Media of Canada - Newspapers

Newspapers

Main article: History of Canadian newspapers See also: List of Canadian newspapers

Almost all Canadian cities are served by at least one daily newspaper, along with community and neighbourhood weeklies. In large cities which have more than one daily newspaper, usually at least one daily is a tabloid format. Bilingual cities like Montreal and Ottawa have important papers in both French and English.

Canada currently has two major "national" newspapers, The Globe and Mail and the National Post. Le Devoir, though not widely read outside Quebec, is the French-language counterpart to the national newspapers.

The newspaper with the highest circulation overall is the Toronto Star, while the newspaper with the highest readership per capita is the Windsor Star (with the Calgary Herald running a very close second).

Canadian newspapers are mostly owned by large chains. The largest of these is the CanWest News Service chain, owned by CanWest. Quebecor owns many tabloid newspapers through its Sun Media subsidiary, including Le Journal de Montréal and the Toronto Sun.

At various times there have been concerns about concentration of newspaper ownership, notably in 1970 and 1980 with two commissions, the Davey Committee on combines and the Kent Royal Commission on Newspapers respectively, and most recently when Conrad Black's Hollinger acquired the Southam newspapers in the late 1990s. When Hollinger sold its Canadian properties, however, many of their smaller-market newspapers were in fact purchased by a variety of new ownership groups such as Osprey Media, increasing the diversity of newspaper ownership for the first time in many years.

The 1980s and 1990s have seen the emergence of city-based alternative weekly newspapers, geared toward a younger audience with coverage of the arts and alternative news. In recent years, many of these weeklies have also been acquired or driven out of business by conglomerates like Canwest, Quebecor and Brunswick News. Smaller newspapers like The Dominion, publishing primarily online but in a newspaper format, have attempted to fill gaps in Canada's journalistic coverage while avoiding the vulnerabilities of the previous generation of alternative media.

In the 2000s, a number of online news and culture magazines have launched to provide alternative sources of journalism. Some important online publications include rabble.ca, The Tyee, Vigile, CBC Radio 3/Bande à part and SooToday.com.