MONTREAL - Transcontinental announced Wednesday that they plan to discontinue 20 publications of local weekly newspapers in Quebec. It will affect at most 80 employees.
The layoff will include 11 reports and the rest extend to the administration, sales, production and editing employees. Jennifer McCaughey, director of investor relations, said that they can find a job in Transcontinental's other 120 publications.
"What we did was re-evaluate our whole portfolio because in many regions where we're ceasing publication we had more than one newspaper in those regions and it was just not viable," said McCaughey.
The Montreal-based printer corporation explained that they will integrate the weeklies in other publications around the region. The Competition Bureau also announced Wednesday that Transcontinental sold 14 weeklies to three buyers, 11 of which will continue in print format and only 3 continue as traditional newspapers.
The exchange followed the deal Transcontinental made last year to buy 74 papers from Sun Media. They were told to sell the 33 of the 74 newspapers. They already found buyers for 14 of them and need to find more for the remaining publications.
As part of a market test, Transcontinental were given a 60-day sale period for the 33 newspapers. If they managed to see all, they'd be allowed to retain their ownership. However, they couldn't find buyers for the remaining 19 weeklies.
There are numerous community newspapers in Canada, but the market's shift towards multiplatform and online editions changed the landscape. McCaughey said that the newspapers are up for sale were launched a few years ago and proved to be difficult to maintain financially. They needed to sell the weeklies in order to salvage the advertising competition in local Quebec market.
Transcontinental is a publishing, media, and marketing company that operates in Quebec, Montreal. It publishes over 30 magazines and also books and flyers.
