Press: A Star Is Shorn

Montreal loses a daily

Managing Editor Ray Heard walked into the paper’s newsroom one afternoon last week and delivered the brutal message: after 110 years of business, the Montreal Star (circ. 114,000) had published its last edition. The evening daily had lost $14.6 million and 50,000 readers as the result of a bitter eight-month pressmen’s strike that ended in February. So the owner, F.P. Publications (the Toronto Globe and Mail and six other Canadian dailies), decided that with the balance sheet red and the broadsheet unread, the Star was better off dead.

Long the fat matron of Montreal’s once powerful English-speaking minority, the Star consistently outsold its morning rival, the Gazette (circ. 168,000), which was founded in 1778 and is owned by the Southam chain (the Ottawa Citizen and 13 other Canadian dailies). But over the past two decades, Toronto has gradually displaced Montreal as the nation’s leading city. English-speaking Montrealers began moving out in even larger numbers after René Lévesque’s secession-minded Parti Québecois won control of Quebec in 1976. For a while, the Star weathered that exodus well. But during the strike, circulation at the newly lively Gazette soared to roughly what the Star’s had been before the dispute. By the time the Star resumed publication, its readership had plummeted to the Gazette’s old level. (The French-language La Presse [circ. 175,000] also fattened from the strike.) Said Star Publisher Art Wood after last week’s announcement: “The simple truth is that Montreal could no longer support two independent English-language dailies like the Star and the Gazette, and the people of Montreal chose the Gazette.”