On the move!
Agh! You’re still here? My new site and weblog, ianking.ca is now up and running; new posts are building up over there, never to be mirrored here. Go! What are you waiting for? All the stuff worth keeping has been migrated over to the new server, and I don’t anticipate making any more posts here.
Bloggers and webmasters: Update your links! Simply replace vancouverscrum.blogspot.com with www.ianking.ca in your blogrolls or bookmarks to point to the new site. Old posts will remain on this server for as long as the people at Blogger/Google allow them to remain; unfortunately, I’m not going to bother to come up with any way of converting permalinks on this blog to their corresponding posts on the new site. Yes, I plead laziness. I also realize the irony of switching away from Blogger just it starts to add features that the demanding blog nerds insist upon.
Thanks for reading and linking, and see you over at ianking.ca!
—Ian King, December 13, 2004
Thursday, April 24, 2003
This might be the headline: The National Post is not dead. Yet.
That's the word from Lenny Asper, CEO of CanWest Global Communications, owners of the other Canadian national daily paper. Asper dismissed speculation about a possible gutting or shutdown of the Post, which has never turned a profit since former owner Conrad Black launched the paper in 1998. While admitting that efforts to turn around the paper's financial performance have not yet succeeded -- it still loses $1-million per month -- Asper said that he expects the Post to continue to progress towards breaking even.
When Conrad Black sold his remaining stake in the Post to the Aspers in 2001, it was losing a million dollars a week.
The rumour mill had been buzzing with talk that the Post might be turned into a weekly national supplement to the Financial Post, or that the new coverage might be axed in favour of a return to the old Financial Post, which was the core around which the National Post was built. Lenny Asper dismissed that talk as the fantasy of the Post's critics and competitors, and said that his company was committed ot making the paper work.
And for those of you keeping track: CanWest's debt was $3.578-billion (CDN) as of February 28 of this year. Revenue for the last quarter was $603-million for the most recent quarter, with a profit of $10-million. CanWest's debt peaked at over $4.5-billion after a late-'90's buying spree where the company bought the former WIB television stations and most of the Hollinger Canadian newspapers. Of course, Lenny Asper is on the conference call spinning the company as best he can to those mysterious financial analysts...
Related: Paper sale lifts CanWest to profit (GlobeAndMail.com)
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