Newspaper monopolies aren't the sort of thing that most companies are eager to build in 2014, but that's exactly what happened this week when Postmedia bought 175 English-language newspapers from rival Quebecor's Sun Media arm.
Postmedia agreed to pay more than $300 million for the Sun newspaper chain in order to add to its stable of big city dailies that already included iconic names like the Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Ottawa Citizen and of course, the National Post.
If the deal goes through, debt-laden Postmedia will own just about every big newspaper in the country, except for the Toronto Star and The Globe & Mail. It's a bet on what's generally accepted to be a medium in decline, but from what executives behind the deal were saying, the deal is move towards a very different future.
"Digitally the scale is very, very important in order to compete with the people that are taking all the digital revenue away from what once belonged to newspapers [like] Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter," CEO Paul Godfrey told CBC's The Exchange this week.
By linking all those newspapers' websites together, Postmedia is hoping it will have the scale to become the biggest news website in the country (beating out a little website you may have heard of ) which would make the online component turn out to be what Godfrey described as "the jewel of the deal."
More carry-on chaos was just one of the big stories in the business world this week. ( Stefano Buonamici/Bloomberg)
Going green
Speaking of looking forward, one of the oldest names in the cleaning industry got praise from customers for showing a little scent-sitivity this week.
Clorox is a U.S. company that makes just about everything you'd probably find under your sink — think Pine-Sol, Glad, SOS pads, Brita water filters, and of course their eponymous bleach.
The company built a corporate empire by keeping '50s-era suburbanites happily nuking their kitchens with powerful cleaning agents. But it's a different time now, and consumers want more information.
On Monday, Clorox announced it will start listing all the ingredients in all of their products. That's a nod to people who suffer from something called multiple chemical sensitivity, which is a crippling reaction to chemicals and smells in the environment.
Under current rules, companies don't have to list all their ingredients if they qualify as scents, known as "parfum" in the industry parlance. That's long upset people with allergies, who say it's an outdated rule for when perfume ingredients were closely guarded secrets — not easily deciphered by rivals in modern labs.
It's a small step in the right direction, the CBC's Aaron Saltzman reported this week. But if, as one person he talked to put it: "the iconic, noxious 1950s cleaning brand" can move to the head of the green pack, surely other companies in the industry can clean up their act.
Be picky about 'pick-and-pay' CRTC told
Updating Canada's byzantine series of television regulations for the modern era is a topic near and dear to most Canadians. But it seems it's been on the mind of some of America's biggest television-makers too.
According to CRTC filings, network executives from Viacom, A&E and AMC told Canada's broadcast regulator that if it tinkers too much with the rules as they currently stand, they may just bypass Canadian TV altogether and start streaming their content directly online.
That may be an appealing prospect to anyone who's ever wondered why they get 500 channels but nothing good ever seems to be on, but the people who make some of the most popular shows on TV today say the system works the way it is.
By keeping channels in bundles, consumers who pay to get popular shows like The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad also get a bunch of other channels. Some of which end up sprouting scrappy upstarts (like Space network's Orphan Black, for example) that can one day stand on their own two legs.
Change the rules, the TV execs said, and we'll leave and go all-online. The message may be meant for the FCC, the U.S. regulator, but anyone with a Netflix account is paying attention to it.
More carry-on chaos
Much digital ink has been spilled about recent changes to carry-on bag rules, but there was a new wrinkle this week.
We've reported before on the chaos at airports as flyers rushed to cram as much as possibly into carry-on bags, to avoid paying the $25 fee to check a bag. But the fallout this week is that thousands of travellers are discovering the custom-made carry-on bags they've bought and loved over the years don't fit into overhead bins after all.
"This is an official carry-on, that's why I bought it," was how one harried traveller at Pearson put it to the CBC's Sophia Harris this week.
Much of the problem lies in the fact that there is no universal dimensions that all airlines agree to. WestJet says a bag can't be longer than 21 inches. Air Canada allows an extra half-inch, and Porter says it's OK for the bag to be up to 22 inches long.
With different rules, it's no wonder consumers are confused. But cash-strapped airlines are eager to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of every passenger mile, so don't expect this to be a problem anyone's going to find a solution to any time soon.
Other stuff
Those were some of our biggest business stories of the week. Be sure to check back with our website often for more, and don't forget to follow us on Twitter here. Meanwhile, here's a look at what our top two most-read stories were every day this past week.
Monday:
Tuesday:
Wednesday:
Thursday:
Friday:
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