Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Paul Godfrey has been CEO of Canada’s largest newspaper chain, the Postmedia Network, for three years. In that time he’s cut more than 2,000 jobs, made two-thirds of content replicable across papers, hiked the cost of subscriptions, and rejiggered the business model toward earning roughly 50 percent of revenue from ads and 50 percent from circulation. In Canada’s Marketing magazine, he discusses his plans for his next three years in charge.
“We will continue over the next three years to downsize the legacy costs [and] outsource where we can,” said Godfrey. “We are going to be a much smaller revenue company and a very much smaller expense company by living with a smaller number of staffers and people doing more. Hopefully we’ll be a more profitable company as a result.”
Postmedia, which owns what used to be the Canwest chain of Canadian newspapers, owns major papers in Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, and other Canadian cities, along with the National Post.
