Ten years from now, Canada may not have any daily newspapers: expert

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – If you still like to sit down and read a newspaper with your morning coffee, beware: those days could be numbered.

With three more local papers preparing to print their final issues in less than three weeks, one of Canada’s leading authorities on media economics and trends has a bold prediction about the future of the newspaper industry.

The Burnaby News Leader, New Westminster News Leader and Tri-Cities Now will publish their last editions October 1st.

Ken Goldstein with Communication Management Inc. says 10 years from now, Canada may not have any daily newspapers.

“It may have been that the predictions of demise were premature in the past. Unfortunately, I think this is where we’re heading,” says Goldstein.

There’s been an overall loss of revenue from all sources, including print ads, classifieds and circulation.

Goldstein refers to it as “unbundling” and says with less money from all those sources, there is no way the papers can survive in their current form.

“The revenue sources that are coming into our daily newspapers are being unbundled by technology. You have a situation where over the last nine or 10 years, we’ve seen the combined revenue from classified advertising drop from $875 million to $175 million.”

He says they can’t survive with a single source of revenue. “To pretend that if I build a paywall — which is just another word for a subscription — around my online content, that that’s going to solve the problem… it won’t.”

Goldstein thinks the only way to survive is to somehow find a way to replace all those revenue sources online, which so far, nobody has figured out how to do.

“If you not only are losing circulation but if you are also finding revenue sources that you used to have being picked off by Craigslist or Kijiji, or other kinds of alternatives, then you’re into a new area,” he explains.

It puts the papers in uncharted territory, much like a company being broken up and sold off for parts.