From CBC News:
The Globe and Mail will stop delivering its print edition to the Maritimes, the newspaper said Monday.
Phillip Crawley, the publisher and CEO, said it followed the decision made in 2013 to stop printing in Newfoundland and Labrador.
“In keeping with the same policy, we have watched print subscriber numbers declining in the Maritimes over the last few years as we’ve seen digital subscriptions increase,” he told CBC News in a phone interview.
“It gets to the point where it makes no sense to keep on subsidizing print delivery to that degree, where it’s costing us $1 million a year to do that, and that’s where it’s now at with the Maritimes.”
. . . .
The newspaper recently hired a new Atlantic Canada correspondent, filling a post that had been vacant for more than a year. Crawley said Halifax-based Jessica Leeder will start reporting in September.
“We’re very much interested in the stories coming out of the Maritime provinces. We have a national audience that would expect us to do that.”
People anywhere can still get the digital version of the newspaper.
Subscribers were informed of the change via email this week. “Our core mission is to invest in journalism that matters, so the money now being spent on subsidizing uneconomic delivery routes will be redirected to creating content for all of our customers across the country,” the email reads in part.
Crawley said the Globe and Mail will still provide national coverage.
“We never said we’d deliver to every town, village, hamlet or whatever. We haven’t done that. We make a decision on where it makes sense based on the number of people who want to read it,” Crawley said.
Link to the rest at CBC News and tip-thanks to Tudor, who says this would be like a major American newspaper cutting off delivery of its print edition to New England.
PG hopes people who live in the Maritime provinces have good internet connections but suspects they may not.
Commenting from the Maritimes! Most of us do have reliable internet connections, although there are some rural communities where this isn’t the case. PCMag.com published an article in 2015 that actually found that Nova Scotia (where I live) has the fastest internet speed in all of Canada and New Brunswick, a neighbouring province, came in second. Unfortunately this is only true in urban centres, which in the Maritimes means something very different than in larger provinces . The capital of Nova Scotia has a population of about 400,000 while Ottawa, the capital of Canada, has about a million people and Toronto has 3 million.
Thanks for the expert report, Nicola.