 28 senior editors, reporters and columnists gone by Feb. 1.
This buy-out was triggered by a basic change involving the news selection and lay-out of pages for world and Canadian news at all CanWest dailies.
Instead of having local editors select content from various sources, that work and the page make-up will all be done in Hamilton, Ont. Generic pages will then be emailed out to The Journal, the Calgary Herald and all the other dailies.
CanWest already provides generic, cookie cutter content for movie and television reviews. Remember the great movie reviews Mark Horton used to do? That kind of local content is gonzo.
Wonder why you no longer see the CP logo in The Journal?
CanWest saved about $5 million a year by pulling out of the Canadian Press news sharing cooperative that was created to let Canadians know what was happening all across the country.
Content from papers such as the Toronto Star, the Globe, the Halifax Daily News, the
Calgary Sun -- and a raft of smaller dailies-- is no longer available to Edmontonians. And with no CanWest dailies in the Maritimes, that part of Canada is like a big geographic black hole for us.
The news flow from Edmonton and Calgary to the rest of Canada is similarly restricted.
It's probably the worst thing CanWest has done since it got into the newspaper business and it has happened with barely a nod or a whimper from our provincial and federal politicians.
If you believe that healthy democracies best thrive on an abundance of information and viewpoints, you'd have to agree that Canwest is going in the absolutely worst direction.
I'm afraid that what's going to happen in John J. McDonald (the Third)'s brave new world is a chain of very profitable CanWest newspapers that will look and read almost the same from city to city.
__________________
* See The Journal story regarding the McDonald's appointment at:
www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=42e88d11-eb5e-4780-8faf-7147a37ec6a8&k=89893
* Exerpt from CanWest MediaWorks (Canada) Inc. Nov 30/07 financial statement:
14. RESTRUCTURING
In November 2007, management made a decision to move the production functions of certain sections of the newspaper to one central location. Due to the move of these functions a workforce reduction plan was announced for the affected newspapers. The workforce reduction is expected to be complete by the end of May 2008. During November 2007, an accrual of $7.8 million was recorded in accounts payable and accrued liabilities and expensed in restructuring expenses. This accrual has been reduced by payments of $0.1 million as at November 30, 2007 resulting in an accrual of $7.7 million as at November 30,2007. Management expects that further costs relating to this workforce reduction plan will be incurred; however, as at November 30, 2007 those costs were not determinable.