An American hedge fund bought an East Coast media empire, promising to bring life back to local news. What could go wrong?
August 26, 2024, was one of the worst days of Pam Sword’s working life. The paper where she had been the web editor for over a decade—The Chronicle Herald, Halifax’s 150-year-old daily broadsheet—had been sold to Postmedia, Canada’s national news behemoth. But it wasn’t just the Chronicle Herald. Postmedia purchased historic, regional, and community-based newspapers belonging to Saltwire Network, the beleaguered, debt-ridden Atlantic Canadian news conglomerate that owned the paper. Typical for Postmedia after an acquisition, the $1 million purchase was contingent on union concessions and spending cuts, which caused anxiety in newsrooms across three provinces.
In an open letter published that day to readers in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador, Postmedia president and CEO Andrew MacLeod acknowledged how proud he was to take on the responsibility of running these local and historic newspapers. He then requested continued support as Postmedia addressed the former publisher’s approximately $43 million debt acquired in the sale. “In return, you have our word that we’ll do everything we can to keep up our end of the bargain and make sure Atlantic Canada has a sustainable news ecosystem that it can count on.”
Yet, over the next few days, Postmedia handed out new contracts like “golden tickets” to employees it wanted to keep. While awaiting her own ticket, Sword received a phone call from a colleague, who gave her a heads-up that she had lost her job. Sword dialled one of her managers, who confirmed it. Including her, three editors and one reporter would not be receiving their golden tickets.
The Chronicle Herald staff believed the new owner wouldn’t start deciding who should stay and who should go until the end of the year, which would be plenty of time for everyone to prove their worth, and decide what they wanted in terms of staffing. But on August 29, Sword, and more than 60 Saltwire employees received termination letters. “Two days after my birthday,” says Sword. “I thought I’d be safe because I was 35 years in.”
At the second-largest of Saltwire’s former papers, The Telegram in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, four of 13 newsroom employees were terminated and the paper went from daily to weekly publication.
In an interview that September with the Halifax Examiner, an online news source serving Halifax, MacLeod said he didn’t have more granular numbers of layoffs, but that his teams were “aggressively working to understand how we can come up with a new operating model that will allow us to be much more efficient and less costly from an operations perspective.” Reducing costs was vital, MacLeod said, to dig the papers out of their enormous debt burden.
According to its critics, that’s been Postmedia’s modus operandi since it was founded in 2010, following the global financial crisis: buying, consolidating, and gutting media outlets in financial distress. Postmedia’s founder, Paul Godfrey, earned his reputation as publisher and CEO of the Toronto Sun in the 1980s, later becoming president and CEO of the National Post in 2009. That year, the company publishing the Post, CanWest Global, filed for creditor protection. Conrad Black had launched the Post in 1998 to compete directly with The Globe and Mail, and then sold it to CanWest Global three years later. By the time Godfrey took over the Post, it was still a desirable asset for any newspaper publisher. Godfrey paid $950 million in cash—funded by U.S. private equity firm Golden Tree Management—for CanWest’s print and online assets, closing the deal in July 2010. Calling his new company Postmedia, Godfrey became the owner and operator of 11 major dailies and 26 community papers, including the National Post, the Vancouver Sun, The Province, the Calgary Herald, the Ottawa Citizen, and The Gazette in Montreal.
The deal had major implications for Canadian journalism. April Lindgren, recently-retired Toronto Metropolitan University journalism professor and founder of the Local News Research Project, a crowd-sourced resource that monitors Canada’s local news outlets, says 2008 was a “turning point” for local journalism specifically, as advertising revenue plummeted when businesses and investors turned to advertising on Google and social media platforms to reach a wider audience for less money. As Canadian newspapers struggled with the financial pressures of the changing industry, Postmedia was able to buy its way into newsrooms across the country at bargain prices.
Today, Postmedia is financially owned by U.S.-based hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, and runs 125 publications, 10 of which it acquired from Saltwire. Lindgren says Postmedia offered a lifeline to these newspapers, but its methods of saving money involve shrinking newsrooms and slashing expenses. “It’s a story concerning economics, but it’s also a story about whether people have access to the news and information they need locally to navigate their everyday,” she says. As of February 1, 2025, the Local News Research Project reports that 529 local news outlets in 351 communities across Canada have closed since the 2008 global financial crisis—the start of a deep recession and a turning point for previously profitable news organizations.
But Postmedia’s expansion into Atlantic Canada is not just another straightforward case of a massive media conglomerate swooping in to profit from the remains of local media. This process had already played out under Saltwire—a miniature conglomerate—formed in 2017 to acquire independently owned publications throughout Atlantic Canada. It pursued its own Postmedia-like strategy: cutting costs, laying off newsroom staff, gutting coverage, and incurring enormous debt in the process. By the time Postmedia made its way to the East Coast, much of the damage to its local news ecosystem had already been done.
In 1875, a penniless immigrant boy from England entered the newspaper business in his new home, Halifax, Nova Scotia. William Dennis started as a junior reporter for The Morning Herald, saving his income to buy one share of the company for $50. The Dennis family acquired full ownership of The Morning Herald in 1907, and by 1949, merged it with another local daily, The Chronicle. For more than a century, the paper was independent and family-owned. In 1954, Graham Dennis took ownership, and over time his daughter, Sarah Dennis, became the paper’s publisher and chairman.
It was Sarah Dennis who, in 2009, fired one-quarter of the newsroom—the first time the paper had seen layoffs in its history. The 2008 financial crisis destroyed display advertising revenue, and profits were falling across the industry. The impact on the paper’s coverage was immediate. Court reporter Jennifer Stewart stopped covering cases at the Nova Scotia Supreme Court. Education reporter Kristen Lipscombe no longer attended school board meetings. Former web editor Rick Conrad, who had been a member of the union executive at the Chronicle Herald, survived the initial bloodletting. But the paper took a long time to gain its footing editorially, and the cuts kept coming.
“The Chronicle Herald has never suffered anything like that before,” Conrad says. “It was one of those things that once it happens, it’s easier to happen again.” Five years later, Conrad was terminated and accepted a buyout package.
Graham Dennis died on December 1, 2011, and Sarah Dennis became CEO of the Chronicle Herald, along with several of the weekly papers it published in smaller communities. “When Sarah took over, it was pretty obvious she wasn’t interested in journalism,” says Conrad. The following year, she delegated the leadership and day-to-day business tasks to her husband, Mark Lever, a venture capitalist who had built his career investing and developing third-party businesses in tech, marketing, finance, and security. His first order of business was taking out an $18 million loan from a private equity firm, Integrated Asset Management, to pay off existing debt. Attention to editorial matters appeared to be comparatively scant, says Conrad. “They seemed to be obsessed with flyers,” he says, describing their strategy of repackaging community weeklies in a flyer wrap for more advertising space.
While staff numbers were whittled down, the Chronicle Herald’s smaller publications stopped print production and were consolidated online. One victim was The Casket, a weekly newspaper published in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, since 1852. As management continued to pinch its purse strings, the Chronicle Herald’s unionized newsroom grew restless. Frustrated by proposed wage cuts, layoffs, and changes to pension plans, 61 reporters, editors, photographers, columnists, and support staff walked off the job on January 23, 2016. They remained on strike for 19 months before reaching an agreement that resulted in the lay off of half its unionized staff and a five percent wage cut. Sword calls it “the dark times,” when replacement workers passed them every morning at the picket line on their way into the Chronicle Herald.
Even as turmoil reigned at the Chronicle Herald and the handful of community papers the Dennis family owned, Lever was asking creditors and private equity firms for $31 million to buy another 27 daily and weekly publications in Nova Scotia, PEI, and Newfoundland and Labrador, from Transcontinental. “I laughed because I thought it was the most ridiculous thing to do,” says Conrad when he heard about the deal. He says it appeared that Lever claimed poverty, slashed journalist jobs, and thought the best way to save his declining paper was to spend more money on his indebted business.
“I don’t understand the logic of buying all these floundering newspapers and thinking you could make money at it”
Stephen Kimber
Lever’s new acquisitions joined the existing Dennis family publications, and on April 13, 2017, Saltwire Network was born. In a rare interview with the Financial Post after this merger, Lever said, “We believe being in 25 communities is a big strength…Our strategy is to tell stories that no one else can, and no one else is equipped to.” Lever and Dennis did not respond to interview requests, but Sword summarized it as an attempt to create “a seamless network that would bring you all the news from Atlantic Canada, drawing on the strengths of the various publications.”
Critics say the attempt was never successful because the would-be regional conglomerate ran into trouble almost immediately. In July 2018, The Compass closed its office in Carbonear, Newfoundland and Labrador, letting go of one employee as it switched from a subscription-based weekly to a “free, total market newspaper.” In simpler terms, to a flyer wrap. The following month, four other Newfoundland publications merged into The Central Voice, a weekly newspaper for central Newfoundland, replacing The Beacon, The Advertiser, The Pilot, and The Nor’wester. The same happened in Labrador less than a year later when The Labradorian and The Aurora weeklies were consolidated into one, The Labrador Voice.
To address a growing revenue shortfall, Saltwire introduced an online paywall in February 2019, charging $14.99 per month. Print subscribers received access to online content for free. By the end of March, Saltwire stopped re-publishing content from the Canadian Press (CP) to draw on more content from Canada’s Atlantic newsrooms. At the same time, it announced shifting national and international coverage to wire content produced by Postmedia itself, because CP content was more expensive. In April, another daily newspaper, The Western Star in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador, was reduced to a free weekly flyer wrap. Thirty people were laid off.
One of Lever’s strategies was to consolidate newsrooms and increase advertising space in community weeklies, rather than employ more people in the newsroom. “The rationale was similar, in a way, to Postmedia,” says Ian Scott, the former chief operating officer of the Chronicle Herald, who was terminated at the outset of the acquisition. Companies like Google and Meta offer cheaper and more accessible forms of advertising, but Scott says Saltwire tried to compete by increasing advertising opportunities.
Yet throughout these attempts, Saltwire kept hemorrhaging money and ignored the quality of its journalism. “It just never made sense,” says Stephen Kimber, freelance journalist and retiring journalism professor at the University of King’s College. “I don’t understand the logic of deciding that you wanted to buy all these newspapers that were all floundering, with maybe one or two exceptions,” he says, “and thought you could make money at it.” In April 2019, Saltwire filed a lawsuit against Transcontinental accusing the company of hiding information about its assets, and overstating revenues they would produce with the 27 papers they now owned. In October, Transcontinental countersued, claiming it had properly valued its assets, and that Saltwire had missed three payments, due as part of its original contract.
Saltwire still owed money on Lever’s $18 million line of credit from Integrated Asset Management, and in 2019, Fiera Capital purchased Integrated Asset Management. Fiera was determined to collect what was owed, and Saltwire entered a series of forbearance agreements—plans for loan repayments. In January 2020, the Canada Revenue Agency claimed Saltwire owed over $3 million in unpaid taxes. Later court filings revealed that it owed $7 million. When the creditors came knocking at his door, Lever couldn’t pay the interest on his missed payments, never mind the loans themselves. He decided to step down as president and CEO. That’s when Saltwire went up for sale.
On March 11, 2024, Saltwire filed for creditor protection with the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia to freeze its $32.7 million outstanding balance to Fiera. Under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act and Justice John Keith’s ruling, Saltwire would enter insolvency under the watchful gaze of KSV, an impartial financial advisor appointed by Fiera. No deals would be made without Fiera’s consent, which prioritized the best interest of its investors. On March 26, Saltwire went on the market and was accepting offers to purchase any or all of its publications. KSV reported it received several non-binding letters of intent from parties interested in what was for sale. In the second phase of bidding, KSV determined four qualified parties, who would submit their binding offers by May 24.
For six months, it wasn’t clear if Saltwire’s papers would vanish, if they would all be saved, or if only some would survive. Some even saw the Saltwire sale as a chance to return some of the Atlantic’s historic media to independent ownership. Among the four bidders offering on Saltwire’s assets was Paul MacNeill, publisher of The Island Press in Prince Edward Island, who placed a $400,000 bid to buy The Charlottetown Guardian and The Journal Pioneer, and return them to local journalists.
MacNeill was hopeful. “I think our bid was fair,” he says. “The local community wants a paper to reflect them back onto themselves.” MacNeill believes newspapers are an essential service, and a publication’s business model should reflect its community. He says reliance on digital delivery and advertising revenue from big tech like Google and Meta are not sustainable for local journalism. When it comes to people’s trust in journalism, MacNeill says, “one of the things about local is if readers know who the people are in the shop, they know they can go in and talk about a story.”
But Fiera was in the finance business, not journalism. “If they start slicing bits off, it’ll cost them more time and more money,” says MacNeill. “Their preferred route was to sell to a single buyer—I get it.” That buyer was Postmedia.
Margo Goodhand is the president of the Michener Foundation Awards (often referred to as Canada’s Pulitzer Prize for journalism). “From what I’ve seen in the last six to 10 years has been a winnowing of the little independents,” she says, as certain legacy outlets swallow those who cannot stay financially viable. For Atlantic Canada, Saltwire was the first to do this by acquiring smaller regional papers, cutting their frequency, reducing editorial coverage, and increasing ad space to squeeze profit from them. Now, Postmedia is doing the same with its acquisitions from Saltwire.
Goodhand worked three years as an editor at the Edmonton Journal under Postmedia, and is familiar with what it means to work under the company. She says staffing cuts trickle into the ability to tell stories. Postmedia uses regional stories to fill news holes, but loses readership because national news doesn’t always reflect what a community wants to read.
Former Saltwire employees say this is exactly what is happening in Atlantic Canada. Former Chronicle Herald editorial cartoonist Michael de Adder—who was let go in October 2024, shortly after Postmedia’s acquisition—calls Postmedia’s Chronicle Herald a “zombie paper.” “They’re not putting local news into it,” he says. “They’re just giving you a local flavour.”
Never having been without a job in her adult life, Sword is heartbroken by the loss of her identity as a journalist, and by the state of the news ecosystem. “If you counted the number of stories in the paper that were produced by the Halifax newsroom, there’s not that many,” she says of the Postmedia editions of the Chronicle Herald.
“It’s not just the lack of cartoons. It’s the lack of reporting, the lack of columnists, the lack of opinion”
Michael de Adder
Before it ceased operations in 2008, Kimber was a columnist for Halifax’s tabloid newspaper, The Daily News, publishing stories not covered by the Chronicle Herald. Kimber says the Chronicle Herald was always the more conservative-leaning paper of the two, but under the leadership of managing editor Jane Purves in the 1990s, it exhibited a classic progressive conservatism. “They understood that this could be a much better paper than it was,” he says, “in terms of being critical of the establishment, of asking questions, and giving reporters opportunities.” Kimber says the Chronicle Herald stemmed from managerial decisions to appease publishers, resulting in a lack of critical reporting. “The joke around the newsroom was that every new owner made you nostalgic for the last bad owner.”
Under Postmedia, nostalgia has peaked. On October 15, 2024, the Chronicle Herald’s entire front page was purchased by the Government of Alberta, which ran an ad urging the federal government to “Scrap the Cap” on oil and gas emissions in Canada. “Ottawa’s Energy Production Cap Will Make Groceries More Expensive,” screamed the front page. In response, Sword reposted Tim Bousquet’s photo on BlueSky: “The pre-Postmedia takeover rule was: If it’s an ad that may look like news content, it had to be labelled as an ad. The Chronicle Herald used wraparound ads (separate sheets of newsprint) before but I think this is a first where the historic Chronicle Herald nameplate has been attached to a full-page ad.” De Adder was confounded and posted to his Substack. Postmedia printed eight pages of news on two broadsheets with two pages being “propaganda ads” for the Alberta government. De Adder noted there was also no cartoon in the paper, the first time since before World War II. “It’s not just the lack of cartoons. It’s the lack of reporting. It’s the lack of columnists. It’s the lack of opinion,” he says. “The people of Halifax went from being served improperly to now not being served at all.”
Known for his left-leaning political cartoons, de Adder feels his termination was likely attributed to the political views of the new owners. “They don’t want extreme opinion,” he says. “They don’t think on either side, but they’re willing to accept strong conservative opinion over left-leaning opinion, for sure. That’s my experience.” He feels this has downgraded the quality of reporting.
In October 2024, Halifax held a municipal election, and de Adder says the coverage of the race was perhaps the least thorough of any election he’s seen in his lifetime—lacking candidate profiles, opinion columns, and other coverage. De Adder’s critiques are shared by many Atlantic journalists, including Sword, who says comprehensive political coverage was also absent in Nova Scotia’s provincial election in November 2024. “One of the bread-and-butter things that newspapers used to do for elections was the interesting riding profile,” says Sword. These often highlight political underdogs and compare political platforms. Sword says none of this is being done in Nova Scotia’s legacy media today because newsrooms are understaffed and stretched thin. Yet, independent publications like the Halifax Examiner are dedicating reporters to personable local beats—and gaining readers as a result.
The Examiner was founded in 2014 by Tim Bousquet, after he left Halifax’s alt-weekly, The Coast, and used his savings to build his own publication. “I’ve been fortunate having a relationship with the readers,” he says, “to the point where they trust me, and a lot of people bring me their stories.” The Examiner grew from a one-man operation to employing just under a dozen freelance and full-time journalists partially thanks to a small inheritance left to Bousquet by his late mother.
The investment paid off in early 2020. On the night of April 18, 2020, a middle-aged man living in Dartmouth, on the other side of the Halifax Harbour, used an RCMP uniform and vehicle to commit a series of mass murders and arson throughout Nova Scotia, killing 22 people in multiple communities. At the time, Nova Scotia had placed strict restrictions on travel from outside the province due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which made it difficult for national reporters to visit easily. Bousquet seized the opportunity to speak with police, survivors, families of the victims, and witnesses, gaining access to police reports and court documents while delivering it all in real-time to devastated Nova Scotians.
The Examiner’s reporting became among the most important on the evolving story. It was the first to report details on the gunman’s lack of criminal record and to publish audio from first responders who were on the scene the night of the murders. Bousquet even published profiles of the victims—neighbours to many readers of the Examiner. This level of detailed coverage was also applied to the Examiner’s coverage of COVID-19, posting daily updates to keep the community informed. “It took two disasters to make us what we are now,” says Bousquet, who saw his subscribers skyrocket because of investing in local editorial coverage. “But now there’s a third disaster,” he says. “That’s the demise of Saltwire.”
Under Saltwire, Bousquet characterized the Chronicle Herald as a middle-of-the-road, slightly-conservative-skewing publication. Under Postmedia, he believes it is heading further to the right. Bousquet saw the Alberta government’s full-page advertisement in the October 15 issue of the Chronicle Herald. “Nowhere did it say advertising,” he says. “To turn your whole front page over to a governmental propaganda piece—have you no soul, no shame?” Bousquet says many people he knows have dropped their subscriptions because of this specific advertisement.
At that same point in time, he says, Postmedia moved two of the Chronicle Herald’s best reporters, Chris Lambie and Andrew Rankin, to the National Post. In Bousquet’s interview with Postmedia’s CEO, Andrew MacLeod said, “there’s no sort of ulterior motives or desire to move them off one beat or another.” Bousquet believes allocating the most talented reporters after the Saltwire acquisition was a ploy to bolster the Post’s newsroom and increase national sales. “The revenue coming from Google isn’t going to expand their reporting force,” he says. “It’s going to enrich their shareholders.”
There is an upside, says Bousquet, to Saltwire’s downfall: “Hopefully, the public generally will value independent news media in a way that they haven’t before—they will pay for it.” While the Chronicle Herald and other historic newspapers in Atlantic Canada are caught in Postmedia’s corporate net, journalists such as Bousquet and MacNeill are returning vital news coverage to locals who just want to know what’s going on. The pain point is money. “I hope there are 10 more Halifax Examiners in Nova Scotia 10 years from now,” says Bousquet. “There could be if people understand just what it is that they’ve lost.”
About the author
Marina is in her final year of the Master of Journalism program, overseeing The Review’s production schedule and ensuring all teams are on track to meet their goals. She is an editorial writer and photographer through her business, Marina Black Media, and co-produced for The Agenda with Steve Paikin during her internship at TVO. When she’s not walking her beat, she’s curled up with a book and her cat, Felix.
