Postmedia Network’s takeover of the SaltWire Network newspapers in Atlantic Canada this summer has brought the inevitable cutbacks to editions, journalists and content. In Newfoundland, the 145-year-old St. John’s Telegram now appears only once a week instead of daily, while 30 percent of its editorial employees have been laid off. Even worse is what the all-devouring chain has replaced the once-local content of its newspapers with after making more than 60 layoffs. In Halifax, readers of the Chronicle Herald awoke Tuesday to find its front page covered with an ad for Alberta oil, as were those of other major dailies in the Postmedia chain. The newspaper’s editorial page no longer features the multi-award-winning work of Michael de Adder, one of Canada’s foremost cartoonists who was let go last week. In its place, de Adder pointed out on X, are opinion articles he describes as self-serving propaganda. “No editorial cartoon in the Chronicle Herald,” he tweeted on Tuesday. “The first time since before WWII.” Pointing to its replacement by opinion pieces including one promoting charter schools, de Adder quipped that with the cover pushing oil, the newspaper now looks “more like the Alberta Chronicle Herald.”

No editorial cartoon in the Chronicle Herald. The first time since before WWII. But there are two self-serving propaganda opinion pieces. One preparing for the day when they put the paper online. And the other promoting Alberta style, unaccountable charter schools. With the cover… pic.twitter.com/mHjd06eVOu

— Michael de Adder (@deAdder) October 15, 2024

The online Halifax Examiner also noted the “striking” full-page ad that took over the front-page of Tuesday’s Chronicle Herald, which was paid for by the Alberta government and claims that Ottawa’s plan to cap emissions from the oil and gas sector will have dire consequences for Canadians. “OTTAWA’S ENERGY PRODUCTION CAP WILL MAKE GROCERIES MORE EXPENSIVE,” it screams above a link to the Alberta government’s Scrap the Cap website. “This ad is part of a campaign that is so ludicrous, I wound up muting the sound when it ran between innings of baseball games,” wrote Philip Moscovitch. “A family would be cooking a holiday dinner, when all of a sudden the power would go out because of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. Just depressingly stupid.” Selling a newspaper’s entire front page to an advertiser is not unprecedented, he noted, and also not exclusive to Postmedia, but the move is notable given the chain’s long-running agreement to promote oil and gas in association with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, often as so-called “native” advertising designed to look like news. Moscovitch quipped that the loss of local content, including several columnists, has led to a “nobody is home zombie feeling” lately at the Chronicle Herald. “Going to the SaltWire website increasingly feels to me like some kind of zombie or ghost-town experience. Sure, there is some life there, but there are also so many signs of decay, neglect, and folks higher up seemingly not caring. One obvious difference is the reduction in new stories every day. Fewer writers = fewer stories.”

Postmedia, which is 98 percent owned by US hedge funds, took over the Halifax-based SaltWire chain in July, including the largest dailies in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland plus numerous Maritimes weeklies. That gave it a virtual monopoly on newspapers in Atlantic Canada since it also bought the Brunswick News chain in New Brunswick from the Irving Oil family in 2022. Its monopoly in the east is rivalled only by its grip in Western Canada, where it owns eight of the nine largest dailies in Saskatchewan, Alberta and BC. Postmedia owns about three-quarters of the 20 largest English-language dailies in Canada, although calculations are now impossible since industry association News Media Canada stopped publishing newspaper circulations. The largest English-language dailies Postmedia does not publish include the Globe and Mail, which is owned by the Thomson family; the Toronto Star, whose owning Torstar Corp. also publishes the Hamilton Spectator; the Winnipeg Free Press; and the Victoria Times Colonist. As I show in my recent book, The Postmedia Effect, its owning hedge funds have taken more than $500 million out of the company in payments on its massive debt, which they also mostly hold, since taking it over in 2010. The company’s revenues no longer cover the $30 million in annual interest payable, so Postmedia’s strategy now seems to be to buy up as much of Canada’s press as possible in order to collect federal subsidies and expected payments from Google.

The consequences of Postmedia’s stranglehold on our nation’s newspapers have now spread from coast to coast and were brought home sharply this week in Halifax. de Adder, who was recently awarded the Order of Canada, was let go last week after 27 years of drawing cartoons for the Chronicle Herald. Like many other displaced journalists, he has started a Substack blog to continue publishing his work, and on Tuesday he used it to dissect the newspaper’s thin content spread across only eight pages. “Two of the pages are propaganda ads for Alberta energy,” he pointed out, “telling you the government is to blame for the high price of groceries and the only thing that can save you is Alberta energy.” de Adder, 57, began drawing cartoons as an undergraduate for Mount Allison University’s student newspaper The Argosy, then graduated to the Halifax alt-weekly The Coast, drawing a comic strip called Walterworld which lampooned the city’s then-mayor. He began drawing for the Halifax Daily News in 2000 until its closure eight years later. He has also been let go before, getting the axe five years ago from the Brunswick News chain for which he freelanced for 17 years after drawing an unflattering cartoon of US President Donald Trump. “There was a time when a pointed cartoon like that would increase a cartoonist’s value in the eyes of his or her newspaper,” he wrote at the time. With history repeating itself, he expanded on that point last week in an interview with CBC Radio in Moncton. “I saw this coming,” he said. “These days the better you are as a cartoonist, the more you are kind of a threat. There was a time when if a cartoonist got in trouble, a paper would consider that kind of an asset because they were bringing attention to the paper. These days they just don’t tolerate it anymore.”

Editorial cartoonists are an endangered species these days across North America as newspapers owned mostly by hedge funds look to cut costs and boost their bottom line. They have lampooned the rich and powerful to great effect since the printing press was invented more than 500 years ago, but now they are falling by the wayside as the lifeblood of advertising drains out of newspapers. Along with them goes a bit of a newspaper’s soul, as de Adder noted in an interview with the CBC.

We all are possibly losing something even more important as cartoonists head out the door and newspapers continue to disappear. One of de Adder’s most popular cartoons these days, judging by how often it pops up on X, trenchantly depicts a row of newspaper coin boxes toppling like dominoes headed toward the watchtower of democracy. It’s enough to make you think, and that’s the whole point.

Marc Edge is a journalism researcher and author who lives in Ladysmith, BC. His books and articles can be found online at www.marcedge.com.