Montreal paper drops standalone Monday biz section

The Montreal Gazette in Canada is dropping its standalone Monday business section and putting the business news inside the A section, writes editor Andrew Phillips.

Phillips writes, “The idea is to provide a quicker, smarter start to the working week at a time when most people have less time to linger over their morning paper.

“Monday’s Gazette is also slimmer, by about six pages. The Business section is smaller (the Entrepreneur feature is still there), and we have one opinion page rather than two.

“The main reason for the change is that the cost of newsprint is rising dramatically. In the past year, it has gone up by about 24 per cent, and it is adding more than $2 million to our annual expenses. Fuel costs, as everyone knows, have also gone up sharply.

“The fact is we can’t keep printing the same size newspaper at a time when the competition for advertising revenue (which makes up about three-quarters of our income) is much tougher. The time is long past when newspapers like The Gazette could just absorb extra costs and pass all of them on to advertisers.”

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