Graphic: Newspaper ownership concentration in Canada
By Tamara Baluja, Associate Editor
Postmedia’s plan to buy all of Sun Media’s 175 English-language newspapers and websites has many reporters and commentators concerned about the concentration of media ownership. If this deal is approved by the Competition Bureau, Postmedia would become one of the largest media companies in Canada. But the situation is more complex than how former media reporter Steve Ladurantaye described it in a humorous tweet yesterday after the news broke.
Haha. Five hundred retweets and counting. This needs to be a recurring feature. pic.twitter.com/99gp3DZTEX — Steve Ladurantaye (@sladurantaye) October 6, 2014
Using Newspapers Canada’s 2013 daily newspaper circulation data, J-Source mapped which companies currently own dailies and how ownership would change if the deal goes through.
Current daily newspaper ownership
Daily newspaper ownership if the Postmedia-Sun Media deal is approved
Postmedia will own a lot of newspapers in central Canada and the prairie provinces if this deal goes through, while Sun Media’s influence will be reduced to Quebec. However, the map also shows there are other pockets of media concentration across the country, where Glacier Media and Black Press control large shares of the market in Western Canada, Brunswick News and TC Media dominate the Maritimes and Torstar looms large in and around the Greater Toronto Area. And, of course, this map doesn’t include weekly and other community newspapers.
Tamara Baluja is an award-winning journalist with CBC Vancouver and the 2018 Michener-Deacon fellow for journalism education. She was the associate editor for J-Source from 2013-2014.
