Globe & Mail employees vote to strike - the end of another newspaper?

Image by roland via Flickr

Employees at the Globe & Mail have voted to support a strike mandate. Will this be the end of another newspaper as we know it?

If the 500 editorial, advertising and circulation workers do strike, how long will they be able to be out before the Globe & Mail shuts down and vanishes? Without a doubt it is a great paper with a great history. However, in the face of newspapers having difficulty competing with online sources, will this be a catalyst for people to simply abandon the old fashioned newspaper - founded in the 1800s, and start using technology from 1996 and 2005 to browse the web on their computers or wireless devices? That's where my money would be.

I don't know anything about the background of the dispute at the Globe & Mail, but maybe the employees should be looking at better alternatives, such as:

• Revenue sharing based on producing popular content for the Globe's websites?
• Ownership and bonuses based on the actual success & longevity of the enterprise?
• Opportunities to participate in unique revenue creating ventures?

The short of it is that the newspaper industry as a whole in North America is suffering. The union workers at the "Big-3" could probably shed some light on this for the 500 editorial, advertising and circulation workers at the Globe and Mail.

From CBC.ca:

• Globe and Mail news and sales employees on Saturday voted 97 per cent in favour of authorizing their bargaining committee to call a strike unless the company comes up with a better deal to replace their expiring contract.
• The 500 editorial, advertising and circulation workers' current four-year contract expires on June 30, and a strike or lockout at the Toronto-based daily newspaper could take place on midnight of that day.

A brief history of the Globe and Mail from Wikipedia:

• The Globe and Mail is a nationally distributed newspaper based in Toronto, and printed in six cities across the country (Halifax, Montreal, Toronto (several editions), Winnipeg (actually printed in Brandon, Manitoba), Calgary and Vancouver)
  
• It has a weekly readership of 935 000
• The Globe and Mail has always been a morning newspaper.
  
• In 1995, the paper launched its Web site, globeandmail.com, which had its own content and journalists in addition to the content of the print newspaper.
  
• It later spawned a companion Web site, globeinvestor.com, focusing on financial and investment-related news.
  
• The predecessor to The Globe and Mail was The Globe, founded in 1844 by Scottish immigrant George Brown
• The Toronto Mail and Empire was founded in 1872 by Tory politician Sir John A. Macdonald (the first Prime Minister of Canada)
• In 1936, The Globe merged with The Mail and became The Globe and Mail.
  In 1965, the paper was bought by Winnipeg-based FP Publications controlled by Brig. Richard Malone
• The Report on Business section was launched in 1962
• FP Publications and The Globe and Mail were sold in 1980 to the Thomson Group
• Control of the paper was sold to telecommunications company BCE Inc. in 2001.
  
• A year earlier BCE had also acquired CTV, a major private television network.
  
• With the sale, the Globe and CTV were merged into a new company named Bell Globemedia (now CTVglobemedia), which became a subsidiary of BCE with the Thomson family retaining a minority stake.
  
• In late 2005, BCE reduced its stake in Bell Globemedia, leaving the Thomson family, through its holding company Woodbridge, with a 40-percent stake. BCE, Torstar (owner of the Toronto Star) and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan each control a 20-percent stake.
  
  

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• Globe and Mail workers to vote on strike mandate (thestar.com)

Google vs. Bing - an update

Image via CrunchBase

I just read on Reuters that Microsoft's Bing is continuing to grow its web search audience. It is still relatively small however compared to Google.

According to comScore:

• June 8-12, Microsoft search accounted for 12.1% of U.S. Internet searches

• June 1-5, Microsoft had 11.3% (the week Bing launched)
  

• May 25-31, Microsoft had 9.1%
  

• May (the rest of it), Microsoft had 8%

At the same in May, Google held 65 % of U.S. searches, and Yahoo! had 20.1%.
It will be very interesting to see if Bing is able to hold the 12%+ or gain more. Additionally, it will be interesting to see if their gains are at Google's expense or at Yahoo!'s. According to brand wisdom, it should be Yahoo! that suffers most.

Google Vs. Bing - Will Bing stand a chance?

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft relaunched their effort to beat Google in the search marketing game. This time Microsoft has come out with an entirely new search engine - called Bing.com.

Will it beat Google? I don't think so.
Microsoft cannot claim much of anything with the new search engine.

• They are not the first
• They are not the most popular
• They are not the dominant

They may be the prettiest. Their site is full of neat Ajax programming tricks that make it a bit more intuitive to use than Google. It also has a nifty menu that creates itself down the left side that helps you filter your results. Will those innovations help? Maybe. Can Google copy them. Absolutely.

According to Comscore Media Metrix:

Microsoft Sites increased its average daily penetration among U.S. searchers from 13.8 percent during the period of May 26-30 to 15.5 percent during the period of June 2-6, 2009, an indication that the search engine is reaching more people than before. Microsoft’s share of search result pages in the U.S., a proxy for overall search intensity, increased from 9.1 percent to 11.1 percent during the same time frame.

Once the buzz and campaign that Microsoft has been driving dies down, my bet would be on Google to maintain strong leadership over time. But then again ... at one point in time I never had any reason to think I wouldn't use Altavista.com for a search.

Congratulations to the Calgary Herald

The Calgary Herald won several newspaper awards recently.

• Firstplace; Magazines: for Monthly magazines produced in 2008 entitled A Day in the Life.
• Second place; Special Sections: "Best of Alberta: The Search for Our Greatest Citizen."
• First place; Special Projects: for marketing, advertising and editorial initiatives undertaken throughout 2008, in honour of the newspaper's 125th anniversary
• Thirdplace; Newspaper Marketing and Promotion: A promotion centred around the Herald's Green Guide
• Second place; Integrated Ad Campaign: For a program it completed with WestJet called Fly Free.

You can find more details on the Calgary Herald site.

My apologies if you are in the newspaper business

The three things that are killing off our traditional newspapers are:

• Heavy debt loads due to bad choices with respect to heavy consolidation,
• A rapid shift to the internet to get timely news and information (esp. with the wireless web now allowing people to view the news in real-time on their iPhones and similar devices), and
• The emergence of CraigsList.org and Kijiji.com eating up their advertising revenues.

And now this report courtesy of CBC.ca today ... "Craigslist revenue on pace to top $100M US".

Big Rock Eddie's 2009 Winners

You can find the winners on YouTube now. If you follow the link from the title of this post you will find Big Rock's press release about the Eddie's and links to each of the winners on YouTube. Just in case you don't want to go to that bother, here are three of the winners and entrants.

The big winner:


One of my favourites (this one hurts ...):


And another (this one hurts ... more):

Thanks Jim Button - The Eddies were GREAT

What else can I say. The 2009 Eddies didn't disappoint me last night.

It looked like a sold-out event. The lobbies were jam-packed and a tonne of fun.

The quality of the ads were excellent. My personal favourites weren't the winners. But, that didn't matter. Maybe I'll have to pull out my video camera and get creative for next year :^).

I'm going to the Eddies

I meant to blog about this weeks, and weeks, and weeks ago. But, alas ... I forgot. One might say I fell off the blogging horse. So, now I'm flogging the blogging.

In any event - on with the show - tonight is one of the biggest nights and coolest events in Calgary. The Eddies.

The Eddies were conceived by the good folks at Big Rock Brewery back in 1993, and have been going strong ever since. Proceeds from the event go to charity.

It's my first time, and I am looking forward to it.

I know it is only hours before the event, but if you still want tickets, check out Ticketmaster.